Do you think that you personally have the gift? Where do you think that storytelling exists?

Storytelling is in everything we do. We tell stories to our friends about the different situations that come up in our lives, we blog, we ask people to tell us about themselves when we’re dating, we tell stories in interviews and job promotion chats with our boss.

Stories are all around us and we’re hardwired to hear stories and to tell stories for information sharing as well as striking an emotional connection with each other.

It’s how we learn about each other and make sense of our world. Stories shape who we choose to hang out with, what we believe, what our values are and what we choose to do in life.

We pick up on social cues and body language during the storytelling process to gauge whether someone is actually telling the truth and whether we trust that person. When we do, we then start to bond with them.

I hear a lot of people say that they don’t really have a story to tell, people won’t be interested in what I have to say and I must admit I actually fit into that category too. But you also have to remember that by telling your story, you reveal bits about yourself that emotionally connect with others and that’s powerful!

As storytellers we instinctively know the bits we need to reveal about ourselves for a given situation and filtering out the bits that we think people might judge.

I feel there’s a lot of attention around corporate content now — make it relevant, make it compelling, make it engaging and make it fit with keyword searches. It’s about how to spin the content and how to write powerful headlines.

But less attention, I feel is given to storytelling. Stories are more powerful today than ever in our fast-changing world. Stories are memorable. People forget facts but remember stories. You can have impressive pie charts, tech stuff, flow charts, whatever, but if you can’t engage with your audience on a human level then forget it!

Famous American computer scientist Alan Kay said: “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

When I worked in radio it was always about the power of the message — crafting a script in a conversational and compelling way. I had the good fortune of working with some of the best storytellers in the business at the BBC in London. It showed me the work that goes into crafting a story; the order in which you tell the story; the elements that would power the narrative and the bits that could be excluded because they weren’t adding anything.

What I have learnt along the way is there are very few thoughts and ideas out there that haven’t been tapped into. However, what will make you unique is the way that you connect to your audience through writing about what you know and talking about what you know, keeping it real and conveying it with definable and detailed examples.

Personal stories feel “real” versus abstract concepts, statistics or logical arguments. To me a good story is easy to follow, has interesting characters, is based on truth, has realistic characters, addresses an issue, drama or tension and has an ultimate point it is trying to get across.

I know first-hand how telling stories can be an invaluable tool to an organisation. A few years ago, I worked in a small government agency of around 150 people and I was asked by the CEO to start up an internal communications strategy to boost morale and keep staff informed of various information inside and outside the organisation.

One of the things I instinctively did was write stories on staff and related them back to the business. People were reluctant to be interviewed at first but when they saw stories being written about other people it started to open up a dialogue and lifted their spirits. It got people talking even to those perhaps they would not have ordinarily have bothered talking to and as a result the employee survey was more favourable overall and there was a reported increase in productivity.

We have to remember that a story is much greater than the sum of its parts. It has information and ideas as well as facts and figures embedded within it. Put together, they are no longer a collection of disparate elements but take on their own force, momentum and influence.

The part that excites me about storytelling is the fact that we’re connecting with another human being in the moment – simply by telling a story.

The post When you think of storytelling, what immediately springs to mind? appeared first on Corporate Story Room.