What's your story?

Who doesn't love to hear a good story??  

But how can you create a good one?  That will captive people and yet pass a strong message?  In the workshop with Jay Bonansinga (the zumbi guru who wrote The Walking Dead series) and Gary Mills, we worked a little bit about how could we create a powerful storytelling.  

Not only that, we can even expand our approach to our corporate day to day life and see storytelling as a tool that can help us improve your presentation skills, share a specific vision for a project, demonstrate value for one idea and why not, defend a project budget in front of a board.  (Believe me, it works ladies and gentlemens!!)

Besides all the emotions that goes around a good story, studies already proven that learners has more than 20% more chance of understanding your content if they get the story you are about to tell.

During the workshop, Gary first presented us some key tips about how to create a good story.  

According to him, everything starts by you understanding your audience:  you need to know who are you talking to, what are they expecting from you and of course, adapt your posture and body language to fulfill this need.  

Kind of obvious right?  Yes but no. When you are listening to a story your expectations go beyond the story itself: you want to connect to the feelings and emotions that the deliver is going through at the moment.  So, as a storyteller, you need to be aware of that, and be able to RESPOND to that.

According to Gary, there is a Dramatic structure that can help us, when creating or telling a story:

1) Establish the background information -  people need to know the context that your story is taking place, in order to feel the power of emotions that you are trying to bring;

2) Identify the problem or incident - what is the trigger that shows the listeners that something has just happened.  Usually this should be unsexpected, to have the first surprise effect of the audience; :)

3) Conflict is activated -  now is the moment that you explain the details of the story, what were the options that you have, or the consequences of the problem you just described before;

4) Turning point - climax:  this is it. The highlight of the story, the plot twist.  Where you are going to tell the audience how you overcame the problems and that luckily everything will be alright.  

5) But even if the climax of the story is the moment everybody is most waiting for, you cannot simply end it up the story there.  You need a conflict resolution, a little « so now what ». A take away and a lesson to deliver to the learners that, if you are lucky, they will remember for a long long time.  

Of course, written like that in 5 steps it seems really easy to create good stories right?  But guess what? It is not. After this little step by step presentation, it was our time to get back to work.  This time with Jay Bonansinga, we got to create our own Horror Story, in less than 2 seconds, and if possible, with only 2 phrase effect.  And oh boy, how that was hard.

I’m a chicken when it comes to horror stories and to have the Zombi Boss in front of me was not helping at all.  :). We finalized by creating some plotting twist and it was his time to explain to us something that, for me, was the biggest take away from this session:  less is more.

According to Jay, we have no need to write pages and pages of stories, give tons of details, if we are able to bring the emotion to the audience in lesser words.  As we did in the exercise, we manage to create this sense of terror and horror in 2 sentences, and I promise you, some of the things I heard back then got me the chills.  

He says that every good story should start by being able to answer two simple questions:  what if // and then. What if I bought just a beautiful new car this morning, and then, while leaving the store, I hear some weird noises from the truck??  This is the level of story we were up to. No zombies though. :)

Besides being an amazing workshop about techniques on creating story tellings, they ended up by saying that everyone of us, leaders in our own crazy companies, we need to have some stories ready in our pockage, that will serve us in our business.  Here are some exemple:

1. The origin story:  how did you start into  the company; what is your role, how your company started;

2. The Crucible Story - story about overcome, reinvented yourself, overcoming the odds;

3. The leadership story - story that shows how you lead and people follow you;

4. The helper Story - story how you helped someone, supported one;

5. The Pie-in-the-face story. - when you make some mistakes and have some learnings from it (it shows how you are vulnerable);

This is was amazing learnings and insight, but for me, being good storytelling is also about some more simple things:

• Only tell the story that you like telling;
• Make sure why you are telling the story and what do you want your audience to feel;
• Never underestimate the power of surprise - dont spoiler your own story by saying:  let me tell you this story about how I got an upgrade in a flight
• Only reveal information in your last time - go little by little.  Make them hungry for more
• Explore you senses and share how things felt for you.  Emotions, people.

In cultural transformation journey, storytelling is one of the major tools that we use in order to captivate our audience, as well as to bring the listeners to experience sensations and feelings with you.

In order words, we connect, human to human!

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