Storytelling is the strategic approach to telling a narrative or sequence of events. Rather than listing off an endless series of events that lead to no point, storytelling relies on thoughtful crafting. If done correctly, storytelling has the power to inspire others and drive action from your customers, colleagues, stakeholders, and even management. Regardless of job role or industry, you can benefit from adding storytelling into your toolkit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The art of storytelling has been around for centuries. As humans, we have endlessly been drawn to tales and lore. Think about what draws you to binge watching that Netflix show on the weekends. The story! So why do we resort to only data and unfamiliar strategic orders from top management to express our objectives? We too can leverage storytelling in business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are some common traits that all good stories share. When it comes to storytelling for business, a good story should be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your story is about your own experiences, it\u2019s important to be true to yourself throughout the story. People can sense inauthenticity and fluff. Integrate some of your personality characteristics throughout the story so that it reflects your personality on a day-to-day basis. By displaying your true self, the story will ring credible and genuine to your audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A story told to your team will be vastly different than one told to your manager or board of directors. Knowing who you will be speaking to will help you craft your story. Prior to creating your story, think of your audience and how they may respond. Develop some key themes that you think the audience will resonate with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Be wary of including details that aren\u2019t relevant to the primary theme. A human\u2019s average attention span is less than 10 seconds. Adding unnecessary details to your story will distract your audience from the key points you are trying to convey. Focusing purely on the main points will enable your audience to retain the information and apply it more easily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone has emotions. Tapping into people\u2019s emotions will make your story that much more powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tone is the attitude<\/em> behind the story. What attitude does your story need to be most effective? What is its natural<\/em> attitude? Is it serious, humorous, inspiring? Tone is often set by our choice of words, level of formality, and our use of punctuation. It\u2019s important to set the tone at the beginning of telling your story. By doing this you are weaving a subtle thread throughout your story that will engage the listener while connecting key points from beginning to the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n German writer, Gustav Freytag, created the Freytag pyramid to understand the elements of a compelling story. Each storyteller should have four parts: exposition, rising action, climax, and falling action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Determining how your story will end is important. Theoretically, all loose ends will be tied up in the resolution. Your ending should reemphasize the key themes of your story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A story needs to drive action. At the end of a story, your audience should feel compelled to complete an action of some sort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This action may simply be to reflect on the story theme. This can be done by summarizing the main point or even asking the audience a question. In other cases, it might be a formal call to action or some other indication of where they can go to \u201cget involved\u201d, \u201cget in touch\u201d, or any other option that makes sense given the purpose of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Storytelling is the strategic approach to telling a narrative or sequence of events. Rather than listing off an endless series of events that lead to no point, storytelling relies on thoughtful crafting. If done correctly, storytelling has the power to inspire others and drive action from your customers, colleagues, stakeholders, and even management. Regardless of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing-skills"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1140,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/1140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kidsfunspot.xyz\/yac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Outline a Storyline – Beginning, Conflict, and Resolution<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Make it Actionable<\/h3>\n\n\n\n