People are hardwired to understand a lot of things through shared experiences. Sitting around a campfire, talking to each other about one’s day and life is a tale as old as time. I’ll cover the importance of listening in building rapport another day, but another crucial part of trust, of understanding, is telling phenomenal stories.
Knowing how to tell stories effectively builds trust, rapport, and allows you to communicate information in a way that doesn’t lend itself to easy objections. A lot of communications literature shows that people when imbibing knowledge have an internal monologue where they challenge, and pick up on different pieces of someone’s perspective. They’ll anticipate what they think of an argument and how they feel about a person throughout listening and form an interpretation of what you’ve said. People are often skeptical, especially to perspectives they don’t share, even if broad studies support them. One study found that people, rather than becoming less polarized with additional education actually became more educated. Data literacy became weaponized towards supporting one’s own preconceptions.
So, how do stories, symbols, and parables play into this? Oftentimes, the mind is less able to argue with a symbol because there’s less to hold on to. A parable may just be a singular case, but individual anecdotes aren’t refutable in the same way a study is. Stories harness the imagination, and give people the ability to come to their own conclusions, kind of.
Stories may appear less structured than straightforward argument, but often they aren’t. The best storytellers spend months or even years honing the details they sustain or drop. They painstakingly decide what needs emphasis, and what can be skirted around. They consider how word choice or analogy can send very different messages depending on who one is talking to. Great storytelling is an art that has hundreds of secrets, but the structure of a story is a little more straightforward, and there can be some tools you can utilize to get better.
First, stories should be emotional. I don’t mean that your dog just died, or your mom’s actually related to Oprah. Instead, I mean that it’s important for your stories to have highs and lows, tension, and build-up. A terrible story would be: I went to the store to pick up some eggs, and came back home with 24 cage free eggs. The way you avoid stories being flat is you add tension, details, and feeling to them. How do you feel about shopping organic? Was traffic a nightmare? Did you grimace when the shopkeeper with spinach in his teeth kept slobbering? Including details makes a story come alive.
Second, stories should have a beginning, middle, and end. You want to start by describing the state the person was in before the event happened, what the event happening did to the person, and how it changed the person. Replace event with whatever happens in the story. One great way to do this is to finish off with conclusions, to talk about lessons learned, or to add a why. This helps to clearly demarcate the content from the story with the rest of the conversation.
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