Advantages of being an effective storyteller

In the previous post, we promised we’d delve a little more into the advantages of being an effective storyteller, so here it it:

Panchtantra tales are known to be the one of the oldest oral traditions of storytelling. Using animals, the story would talk about morals and wise conduct of life. It’s believed to be composed for ignorant princes so that they could learn how to lead a better life.

Using animals, to teach a prince. Makes sense, right?

Those days, hunting was one of the major activities the kings and princes would indulge in. Their army comprised of elephants and horses. They were surrounded by birds, squirrels, rabbits as pet animals all the time. Hence, it made perfect sense to use these animals as mediums to impart softer life lessons.

Communication is by far the most used skill for humans. Every day, in both our personal and professional relationships, we need to be able to communicate effectively with our stakeholders. Which means, we need them to understand our message and in turn understand theirs. Obviously, you can’t use storytelling in every conversation that you do, but for the ones that are important to you, wherein you really wish to convince the other person to understand your point of view, and for which you will possibly have time to prepare, storytelling could be an effective way of sealing odds in your favour.

Imagine your first meeting with your new boss. He is keen to know more about you, what’s your background, what you do and most importantly what unique capabilities do you bring to his team. Yes, with time, he will understand all that about you, but how about telling him upfront what you want him to know about you, and leave rest of the time of your partnership for him to validate what you tell him in the first meeting?

Hi, nice to meet you. I’m from Dehradun, and both my parents are teachers. During early college I realised that I am good at managing things; you give me 10 random objects, and I would line them up in an order that will make sense. With self-study I got into my MBA college with the highest percentile among my batchmates. In last 10 years of working, I have experienced 5 different roles. Not that I get bored in a role, but my excellent ratings have forced my managers to put me on a fast track career program. I moved into this role around six months back and in addition to expanding the distributor network in my region with some innovative ideas, I’m also working extensively with the HR team to enhance functional skills of our team members. In our annual team goals meeting, I was also chosen as the mentor for the young folks, but honestly I haven’t had the time to work on that yet; once you settle down in the role, would be hoping to re-ignite that piece of much needed work.

So, if you were the new boss of this person, what would you think of him? Arrogant/show-off/on my face/bold/smart/over-smart? The impression you make would also depend on the body language and tone of the person speaking and hence we can’t conclusively say whether he would leave a bad impression or a good one, but what we can assure you is he will leave an impression.

It’s exactly what Panchtantra did ages ago- use the common/known surroundings, in a story manner that grips his attention, tell the person what he needs to know.

Here’s why mastering the storytelling technique can help you tremendously:

Stories stay in mind more than facts: Human beings tend to remember stories more than facts or numbers. A presentation started with a nicely done story summary is going to be remembered much more than a status update of Minutes of the Meeting.

Stories touch us at deeper levels. We tend to relate to characters of a story and empathize with those characters. Hence, it’s easier to build trust and partnership with someone who is telling a genuine story.

Stories carve out our individual identity. In this crazy world of high competition, each one of us need to build and enforce our unique identity to be successful. Our stories, distinguish us from others and helps us make our individual brand stand out.

Stories add perspectives to our thoughts. There are all kind of stories- success stories, failure stories, happy endings, sad endings, adventurous, magical/wishful stories but whatever they are, we know of them today because someone chose to put words into their thoughts. And that’s exactly what storytelling helps you do. A fight with your spouse, wherein you had thousand things to say but you didn’t because you didn’t want to complicate things, can be resolved by talking about underlying issues at some other opportune time. The way you talk about those issues would play a crucial role, and hence using storytelling mechanism could help.