Storytelling, from time immemorial has been the surest way of grabbing attention and getting dormant minds to recharge and activate their thinking channels. As children, we have spent innumerable hours behind that favourite story-book, or in our grandmother/mother’s laps, listening to stories of all kinds. Before we even knew we had the capability of emoting so many feelings, we had experienced excitement, laughter, anxiety and even trepidation, hearing to some of those old tales.
It’s an art, not everyone can tell stories the way some of the gifted ones can. We all have that one person in our family/social circle whose stories, even if repeated, we love to hear and laugh our heart out. It’s not always the content, but even the way it’s told. The facial expressions, the hand gestures, the addition of the local dialect, the personification- they have some unique quality in enthralling their audiences.
These days, storytelling’s power is reaching the corporate world as a tool to cascade company values and success stories. In this form, it’s more of a science than an art. People are being taught the theory of storytelling, of how to notice stories being created, how to express it to a third person and the way the internal stories can be used to re-energise the staff.
When I first heard of this way of teaching people to become effective storyteller, I thought it’s not going to work. I mean, it’s an art and not a science.
But after taking storytelling classes with kids from the age group of 3 to 7 years, I’m convinced that storytelling can be taught. As kids, our curriculum or our social activities just didn’t expect us to be either masters or jacks of this little art and hence we really didn’t bother to learn it. The natural ones kept getting better and better at it, because of experience and audience reactions, and the listeners never bothered to cross the table.
An account or recital of an event or a series of events, either true or fictitious, is a story. Simply put, storytelling is primarily either/or a combination of these two things- an existing story/an event that has happened or creating a new scenario/story from scratch. If you recall the events of your previous day, you would probably realise that you have told at least one story that day- telling your colleagues how you spent your weekend, sharing plans with your friends about your upcoming holiday, telling your spouse how your day was, or even updating your boss on why that region is giving your difficulty to generate more sales.
It’s omnipresent. We live around stories all the time.
What we don’t realise is that by just giving a little attention towards becoming better storytellers, we can become better communicators, influencers, teachers and be more controlled in our relationships. How? Because stories inspire. We get moved by listening to stories. Stories of personal triumphs and tragedies, stories of success and failures, stories of heroic and injustice.
For the time being, I’d leave you with these three thoughts-
- Stories are all around us, and we don’t always need a story book or a folk tale to tell a story.
- Storytelling is both an art and science, and with just a little focus, we can become better storytellers
- Becoming better storytellers have a lot of hidden advantages in our personal and professional lives.
We’ll delve a little more on point 3 in our next write-up. Stay tuned!
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