The Power of Storytelling

The Power of Storytelling.
In this episode, we look at storytelling. Why do we love stories and why do they help make our messages more memorable?  What's the best way to tell a story? Is there a magic formula? And can anyone tell a story? Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen answer these and other questions. Join them for another fun episode. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Art of Communication Podcast with me, Robin Kermode. Have you ever wished you could become a confident speaker or presenter? Then why not join my online masterclass? Speak so your audience will listen. In 10 easy to follow modules, you can become a confident and authentic speaker. For more information, visit robinkermode.com.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Art of Communication Podcast. And as usual, you have Sianne Hansen and Robin Kermode. Hello. And this one I'm so looking forward to because it comes up all the time, I think, with your clients, Robin. We all love a good story, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Well, everybody in business says that we've got to tell more stories, which made us think: should we do a podcast on storytelling?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

And the art of storytelling is how old?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

It's very old.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

A bit like you?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Thank you. We've told stories apparently for 150,000 years, 150,000 years. We've only learned to read and write in the last 5,000 years. So in other words, we've told stories 30 times longer than we have reading them.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Do you remember stories more accurately if they're told to you verbally than if they're written down?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Well, you remember stories more accurately if they're anchored. In other words, if they have memorable pieces in them. Right. Little bits in them. We think, oh, I remember that moment there, and I remember that moment. I remember the way you described that person looking or that building or that situation.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Have you got an example of that?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

An elderly friend of my mother's lived in the country and came up to London to go shopping at the department store, Harrod's. After a bit of shopping, she decided she wanted to have a coffee, so she sat down in the rather smart cafe and bought herself a coffee, and treated herself to three little biscuits. Now they came in a plastic wrapper, so all three were together. She sits down at the table and she's having her coffee. A young man comes along and says, May I share your table? She said, Of course. The young man leant forward, opened her three biscuits, and took one of them. She was incensed. She thought, Well, these are my biscuits. How dare you do that? But she thought I'm going to not say anything. So she took one of the other biscuits herself. So they're both sitting there, and there's a standoff now, of course, because there's only one biscuit left. The young man leans forward, breaks the biscuit in half, and gives her half the biscuit. Well, she's now really incensed. She pays her bill and leaves. A few moments later she's buying something in another department, opens her handbag, and sees that her own biscuits are still inside the bag. So she has been eating his biscuits. Has been generous enough to share his biscuits with her. The reason that story works so well are the anchors. We can see very clearly in our mind's eye the three biscuits in the wrapper, we can see the two of them looking at it. We can see the young man opening them, taking one, her taking the other one, and now the standoff as they both look at the lone biscuit left. These are all very visual images. We can see them. These are the visual anchors that make stories memorable.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

So let's just put this right into the heart of making a speech or talking to somebody one-to-one. Why do you need storytelling? Why is it even important when you're communicating with somebody?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

I had a client who won Hedge Fund Manager of the Year. Right. And he said to me, he wants to make an acceptance speech, and could we work on his acceptance speech? Now, of course, he's only going to speak probably for maybe 30 seconds or a minute, even. It's a good opportunity for him to come across well, maybe they can film it and use it on the website and that kind of thing. And I said, why don't we reverse engineer it? So this is using stories, but reverse engineer the speech. So I said, What boxes do you want to tick? And he said, Well, I want the audience to think that I'm good at what I do. I said, Of course, I understand that. He said, I want to be thought of as a thought leader. I want to be thought of as very human. I said, fantastic. So you've got three things there: wanting to be a thought leader, wanting them to think you're good, and wanting to be human. So let's have a story that ticks all those boxes. So we're essentially reverse engineering it. So we want a story that explains each of those attributes. So I said, okay, you want to be a thought leader. So you could say, I'm a thought leader, and here are my thoughts on the industry. You sound a bit pompous if you do that. But if you put it in the context of a story, even if it's not actually true, it helps, right? So you stories don't always have to be true. So for example, he could say, Do you know what? I was at dinner last night, and there was a young person there who had just left university, and she said to me, Do you think it's a good time to go into this industry, into the financial industry? And I was able to say, A, B, and C. In other words, he's able to give his thoughts, but he's giving his thoughts in answer to a question, fictitious question, possibly, but it means that he's able then to tell that story and still get his message across. So that story, in a way, is more anchored because it was at dinner last night somebody asked him this question.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Got it. Can I just pick you up on that? Stories don't have to be true. Um, so they don't have to have happened to you, or it's something you could have read an ancient story and you use it for your own purpose.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

You could do that. I mean, the stories that I tell didn't always happen in exactly the same order that I tell them in. In other words, all the elements actually did happen. So probably at some point this man had been at dinner and somebody had actually asked him this question. The point is it wasn't last night. In other words, it possibly happened, I don't know, five years ago or whatever, somebody asked him that question. But if we say, do you know what? About five or six years ago, somebody once asked me, it's not as current as saying, last night this happened. I was on the radio recently and somebody said to me, What is your favorite way of starting a speech? And I always say, well, it's two words. And I start a speech with last Tuesday. Last Tuesday. And they said, Why last Tuesday? I said, because whatever story I'm going to tell, whether it happened a year ago or two years ago, it's too old. But if I say it happened last Tuesday, there's something current about it. And it also sounds more impromptu and more relevant.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

This is something we've been doing since childhood, isn't it? I mean, we tell stories to our children to get a moral across, don't we? So what are the oldest stories that are relevant for, I don't know, a business speech or a sales pitch or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

You're right. The oldest stories, of course, the ones we have as as children, and they're from religion often as well, if we're brought up in a religious story. Fables and Fables and Parables. You know, I mean, fables tend to have a message in them. Fairy stories often start with once upon a time, you know, we we're used to that kind of thing. And parables, of course, have an extra meaning in them. The famous parables in the Bible, you'd have the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, and these kind of stories pass into the language. Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes is a parable about pride.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Which is still relevant.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Which is still relevant.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

And that story, in a way, you could adapt that. For example, if somebody was so pompous that he daren't admit his fault, so he's going to carry on pretending. That's very relevant today, I'm sure. And you could adapt that story, for example, into a business context.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

What kind of stories work? I mean, you mentioned fairy tales, so I assume once upon a time doesn't work in a business context. And I know it's not always about business, it's also about just getting your point across. But what kind of stories really truly work? Are they based on individuals or are they about nations or are they about imaginary characters?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Well, historically, they're all those things. They can be people, they can be nations, as you said, they can be culturally passing down the history of our culture, our nation, of course. But it's interesting when you say you can't start a business story with Once Upon a Time. Well, you can.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Can you?

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Because essentially there is a template for all fairy stories. It's a five-point template. And they start with Once Upon a Time, then there was. Then the second one is they used to do this. Then, this is the third one, one day something changed. Four, so they did this. Five, as a result, they did that. So for example, you could say twenty years ago, Mrs. X founded this company. So you wouldn't go once upon a time, but so the same five stages. Twenty years ago, Mrs. X founded this company. She had a vision and gradually she built up the business. Then, last year, she was approached to sell the company. She thought about it very carefully, but eventually she decided not to sell, and I'm very happy to say that we're still growing as an independent and fast-growing company. So it's the same five steps of storytelling, but you're putting them in a business context, that's all. You just don't have once upon a time.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

And can you tell stories that are bad news stories? Can you tell stories where it's a dark outcome? Do stories always have to be uplifting if you're putting them in communication.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Oh, that's really interesting. The point of a story is to illustrate whatever emotion you want to have. So I remember working with uh the CEO of a big organization, and she had a speech to make in front of two and a half thousand people. She was in retail, and we worked on the speech together. And in the end, what she did was she came out and she said, last Tuesday, she suggested it. So she came out and she said, last Tuesday, a customer went into one of our stores and said this on the screen. And she said, I never want that to happen again. Now, it's not a happy story, particularly. It's actually rather a difficult story. But what it does is it explains the problem they're having with certain customers. But she's making it very specific. It happened to a specific customer last Tuesday. Now, she could just have stood up and said, We're having a problem with the way we interact with our customers and we need to do something about it. But it's not as memorable as saying, last Tuesday, one customer went in, said this specific thing, I don't like that, and we shouldn't be doing that. Now, of course, it's very clear that the rest of her speech is going to be about customer service. So you can use stories for good things, happy things, and also for challenging things. But you can lull people into a false sense of security with a happy story that actually turns really bad. And you go, so it's not as good as we thought, is it? Yeah. We need to do something.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

That's interesting, that change of direction, that you can use a story to switch an emphasis in a speech or get the audience to move with you, because you've often talked about never being above or below your audience, never pitch above or below.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

So equal status.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Equal status. And I've seen you tell a story. You often tell a story slightly against yourself, not to ingratiate yourself with the audience, but to get that equality. You do that, don't you? And you just say, you know, I did something ridiculous the other day.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

I didn't mean to, but we're all human, and the one thing that we don't want to do is to pretend somehow that we're not human, that we're somehow better than the audience. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't work. And it's rather like, you know, if you're going up the steps and you drop all your cards and the audience see you drop all your notes or what are your speech, rather than panicking and saying, sorry, sorry, I know all this sort of business, much better just to say, Well, as you can see, I've dropped my cards and I'm human like everybody else. And I think the same in a story. Telling a story against yourself makes you makes you look human.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

And in reverse, I suppose you'd recommend you don't tell a story bigging yourself up, like, look at me, I just ran 50,000 miles in a year or something.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Well, people do that a lot. On a PowerPoint particularly, they'll have a picture of them running. So they'll go, this is me running the marathon last year. And I'm thinking, why do you want to do that other than slightly showing off, really? Now, if you said, This is a picture of me running the marathon, those of you who know me well, you know, this is the tenth time I've done it, and I was really hoping to break the four-hour barrier, you know. Well, this is my time, and then there's a close-up of the watch, and it's five hours, 20 minutes, right? Then that's kind of fine because again, that's a self-deprecating story.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Okay, let's go into the detail. Are there ways to tell a story well? Are there ways to tell a story badly? And can you give us some help? So let's say we want to put a story into our speech, we can see where it fits in nicely. What are the do's and don'ts?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

There's always a conflict somewhere in a story. Stories very rarely are just completely even. I went along, had a lovely meal with someone, and it was a nice evening. It's not really a story. But I went in, I was feeling very low, and I thought I'd take myself out for lunch. So I sat at a cafe and just had a sandwich, and I thought, well, I'm just going to think about life, and life wasn't going particularly well. But an old guy came along and he said, Hello. And I said, Hello, do I know you? And he said, No, I just wanted to say hello, and he moves on. Now, it's a very sweet little story. There's nothing much happened in the story. I made it up, yeah. So nothing actually happened in the story other than sometimes when we're feeling sad, a little generous act can make somebody feel better. Following the template, again, once upon a time he was feeling low. He decided to take himself out for lunch, then a man came along, said hello, and now he feels better. I mean it's the same, it's the same template for every story.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

And would you put a story at the beginning, an end of speech, or are you not that wedded to where it sits?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

It's great to have a story at the beginning to grab people's attention, but also the story needs to be appropriate and relevant to what you're going to talk about. So the story in a way has to illustrate and telegraph to the audience the nature of your speech. The ending story, if you have a story at the end, it tends to be one you want to end either rather poignantly and emotionally, or you want to end up on a laugh.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

And so can you give us an example of how maybe somebody opened maybe maybe it's not necessarily a story, but with a reference to them and the audience.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

I talked about a speech that David Attenborough made in a blog recently. And David Attenborough started with two sentences, both of which started with I wonder. And the first one was, I wonder if you remember when you were 18. Now, in a sense, that is a kind of once upon a time, we were all 18. And then he goes on to talk about fundraising and he's fundraising for his college at Cambridge. But the sense of wonder that he's got from this taking you back to when you were 18 gets you into the right mode to hear the rest of his story.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

And it sounds like the beginning of a story, doesn't it? And maybe it's your story.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

And that you can create the same story for another generation. Yeah. It's very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Very powerful. And like we said at the beginning, the reason that people tell stories is they're memorable because we can see them. We can see them in our mind.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

So, Robert, not all of us are natural storytellers. And quite often, I couldn't possibly think of a story, a particularly a personal one, that's going to be relevant for the speech. So, what do you advise clients when they're in that position?

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Well, it's amazing. People say, nothing really happened, I don't really have any stories to tell. But interestingly, I had a client recently who said to me, I want to make a big speech at the end of the year, but nothing's really happened this year, so I don't really have anything to say. And I said, Well, tell me what did happen this year. And he told me a few things. And finally he said, Well, we moved buildings and um the queen came to open the building. And I said, sorry, the queen came to open the building. Well, then you have a story. He said, Yeah, but it's not really. I said, Okay, let me ask you a couple of questions. I said, Have you ever met the Queen before? And he said, No. I said, So how are you feeling? He said, Well, it's interesting, Robin. He said, I got up in the morning. I was so nervous that I was going to be late. So I got up in the dark, I didn't want to wake my wife up, and I put on odd socks. So then I get there, and I'm now standing in front of the queen. I look down and I realise I've got odd socks on. And I suddenly was filled with embarrassment and panic. Now, that was a story. But previously, five minutes before, he'd said, Well, nothing really happened this year. So I think all of us, if we just think back, not all of us, of course, get to meet the Queen, but that all of us have more stories than we think if we look for them.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

And Robin, do you have a favorite story?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Well the favourite story that you and I tell quite often, actually. In our apartment, we discovered in the wall of the building. When we were doing some renovations, we discovered there was a safe, an old safe in the wall, under the wallpaper and under layers and layers of paint was an old safe. Now, of course, we didn't have a key for it because it was very old. And I said, Well, we'll just get the builders to drill it open. We've got to find out what's in the safe.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

And you said No, I don't think we should open it.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Now, in terms of storytelling, what Sianne said was it's better not to open it because it's more exciting not to know. I think that was the author thinking.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Anticipation is there's a phrase about that, isn't there? Anticipation is much more fun.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

The journey is more exciting than arriving.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah, and I just didn't think we should open the safe. Whatever was in it was put there by a previous owner about 50 years ago, or maybe a hundred years ago. And I don't feel like it's ours anyway. And it isn't ours.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

We bought the apartment.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

And anyway, what did we do?

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Well, we didn't open it. And we papered it over, and it's still in the wall. Now, what we have gained from this by not opening it is we gained a story.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

We gained a story.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

And do you know what? If we'd opened it, there probably would have been nothing inside it at all. We have a story, so maybe that's better than whatever might have been in there.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Robin, thank you so much, as ever. Hugely enjoyable, and thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Have you ever wished you could become a confident speaker or presenter? Then why not join my online masterclass? Speak so your audience will listen. In ten easy to follow modules, you can become a confident and authentic speaker. For more information, visit robinkermo.com.