What were you feeling when you were angry at your boss? When you were frustrated by a stubborn client? When you were confronted by an angry customer? When a prospect you thought was just about to contract with you changed their mind and went elsewhere? When a committee voted against your cherished idea?
If you're in any kind of business or workplace today, you've experienced all of these situations at times. You know that what you say will be used against you, so you have to react and speak cautiously. That caution doesn't apply to what is going on inside your head. You could be having a raging argument, fantasies of retribution or the satisfaction of saying "take this job and stuff it!"
While you can't behave this way in real life, you can let audience inside your head as part of a story. You're urged by many storytelling experts to engage attention, inspire action and create an emotional connection with well-crafted, relevant stories. Letting the audience feel your feelings and express your outrage are powerful ways to engage,inspire and connect.
Stories are not reports--the who, what, where, why and how. Stories are verbal pictures of an event and your experiences of that event. By experiences I mean how you felt, thought and ultimately recall an event, not what you did. That's what makes a story powerful for an audience. You can cause the audience to feel what you felt and have the urge to say what you wanted to say.
How? The simplest technique is to set the scene of an event by describing with great texture one or two details of the main character (you or the other person) and a bit about the scene. Don't get hung up on complete, under-oath type accuracy. Storytelling is art, not testimony. Then when it's natural for you to continue the story with what you did, you take the inappropriate thoughts you had and tell them as if that's what you did.The audience will be open-mouthed in disbelief. Just before the end you look them in the eye and confess that that's what you wished you did, but since you (and they) want to keep your job, your customers, etc. you did what was expected. Your message is that everyone has thoughts and feelings about unacceptable behavior and that's good because it allows them room for their natural feelings, even as they act correctly.
Try incorporating what your emotions dictated to you into your story, then recover and describe what you actually did. The lesson you learned is that the emotional response is valid and healthy. And your audience will breathe a sigh of relief to learn that they're not the only ones with extraordinary reactions that they hide in order to save their jobs and their reputations.
People like being able to relate to a speaker. This is why successful comedians will tell stories the audience can relate to, like airline food or standing in line at the DMV. They are thinking "hey, that just happened to me! I know exactly what that feels like."
Posted by: Julie | April 21, 2015 at 08:36 PM