Your Stories Will Make Your Ideas Unforgettable

• 00:04 Do you want to know what the single biggest difference is between great
• 00:08 communicators, people who are great public speakers, presenters,
• 00:12 versus the average ones, the boring ones?
• 00:15 It's not about intelligence.
• 00:17 It's not about looks.
• 00:19 It's not this nebulous thing people like to call charisma.
• 00:23 It's not the absence of ums, uhs, ers, you knows.
• 00:28 It's not even about even having a sense of humor, although humor helps.
• 00:32 The single biggest difference between great speakers and
• 00:36 presenters and everybody else,
• 00:39 great communicators use stories to illustrate all their key points.
• 00:46 When I ask people all over the globe, whether I'm training a financial
• 00:51 executive or a prime minister, I get the same response.
• 00:55 I ask them, what do you remember from the best speakers you've seen?
• 00:59 Beyond the fact that someone was comfortable or engaging or
• 01:02 walked around, the only thing anyone remembers, the stories.
• 01:06 Now, they remember the messages associated with the stories,
• 01:10 but they remember the stories.
• 01:12 Now, you're probably thinking, well, that's great, TJ, but I'm not a natural
• 01:18 storyteller, and my industry, we don't have, it's all a bunch of excuses.
• 01:23 It doesn't have to be anything particularly fancy.
• 01:28 For example, a few years ago,
• 01:30 I was conducting kind of a run-of-the-mill presentation training.
• 01:34 A major healthcare executive,
• 01:36 a CEO had flown into New York City to work with me for a day.
• 01:40 And we were in my training facility in midtown Manhattan.
• 01:44 And his staff had called me in advance and said, TJ, we've worked on this speech for
• 01:48 three months, whatever you do, don't change it.
• 01:50 It's been approved by all the different people, the lawyers, investor,
• 01:55 everyone signed off on it.
• 01:56 Let's try not to change it.
• 01:59 I said, hey, we're going to try to improve him the best we can in every way possible.
• 02:05 So Jim gets there early in the morning.
• 02:09 I started the presentation training as I do with all of them.
• 02:11 I just had him get up and speak.
• 02:13 I recorded it on video.
• 02:16 So he gives his presentation, it's about 15 minutes long, I record it.
• 02:21 We play it back and he asks me what I think of it.
• 02:27 And his speech consisted of him sort of head down, going through a whole bunch
• 02:31 of bullet points, reading, reading bullet points on a slide.
• 02:35 A totally normal presentation, no worse than any other presentation I've seen.
• 02:42 But he's basically reading off of a script,
• 02:44 he's reading off of bullet points on the screen.
• 02:49 And he wants to know what I think.
• 02:50 And I said, Jim, I'll tell you what I think, but I want to know what you think.
• 02:55 And again, I made him really watch his own presentation.
• 03:02 When it was done, he turned to me and said, my God, TJ, it's so boring.
• 03:08 I wouldn't want to watch me.
• 03:11 What did you think?
• 03:13 And I had to say, well, Jim, you seem like a smart fellow.
• 03:16 If you think it's incredibly boring, guess what, it is.
• 03:21 And we took his speech and we just tore it up into little pieces.
• 03:26 We balled it up and we threw it in the trash can.
• 03:32 Okay, Jim, let's roll up our sleeves, let's try again.
• 03:35 We had a clean sheet of paper, we brainstormed on how many?
• 03:40 That's right, just the top five ideas that we really
• 03:44 wanted to convey to his audience for this presentation.
• 03:48 And then he came up with a little story for each one, an example for each one,
• 03:53 and we had a single sheet of paper.
• 03:55 We got rid of the slides because they were worthless.
• 03:58 And this time he just spoke, focused on a few ideas.
• 04:04 We recorded it, looked at it.
• 04:07 Then he didn't even ask me what I thought, he's like, my God,
• 04:10 it's a thousand times better, TJ, you're a genius.
• 04:12 Well, I'm not a genius,
• 04:15 I'm just getting people to stop boring their audiences to death.
• 04:22 Okay, so what I do there?
• 04:22 I just told a little story, happens to be a true story.
• 04:27 There's nothing particularly glamorous or exciting about it.
• 04:31 It wasn't in an exotic locale, just in my office in midtown Manhattan.
• 04:36 There wasn't any great drama, nobody cried,
• 04:39 nobody pulled a gun on me, that has happened before.
• 04:44 A simple story, but it had a character, had a problem,
• 04:49 had a setting, had a little dialogue, had a challenge.
• 04:55 It had some emotion involved and it had a solution.
• 04:59 That's all a story is.
• 05:02 So if you really want to convey your main messages,
• 05:05 you need to package each message with a story.
• 05:07 And the story wasn't for me just to be entertaining.
• 05:09 It was to convey a very important point that you don't want to bore your audience,
• 05:14 you don't want to just do this boring data dump.
• 05:18 You want to have narrowed your message down to five.
• 05:21 But if I just said that in ten seconds, it goes in one ear and out the other.
• 05:26 By telling a story, and it only took a couple of minutes,
• 05:30 it allows the audience to visualize it.
• 05:34 That's the real power of story,
• 05:36 is it forces the audience that you're speaking to, that you're presenting to
• 05:41 to essentially run a little movie reel along with what you're saying.
• 05:46 That triggers the memory process.
• 05:49 That's why story is so important.
• 05:52 So it's not just about opening your speech with a story or
• 05:56 a funny story to loosen people up, no.
• 05:59 It's critical to the whole communication process.
• 06:02 You need an actual relevant story, a real story,
• 06:08 not some generic motivational starfish story.
• 06:12 But a real story about a real problem,
• 06:15 a real conversation you had with a real person, a client, a colleague,
• 06:21 a customer, a prospect, and how the problem was resolved.
• 06:26 If you do that, you're instantly going to be one of the best speakers
• 06:31 your audience has seen today, possibly ever.
• 06:35 So I need you to start thinking about your stories you're going to use for
• 06:40 your messages for the presentation you're going to be delivering.

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