Essential Story Elements: Dialogue and Conflict

• 00:04 Your stories need several other elements if they're really going to stand out
• 00:09 as stories and grab people's attention, and more important, be remembered.
• 00:15 Now I've mentioned you've got to describe the setting, you need to convey emotion.
• 00:22 You also need to bring in dialogue.
• 00:24 What do I mean by dialogue?
• 00:28 As I said in the previous video,
• 00:30 my story about the first time I trained in Eastern Europe.
• 00:34 I didn’t just describe the conversation.
• 00:37 I actually stated the dialogue.
• 00:40 The prime minister said to me, DJ, what do you think about the presentation?
• 00:45 I said, I don't know what you said, but with all due respect,
• 00:50 I thought it was boring as hell.
• 00:52 That's dialogue.
• 00:53 What you actually say to someone and what they say back.
• 00:58 The boring way to do it was, the client asked me for my opinion on
• 01:03 the presentation, and I informed him that it was not particularly interesting.
• 01:06 That's straightforward, linear, it's boring.
• 01:11 That's how people talk if they've written out everything and
• 01:14 it's a bunch of bullet points on a slide.
• 01:17 When you're telling a story, you need to actually tell people what you said and
• 01:22 what that person said back to you.
• 01:24 Now the beauty of this is it's impossible to be monotone when you do that.
• 01:29 You're changing your tone, you may even do a bit of an accent.
• 01:33 You don't have to.
• 01:35 You often change the position of your body to re-enact the conversation.
• 01:40 It creates variety in the sound of how you're presenting information.
• 01:46 Again, does it matter if anyone remembers exactly what you said?
• 01:49 No, but it helps slow down the onslaught of new facts, new data points.
• 01:54 It gets people to visualize it and to focus on this one idea at a time.
• 01:59 So, that's why the dialogue is so important.
• 02:03 And you've got to describe a problem.
• 02:04 Now the problem doesn't have to be as dramatic as
• 02:07 fearing people with machine guns doing something bad to you.
• 02:12 The problem can be you're worried about loosing a client or
• 02:18 missing an expectation for a sales quota.
• 02:22 But describe what the problem is so that people can relate to it.
• 02:28 Every great action thriller movie has some big problem,
• 02:33 some heist of diamonds, some nuclear weapon is about to explode the world.
• 02:38 There's always a problem, but
• 02:41 just like in a great movie, there has to be a resolution.
• 02:44 The bomb has to be detonated.
• 02:46 The world has to be saved.
• 02:48 You have to do what your client needed in order for
• 02:52 them to make their sales quota on time.
• 02:55 How was the problem resolved?
• 02:57 In the story I gave you, it was resolved
• 03:02 because we redid the speech using a simple outline with stories and
• 03:06 the client loved what he saw on video, problem solved.
• 03:11 So when you're telling a story, don't leave people hanging.
• 03:15 Make sure they see how it's resolved.
• 03:18 So these are the big elements, when you're introducing a story you gotta have
• 03:22 a solid message behind it that's relevant to the audience,
• 03:25 describe the setting, introduce a character, bring in some dialogue.
• 03:30 Bring in some emotion.
• 03:33 Describe the problem in detail and how was it resolved.
• 03:37 You do that and
• 03:39 you're going to be way ahead of almost any other business communicator.
• 03:44 Because most people leave out the stories.
• 03:47 Great communicators have stories, not just the beginning of the speech or the end,
• 03:51 but for every single important point.

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