The secret to Storytelling is to Shoot for their Heart, Capture their Mind and Make them Smile.

Storytelling for individuals and business people is all about connecting with others and helping them to see what we see, then bringing them along on our journey and energising them. When we tell a story to our partner, a business colleague, an important investor, or even to our dog, we want them to be captivated by it to act on our ideas. We use stories in business and in everyday life, in formal situations and when passing people in the street. Mastering the art of storytelling allows us to reach the hearts and minds of the people we come into contact with. When we tell our story it is about selling the story and inspiring your audience.

This is so important for every goal we want to reach in life that I want to dedicate this section to the art of telling and selling an idea and ultimately getting support, buy-in and followers.

There are three important things to keep in mind when selling and telling a story. Ideally embrace all three of them:

  1. Shoot for the heart, because people remember when they are emotionally connected with your story.
  2. Capture the mind, which is the rational part of the brain, and the rational part of your audience.
  3. Make your audience smile, because humour releases energy, can facilitate social interactions and contributes to higher subjective wellbeing.

Research has shown that fear of public speaking, also known as speech anxiety or glossophobia, is the greatest fear that people have, even greater than that of spiders, disease and death itself. Some people are so scared they start sweating, they can’t sleep, they don’t smile when they’re on stage, or if they do it’s a Snoopy smile, pretending to be happy. If someone is scared and doesn’t smile genuinely, people will feel their fear.

If you are one of the many who fears public speaking, follow my five rules to overcome your fears, as communication is the ultimate toolkit for taking people with you on the journey, convincing them, inviting them to join the adventure and making them dream. Very few master all of the below, but improving on each of them will make your life much easier.

Communicating your ideas is the currency of today to evolve your brand. If you improve your storytelling skills, you will increase the value of yourself and the business you represent. Carmine Gallo, Keynote speaker, author of The Storyteller’s Secret

1. Do it with passion. Life without passion is no life. This is where we need to touch the heart. In order to connect with other people’s hearts, we have to be vulnerable, show that we are human beings so the audience can relate to us. To feel like we’re connecting with them, every single individual needs to see how real we are. They want to know whether we are a big ego or whether there is vulnerability.

Here are some hints for touching the audience’s heart:

  • Sparkle on stage. Make sure your eyes sparkle, engage with the audience so that they feel inspired and connected. Very good speakers interact with the audience, asking questions, engaging, even walking through the audience
  • Remain in attendance. No one wants to listen to an automaton. If the audience feels you’re reciting your speech from memory, they will feel like a robot is talking. They will not feel any authenticity
  • Master your talk. It’s much easier to show your passion during the presentation when you have mastered it. Then you can make your passion contagious so people feel elevated from their chairs and want to join you
  • Be persuasive. Making your audience dream is very important, and using ‘what if?’ questions will touch their emotions and help you to persuade them
  • Show your passion to express your talent. Tell your story with passion and conviction. A good story is 65% emotions and feeling.

2. Bring something fresh. Surprise your audience with something they didn’t expect. Your mission is to inform, educate, inspire and give people a new way to look at the world in which they live. Many people talk about the same subject, but the way you relate to the audience, showing a different point of view or a different way of looking at a problem, will make the topic fresh.

You need to grasp attention, and to get the audience’s attention you have to do something new and unexpected. Surprise them. It is the age of serendipity, after all.

Not every speech has to have a single jaw dropping ‘oh shit!’ moment, but having a few surprises and creative ideas that people didn’t expect is a great move. A speech should express all the emotions like joy, fear, shock and surprise as the brain has a kind of a save button for these things. People will always remember the small pieces that were fresh ways of looking at the world.

Tintin Snack: music moves. A great way to get a jaw dropping moment is with short music videos. When you show a great video of half a minute and watch the audience, you will see the people melt while the video’s playing. They smile because they can relate to the video. Often when you end with music, it’s beautiful too.

3. Remember your audience is your customer. You are here for the audience. You need to think of your audience as your friends, students, managers or family, whether it’s a huddle of professors, a bunch of kids or a posse of investors who want to invest in your business. They are all in one, and you want to reach each of them. Tailor your message to them. Think about what they want to hear.

The heart of your presentation is the customer who might buy your product or your ideas. Have empathy or a connection with the audience, feel where the audience is. If people start looking at their mobile phones and frowning, or there’s a murmur at the back, maybe take a pause, make a joke, ask a question, or be a little bit provocative.

Be honest to build fans, and make sure that when you present to your audience, your values come across. If you’re presenting your company, you present the values of the company. Encourage people to want more. At the end of the presentation, gauge the sound of the applause, note how many people come to you or ask to be friends on LinkedIn, check the tweet comments. This is your feedback on how well you have engaged with your audience.

4. Make it stick. Be creative in how you present and visualise your ideas. You need to deliver a great experience and avoid sleeping audiences by making the message stick.

There are five ways to make it stick.

  • Practise, practise, practise. I didn’t believe this at first, but I always practise now even if it’s limited. Practise in front of a mirror, or your family and friends, but make sure you practise. Be careful that your practice doesn’t robotise your presentation. Try not to have every word fixed in your head. Have notes, a few bullet points to remind you what you want to say. Some people might need more, but don’t overdo it.

    Tintin Snack: Some people do it differently. Steve Jobs, for the big annual events around September in Silicon Valley, would practise for four full days. Why? The final moment, always ending with ‘One more thing’, was worth hundreds of millions of marketing dollars as it would go viral. Steve Jobs knew the strength of communication. This perfectionism and the four days of practice were so valuable.

  • Humour. It’s not about telling a joke, unless of course you are a comedian. Use funny anecdotes, especially about kids, family and friends, that people can relate to, because we’re all human beings. Using humour will make you likeable, and people will be more open to doing business with you if they like you. Lower your defences, and when the audience smiles, it lowers its defences too. Even if you can’t be funny, try a little self-deprecating humour. Laugh at yourself, but make sure you remain authentic.
  • Deliver the experience. You have to master your stage presence. The whole picture has to be one: the way you sound, the way you move, your clothes. Have your own style that works for you and your audience, formal or informal. Storytelling is how you present, how you come on stage, how you move around on stage, so be dynamic, express yourself with your body language. Your presentation needs to be visual, but limit text on the slides. The titles of the slides are the most important, then a single image can convey your idea beautifully and elegantly. How do you make your story delicious and beautiful? If you want to enlist people, you need to make things beautiful, and you do that by visualisation.
  • Avoid sleeping audiences. If you have a pitch, a presentation or a story that takes an hour or two, make sure every ten to fifteen minutes, you reengage. Do a demonstration or show a video, tell a new story or joke. Then at the end, for a maximum of five minutes, share the key take-aways and the three reasons why the audience should support your idea.

    Tintin Snack: don’t make your audience sleepy! A TED Talk is on average eighteen minutes long, because eighteen minutes is apparently the attention span a person has without falling asleep or being distracted by something else. That’s why you need to keep reengaging if you have a longer story. My favourite TED talk is fromSir Ken Robinson did in 2006 on ‘Do schools kill creativity?’. It has it all. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

  • Tonality and pacing matters. There’s some great support on the web about the tone you use, the pauses you make. When you tell a joke, give the audience time to laugh. Don’t just go on, pause. Find your timings. Your voice shouldn’t be a monotone. Practise a lot and model good speakers.

So, how do you stand out? Try to do all the things we’ve already looked at – add humour, capture hearts and minds, project your passion. But timing is super critical as often you only get five to eight minutes, so manage your time carefully. If you only have five minutes, don’t take ten minutes. People appreciate you valuing their time.

5. Feedback is a gift. There are three great opportunities for getting feedback – in the rehearsal stage, during your speech and afterwards. You receive feedback through the emotions and the laughs you get from the audience while you are presenting, you get feedback when you practise and you have feedback afterwards.

The person who sets the boundaries for feedback is the one who asks for the feedback. For example, after the session you may ask someone how the presentation went, but as he or she responds your face changes. He or she sees that you don’t like their feedback and stops giving it. You have to be open and receptive. This is valid for all feedback in all types of circumstances.

When asking for feedback, you can be specific – ask about the physical aspects, the sound, tonality, your clothing, movement, how you held the microphone. You can ask for feedback on the content, the structure. Was there something fresh? Ask for feedback on how the audience felt – did you shoot for their hearts? Did they have an emotional connection to your story? Did you emotionally connect with them and inspire them?

During your presentation look at the audience’s eyes. Are people looking in your direction? Are they laughing in the right places? Are people engaged in a sense? Are they talking among themselves or are they responding to your questions?

Tintin Snack: a speech that has it all – telling and selling in action. Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2006 got everything just right. He never went to university, and he started by saying the closest he got to a graduation ceremony was there and then – self-deprecating humour. Then he shared the three stories of his life. Nothing more, nothing less. He talked for fifteen minutes about people finding what they love, what they want to do with their life. He advised the audience to follow their heart and intuition, keep looking, not to settle. Then he said, ‘If this was my last day alive, would I do what I did today?’ He was unbelievably fresh. He made that statement based on his own authenticity, had some humour at the beginning, connected with hearts and minds and left people smiling. He showed he was a human, just like you and me.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die

To summarise, to be a great storyteller, selling and telling your story, you have to capture the mind, shoot for the heart and make people smile. This is the healthy, mature story seller and teller.

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  Olivier Van Duüren

 As international Public Speaker, Trend Sensemaker, Executive Whisperer and Author, I help businesses to take the pain out of their personal and business transformation, leaving them with a regained sense of spark.