Posts tagged Storytelling

I’ve been speaking with lots of college and high school students over the summer, and I asked them what made an excellent teacher. What I learned was this: a great teacher is a phenomenal storyteller. They engage the student’s hearts and minds, with stories.The same is true for successful business people. Read on…

In a blog post from 2009 enticingly titled, Barack Obama is Tapping into Your Brain, author Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the research of Dr. Marco Iacoboni. It’s powerful information - I suggest reading the post for yourself.

In a nutshell (for those of you who don’t have time), I’ll extract a bit from the post.

Stories are how we learn. As Iacoboni explains,

“Early on in life we learn a lot of things through stories. As a child, you listen to your parents and teachers and you learn lessons from their stories about right and wrong.  When you go to bed, you are told stories. There is something almost primal about our evolution and development that leads us back to listening to stories.”

“So,” concludes Kaihan, “to be a great communicator, a person needs to understand the importance of using narratives. To get people excited about a new idea or thought, he or she needs to be a great storyteller.”

This is important knowledge for any entrepreneur, network marketer, or home-based business owner…just as it was for Barack Obama during his Presidential campaign. He had to find those stories that would resonate with his public, and he succeeded in “creat(ing) a narrative that touched the hearts of many Americans. He was able to connect people on a deeper level than conservative and liberal.  Obama was able to use people’s mirror neurons to naturally and automatically empathize with him.” 

So…what’s a mirror neuron? It’s rather simple really - when a picture (or a story) looks/sounds more like the observer/listener, the observer’s mirror neurons fired more strongly. 

“In other words, the more someone sees himself or herself in the picture, the more his or her mirror neurons fire. The more people see themselves in you, the more they relate to you. They think, ‘This person is like me,’ and since most of us like ourselves, they think, ‘I like this person.’”

So, ask yourself how you can weave stories that both capture the imagination, and resonate with your listener’s sense of self. Give them ways of seeing themselves in your story.

It’s my belief that storytelling is play – no matter how old you are.

When we were kids when we told stories to support our activities, pretending we were soldiers fighting, or young girls who were teachers in front of a classroom of their dolls; or (and this was my favorite storytelling pastime) we were going on adventures to faraway places.

Back then, we didn’t need a structure to the story – a beginning, middle, and end. No sir; we threw ourselves right into the middle of the story, and stayed there until we were ready to do something else. Our imagination allowed us to become our characters – with total abandon.

Even now, telling a story is to be in the story with our own personal way of playing. With that level of involvement, you want to be telling the right stories, don’t you? Especially when reinventing yourself, or reaching for a higher level of success – your stories need a positive spin – they need to be tales of inspiration and hope. With just a dash of fun and mystery. Life should always be as it was when we were kids: full of possibilities.

As adults, our stories need to support our day-to-day activities, but they also need to engage us in playing the roles we want, not necessarily the roles we’ve assumed over the years; roles that no long suit us, or make us happy. Storytelling is a way of becoming, growing, expanding our lives.