Storytelling Bites: Introduction

Communication is an essential, ubiquitous function of our daily lives, especially at work. 

Listening to someone who is a great communicator is a joy. What do they do that makes it work?

Great communication might be something a friend does who is quite the raconteur, or possibly the way your favourite broadcaster structures and delivers your daily information fix. It may be the only speaker you have ever heard at a conference who didn’t make you want to reach for your phone to deal with your email backlog or it might be found with the inspirational colleague whose team you keep angling to join. They succeed in being engaging, make us consider things in a new light and seem to be speaking just to us even when we’re one of a number of people listening to them.

We have all experienced good communication and yet it’s unlikely we would all agree on who did it, or what they did that made them so engaging. There will be certain givens such as not speaking in a monotone, or not, like, endlessly peppering every, like, sentence with, like, the word ‘like’ but what we each like is subjective. Just as in our favourite comedian, playwright or band, what is to our taste in a speaker may well be an irritant to the next person.

A real danger when preparing or presenting information is forgetting that we are not simply speaking to ourselves or to an audience made up of clones of us. We need to connect to someone, or a disparate group or groups of individuals, with different likes and dislikes to our message and its purpose, and who will need content and a style of delivery that works for them.

Storytelling holds the answer to most of the questions around good communication and how to create and deliver it so as to connect with and engage an audience. With the application of storytelling our audience is more easily able to hear us, understand us, believe us and see the value in what we are presenting to them.