Tell a Story

For his book, 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators, Carmine Gallo interviewed financial maven Suze Orman. Orman admitted that her message of getting out of and staying out of debt is not a new one. Gallo wrote:

“Anyone can know this material,” she told me. “It’s how you communicate the material you know that sets you apart.”

How we communicate plays an important part in how effectively our messages are delivered. In this post we’ll discuss a bit of advice that applies not just to our impromptu speaking opportunities, but also to the vast majority of our public and private interactions: Tell a story.

Most of us heard stories when we were children, and stories still capture our attention as adults. Stories are compelling to our audiences because it’s easy for people to insert themselves into our story. Stories invite our listeners to walk along with us, to experience what we’re saying rather than passively listening. This makes it easier for people to connect with us and understand our messages.

When applied to impromptu speaking, storytelling can attract and keep our audience’s attention and illustrate a point. The steps to create a story on the fly are as simple as the word CODE:

• Create the scene
• Outline the problem or conflict
• Describe what happened
• End the story

As an example, let’s consider a situation where we’re asked for a status report for a project we’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. We might say:

(Create) The project has moved into the testing phase. Two of the latest rigs were installed on Monday down in Lab 5. (Outline) When we ran our initial benchmark, we discovered some instability in the BIOS as shipped. (Describe) We immediately contacted the vendor to make him aware of the problem. We sent over some crash logs and participated in a conference call with the vendor on Wednesday afternoon. (End) The vendor has root-caused the problem and expects to deliver a fix to us on Monday so that testing can resume.

Note the importance of the last step–End the story. We shouldn’t drag the story on with unnecessary details. We’ll only succeed in losing our audience.

CODE (Create, Outline, Describe, End) provides a simple framework or pattern for building and telling our own stories. Telling a story is a simple way to bump up the effectiveness of our daily communication–impromptu and otherwise.

Color Outside the Lines

It’s popular to speak boldly about “coloring outside the lines.” I think of it as a more hip version of the threadbare “think outside the box.”

The truth is, though, that when we first clutched those fat Crayons in our pudgy little hands the lines on the page provided guidance as we struggled for mastery.

I can remember being really tiny and looking with admiration at the coloring books of the older kids. Not so much as a smudge outside of the lines! Wow! They were, to me, masterpieces. I struggled mightily to build my skill to emulate their success. The lines on the pages of my coloring books gave me guidelines or patterns to follow. It was these patterns that eventually helped me to succeed.

When I watch the likes of EMC CEO Joe Tucci or President Barak Obama take questions from an audience, I feel like that little kid again. I watch as they produce a coloring book’s worth of impromptu speaking masterpieces that I wish to emulate. How do we build our skill to achieve a similar level of comfort and articulation? I believe that the answer, like when we first learned to color inside the lines, is to follow a pattern. Following a pattern will give us the guidelines we need to build expertise and eventually succeed.

Knowing and practicing a pattern to follow will also prepare us for the surprises that impromptu speaking opportunities bring. Consider the brilliant work of US Airways Captain Sullenberger in the recent crash landing in New York’s Hudson River. All passengers and crew aboard flight 1549 survived because in the 5 minutes between take off and splash down Sullenberger followed practiced guidelines and patterns. He had never lost two engines on takeoff before, but years of training and preparation equipped him with patterns he could follow automatically.

Knowing the patterns allowed him to focus on delivery–successfully delivering the passengers and crew alive!

Similarly, but with much less danger, our impromptu speaking opportunities present us with situations we’ve never been in before.

Like Captain Sullenberger we can handle these unexpected situations by automatically following patterns we’ve memorized and practiced. These patterns help us remain in control and focused even in the most challenging situations–successfully delivering the information our audience demands.

In a short series of upcoming posts to this blog we will discuss three patterns that we can follow to develop our impromptu speaking skills.

The patterns are:

*     Tell a story

*     Position, action, benefit (PAB)

*     Past, present, future

Stay tuned…