Episode #336: Do You Have Enough Stories When Presenting

The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections. We don’t need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be a presenter, but we do need to borrow from their catalogue and start building up stories. I was listening to an interview with a rakugo professional. They make their living telling stories. They do this while sitting stationary on a big cushion dressed in kimono, employ only a fan as a prop and use their facial expressions, eye power, voice modulation, body language and delivery timing to captivate their audience. We have many fewer restrictions in what we are doing when presenting, but there is much to learn here.

They start by copying the stories of their master and then they bring their own flavour to the story once they have mastered it. We can do the same. When we read a biography of a famous person, we will find there are many interesting turning points, eureka moments and key incidents in their story, which we can use in our presentations as examples. The big difference is we have probably read these before, but without the mindset to capture them, note them down where they can be found and then to employ them.

Once we decide that we are going to employ more stories to make our points, we start to read and search with a different purpose. Generally, there are only a few topics on which we will give a public speech and so there is a defined world in which we can search for stories. If we think we have to read everything available and search for stories across a broad front, we will give up, because the task is overwhelming. We select the areas we will cover and then we think about where can we find stories on these topics.

Another way is to think about people who will resonate with the audience. If you think Steve Jobs is a likely example who people will pay attention to, then we search out what he had to say or what people have said about him and try and find relevant stories and examples we can use. There is no shortage of famous people we can draw upon, we just have to make simple list and then start.

There are plenty of speeches available on TED talks and on YouTube or on podcasts where we can locate content we can use. We can search from the content point of view or from the individual whom we think will have something worthwhile to say. There are thousands of blogs, articles and books on the subject we have chosen. The key is to absorb them with a viewpoint that we are looking for content we can use, rather than just absorbing the content for its own sake. We can do both of course and we should be doing both.

In our communities, there are bound to be people giving talks. We should attend these and see if they have any interesting examples or stories we can use. There is no shame in attributing the stories to the person you heard it from – no one marks you down for doing that because all they care about is do they get value from the story. Ripping off other people’s stories and then manufacturing them as if they are your own cases is a very, very bad idea. Plagiarism of any variety shouts that you are an intellectual lightweight and pathetic thief. This is not a reputation building plus, so don’t steal.

Remember, our reputation in the business world is all we have really. Lose that and life in business gets very hard, as no one will trust you or want to work with you. If you are so duplicitous as to steal someone’s story material, then why would we see you as a reliable business partner? Well we won’t and you don’t have to do this anyway because there are tons of stories available. We will have our own home grown experiences and there will be plenty of these to draw on. What we usually lack is the ability to capture what happened and use it. Often things happen and we just keep moving forward and don’t capture the detail so that we can use it later. Or if we do capture it, we can never find where we put it.

This requires a good record keeping system, with a robust filing and recall mechanism and also the discipline to look for good stories to capture in the first place. It means we have to be well organised. We don’t exactly know which story we will need or just when, but if we can locate what we need, when we need it, then we are good to go. To get to that stage isn’t that easy, but today there are digital records we can access from anywhere. I use Evernote on my phone to capture items I think will be useful for later. I can re-type it or photograph it, so the process becomes fast. I can download this content and move it around to file it, categorise it and find it later. I am sure there are many other apps for this purpose and that is the beauty of this age - we have few excuses for not being able to capture useful information.

How many stories do we need? Not that many because we don't get that many chances to give a public talk. As I mentioned the speech topics will probably be limited. When you combine few speaking opportunities with a limited range of topics, then the number of stories required becomes relatively small in number. If you said I need ten stories, that would be relatively easy to assemble over the period of a year. If you said one hundred, then that thought will probably have you zooming straight to the couch to lie down for a while and recuperate. Start small and capture them one on one and before you know it, you will be surprised with how many useful pieces you have assembled.