I was listening to NPR radio the other day. They were talking about the outcome of one of the Merck (drug company) trials to the benefit of a plaintiff. The interviewer asked about the outcome and the interviewee said that a lot of the credit went to the attorney. She said, “He’s a good story teller.” Yeow! A multi-million dollar story!
Let’s start with a hundred dollar story and work our way up. First off, start the story at the beginning of the action. Don’t make us wait.
You don’t get to deliver it from memory. Practice your story. Here’s why:
- To develop mental memory and muscle memory your body remembers the gestures
- To make it vocally appealing
- To refine and perfect it
- To be ready for a problem if the story goes wrong; have some practiced “savers”
- To keep the story memory-accessible
- To help it grow (and get better)
Types of practice:
- Mental – easiest but least effective, least valuable.It’s quite removed from “reality speaking”
- Mumble through it – next level up
- Casual rehearsal – Visualize the audience, do the gestures
- Dress rehearsal – Visualize the actual situation, no stopping
- On-camera rehearsal – Video tape it and analyze it.
They say the longer the joke, the funnier it needs to be. So presumably, the longer the story, the more impact it needs to have. Check each word and phrase in your story – does it need to be there? Does it move the story along? If not, cut it out.
Another expression in speaking: facts tell, stories sell! Whether you’re selling an idea, a product or selling yourself, you’ve got to have stories – your stories, not from some famous dead person. They hired you. And what if the speaker before you had the same story in their repertoire? Oops!
So start practicing “story retrieval.” When you need to explain something to someone, try searching your memory for a lesson you learned that may apply. You will eventually train your mind to access those stories easier. Soon you will have a story or two for each point in your presentation.