We’re in the middle of a series of articles looking at ways to make friends with the “security guard” in your listener’s brain. That’s the gut-level, largely unconscious reaction your listener feels toward you, starting from the very first impression. If you can get a person’s unconscious protective system, their security guard, to relax and trust you, that person will listen to you. If not, your words and ideas either will not reach their conscious, thinking brain at all – they will have tuned you out and gone off on a more interesting, internal voyage – or what you say will be immediately forgotten because you made no lasting impression.
To be remembered, you need to make a good first impression, and then you need to keep on making a good impression throughout your presentation. So far in this series, we’ve talked about good posture and open body language, for that all-important first impression. We’ve discussed clear articulation, speaking with passion and making eye contact with your listener to let them know you acknowledge and accept them. Now let’s talk about telling stories. The human brain responds to narrative better than to any other form of information.
Since time immemorial, human beings have been using narrative to try to make sense of their world. Every culture, from every part of the globe, has a tradition of stories in its background, stories that have been created to teach, to entertain or to explain the unexplainable. Responsiveness to stories seems almost to be part of what makes us human.
As a speaker, then, why not take advantage of this very human love of tales to generate engagement with your audience? Try telling a story right at the beginning of your talk to introduce your topic. Sprinkle stories throughout your presentation to illustrate your points. Keep your story focused, though, and avoid getting bogged down in details. Everything in it should serve the point you are making. If the directions you gave someone to get from Point A to Point B are not relevant, leave them out. Name dropping is obvious to everyone but the person doing it. If you include names in your narrative, check to be sure that it’s to serve your audience’s need, not your own.
Our brain seems to have a hard time remembering abstract data. That’s probably why it was so hard for some of us to learn the times tables or to memorize a list of French verbs in school. Put those dry facts in the context of a story, and they immediately become easy to remember. If you have facts and figures to relate, you’ll find your audience much more attentive if you stick to round numbers and put them in a human context. In other words, tell a story with them. (Detailed data don’t get remembered orally, anyway, so if the exact figures are necessary, put them in a handout for people to read later.) And don’t forget that stories often include humour. Is there any reason why you can’t present a financial report as if it were a tennis match between debits and credits? Let your imagination loose. You have nothing to lose but your audience’s boredom.
One of the reasons stories are easy to remember is because they create emotion. Don’t you find that the memories that stick with you are ones that are associated with some degree of emotion? The stronger the feeling, the more vivid the memory. That’s because the hippocampus, part of the limbic system of the brain (where our emotions are centred) is strongly involved in forming, organizing and storing new memories. It connects emotions and senses, such as smell and sound, to memories. It then sends those new memories out to other parts of the brain for long-term storage. The more emotion you can engender in your audience, the better your words will be remembered. One way to do that is to speak with enthusiasm and show your own passion. Another way is to tell stories.
When you were a child, you were probably told not to tell tales. Here’s a positive, constructive way to do just that. In this context, telling tales is a good thing!
