Harnessing the power of storytelling: A guide to influence people
In the realm of leadership, storytelling is a powerful tool that can captivate, inspire, and influence people. Knowing when and how to utilise storytelling in the workplace can enhance your communication skills and drive positive change. In this article, we will explore the art of storytelling and provide practical guidance to leverage this technique to influence people effectively.
Understanding the Impact of Storytelling
Stories have a unique ability to engage emotions, create connections, and make information more memorable. By sharing relevant stories, you can communicate complex ideas, values, and goals in a compelling and relatable manner. Stories tap into the human psyche, allowing individuals to relate their own experiences to the narrative, fostering empathy and understanding.
Use stories to illustrate a point, inspire action, or convey the importance of a particular initiative. When faced with resistance or challenges, storytelling can help overcome objections by appealing to emotions and offering a different perspective.
Why are stories are so powerful?
Before we dive deeper into the elements and craft of story, let’s first understand why and how stories affect us. When we have a better understanding of how our brains process stories, we tell more impactful stories.
The brain’s response to story is a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional, and social processes. Through its ability to involve multiple brain regions simultaneously, storytelling creates a unique and immersive experience for the audience. This cognitive engagement fosters deeper understanding, emotional connection, and lasting memory retention, making storytelling an effective and influential means of communication. Whilst you don’t need to understand the mechanisms to tell good stories, you need to appreciate the ways story affects our brains so that you tell stories that achieve this.
Here are some key ways stories affect our brains:
Language Processing: Listening to or reading a story involves language processing regions in the brain, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, responsible for understanding and generating language. As we interpret words and sentences, these areas become active.
Visual and Sensory Cortex: When stories include vivid descriptions of scenes, characters, or events, the visual and sensory cortex become engaged. Imagining the settings and actions described in the story activates the corresponding brain regions.
Mirror Neurons and Empathy: Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing the same action. Hearing about characters’ experiences in a story activates mirror neurons, which allow us to mentally simulate the emotions and experiences of the characters. This activation fosters empathy and emotional connection. Mirror neurons allow us to learn as if we’re experiencing the situation ourselves.
Prefrontal Cortex: The prefrontal cortex is involved in decision-making, planning, and problem-solving. When we follow a story’s plot and anticipate its outcome, the prefrontal cortex is at work, organising and analysing information to comprehend the narrative.
Hippocampus and Memory: The hippocampus is crucial for memory formation and retrieval. As we hear a story, the hippocampus helps store and consolidate the narrative details, making the information easier to remember and recall later.
Amygdala and Emotional Response: Emotional elements in a story activate the amygdala, which is responsible for processing emotions, particularly fear and stress. The amygdala’s activation contributes to the emotional engagement and impact of the story.
Reward System: Engaging stories trigger the brain’s reward system, primarily involving the release of dopamine. This reward system creates feelings of pleasure and motivation, making us eager to continue following the narrative.
Attention and Focus: Storytelling captures attention and sustains focus by engaging the brain’s executive control network. This network helps us concentrate on the narrative while suppressing distractions.
Association and Integration: Stories often require connecting various pieces of information and integrating them into a coherent whole. These processes involve association areas of the brain, responsible for linking different regions and creating a holistic understanding of the story.
Social Brain: Hearing or reading stories with social interactions activates the brain’s social network, including the regions involved in understanding others’ intentions, emotions, and motivations.
So our brains are absolutely wired for story and explains why stories are powerful tools for communication, memory retention, and emotional engagement.
Key story elements
The good news is you don’t need a psychology, Art or literature degree to tell effective stories. Your story just needs a few key elements to work: character, plot, conflict, theme and setting.
So what do these require and how can we use this in a really simple way to tell stories at work?
Character: Characters are the individuals or entities that drive the narrative. They can be fictional or real, and their actions, thoughts, and interactions shape the story’s development.
Don’t mistake the plot as the story. Story Telling: Part Two delves deeper into character and brain science, but for now its enough to know that our brains are interested in and follow the character and their reaction to the plot. So the character drives the story, not all the horrible, twisted events you throw at them!
Plot: The plot is the sequence of events and actions that move the story forward. It follows a particular structure, often comprising an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
When structured well, the plot engages our attention and focus. As discussed earlier, our pre-frontal cortex tries to anticipate the outcome as it organises, analyses and makes sense of the story. This means your plot needs to have a series of cause and effect and not just a random jumble of ‘this happened and this happened, and so did this. Did I mention this happened?’
Conflict: Conflict is a central element of a story that creates tension and drives the plot. It can be external (e.g., a character’s struggle with nature or another character) or internal (e.g., a character’s inner conflict or dilemma).
Conflict creates urgency and the need to act and change. Without conflict, you just have a character at a series of events. The events might be super outrageous, but your story still won’t be impactful and lead to change because conflict is the component that sparks change, requires the character to act.
Theme: The theme is the central idea or message that the story conveys. It often reflects broader human experiences, moral lessons, or universal truths.
Some themes you might consider for your stories include: persistence pays off, the world is full of opportunities for those who try, we have to first fail before we succeed, we’re always learning.
Setting: The setting provides the backdrop and context for the events of the story. It includes the time, place, and social or cultural environment in which the narrative unfolds.
Be concrete and specific. The more specific the more likely you will help trigger the visual and sensory cortex of your audience’s brain and immerse them into the story.
A simple story framework for business stories
Now let’s put all of this into a simple framework so you can tell and share stories at work. Have a go as you read through this section, either follow in your head, write as you go, or open our Story Builder tool – the short version.
Start with your character. Who is your story about? And add some specific details so they’re relatable and seem real.
Drop them into a situation. Where’s the story set? Add context that will help your audience know time, place and the “common rules or norms” for the situation.
Add complications. So what’s the problem and conflict? What’s happened or happening that the character must act upon, and right now?
Then give the hard won resolution. What hard fought battle did the character have to win and what was their reward?
Aha And then when they reflected what did they learn? This is the character’s real aha moment, and also your story’s real underlying theme and your reason for telling this story at this very moment.
Set some actions
Storytelling is a valuable skill to influence and motivate people. Embrace the art of storytelling and watch your influence soar. This takes practice so set some small actions you can start now and continue over the week to practice. Here’s some ideas:
- Create a story bank of your own personal stories. Set up a spreadsheet or document and add your go-to stories
- Look through your day or week ahead. Plan a time to share a story. Prepare a new story, deliver it and reflect on how it went. What worked well and what can be improved?
- Listen to the stories shared over the course of a week. What stories impacted people the most? Why?
Learn more
- Learn more about the science behind story with Lisa Cron Wired for Story
- Use our Story Builder to practice writing stories
- Read related post “Story Building: Part Two” which explores the brain science further
- Read related post “Story Building: Part Three” which delves into story telling for business change and stakeholder engagement
