The first is how you start your story.
You never wanna start with, “Let me tell you a story.” You’re automatically telling a story, so you don’t need to tell your audience that you’re going to be telling a story.
You also never want to say, “Oh, this is hilarious, you’re gonna really love this story.” Well, they may or may not, and you’re setting yourself up for failure if it doesn’t hit or isn’t very funny to them.
The second piece you want to avoid is rambling on.
That’s why it is so very important to write out your stories first, so that you know exactly what points that you want to hit when telling your stories. Nobody wants to hear you go on and on and never get to a point at all.
They want you to get to the point of your story as soon as possible. Every word absolutely matters, so avoid rambling on.
The third piece is to avoid being vague.
You also wanna avoid being too vague with your story. Saying things like “I was in my house”, or “I was in my car.” Instead you must describe your house or your call in detail, so you paint a picture in your audiences head. Be very specific about the situation so you can create that connection with your audience. When you paint a descriptive picture in their mind you are both seeing the same thing. When you’re too vague with there are too many variables and you aren’t really bringing that audience into the story with you.
So let’s flip that around. So this is how to tell a story.
You definitely want to have a purpose to your story, a goal that you want to achieve. You need to create a learning moment in there, what you learned from the story and how it relates back to your product. The story needs to have a purpose to it, and it needs to drive to a sale of some sort.
You definitely need to plan out your story, write it out, so that you can make sure that you hit all the high points. And you want to make sure that you are rehearsing it, yet not memorizing it.
This is how I work with my private clients, how to retell the story so it doesn’t sound memorized or that you’re just speaking the story. But you definitely need to have it planned out so that you make sure you hit all the points, and you aren’t rambling on and doing all the stuff that I was talking about avoiding doing. In writing it out, make sure that you are very strategic with the words that you use, because words to matter in the context of telling your story, and you want to make sure that each word has the right impact on the audience.
So there you go, how not to tell a story, part one, and a couple of tips on how to make sure that your next story is impactful.
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