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One of the most important things any organisation can do is become great at storytelling.
Stories are influential learning and knowledge sharing tools. They help process complex issues, retain vital information and, critically, inspire change.
This means evolving your stories from simple ideas into useful and interesting tales that focus on the human needs of your audience.
Here’s our tools and tips to help you begin.
Tools
Get sticky with it
What makes great stories so powerful is their "stickiness”. This is the ability to draw our attention and engage our hearts and minds. The best stories spread good ideas like wildfire and inspire us to take action.
Here’s eight ways to ensure your stories are sticky. And here's five more that are focused specifically on creating a sustainability stories that stick.
Unearth your tales
Telling stories from a place of conviction is the most powerful communication device you have.
The greatest and most beloved communicators risk transparently revealing their vulnerabilities so that they can be mentors and guides and connect to the audience and remind us that we are all human. These techniques will help you to identify and tell your most powerful stories.
Play! (with story cubes)
Remember as a child, running down a hill and picking up speed, and going so fast that you either had to keep running or fall over? This is a good way to approach your story telling! Story Cubes allow you to find and tell a tale as quickly as possible without thinking too hard.
Build photo and video stories
If you’re looking for an easy way to share your incredible photos these six iPhone apps, recently highlighted by Apple, are purpose-built for the task and create beautiful-looking photo and video stories to boot!
Tips
Avoid these mistakes!
Sharing your inspiring stories may not come easily but with practise and focus you can achieve great things using stories. Check out our five things not to do when creating and telling your stories!
Turn your photos into stories
We know a photo can tell a thousand words. But simply snapping away may not capture the story. Here’s 10 great tips for creating photos that tell stories!
Do it Tim’s way
American author, entrepreneur, and public speaker, Tim Ferriss, shares his top tips on telling stories. While on stage. They're great tips and, as he says, if you walk up with a smile – you’ll knock ’em dead!
Tim has some great advice about your own self talk in this podcast. This is more of a long form listen. Tim suffers from depression which is brought about by his negative self talk... so he has developed techniques to self talk better.
It's story time!
'Do Story – How to tell your story so the world listens' by Bobette Buster has been newly updated and expanded with two chapters, beautiful artwork by Millie Marotta and plenty of practical tips and exercises. Discover how to take your own storytelling from good...to great.
Almost every day there is a storytelling event happening somewhere, and this website will point you in the right direction. Search for events, from festivals, storyrounds or courses and get ready to get lost in stories.
Oh, and we love the idea of this ‘Storytelling at work’ workshop. Learn to stop punching out the facts and look afresh at the skills needed to tell a story.
Have you found these storytelling tips and tools useful? Do you have any you'd like to share with us? Do you know someone who might benefit from giving one of the tools or resources from our list a go?
What's your story? Please share away, and why not submit your comments below?
