Birds under umbrella (raining)

Communication: Four secrets anyone must have to have massive impact in the first 5 minutes

 

 

Today is the fourth and final of four posts in which I will share tips on how to have massive impact in the first five minutes of walking into a room.

 

Storytelling . . . did you know that the gift of storytelling can be one of life’s most powerful and envied skills? A well told story can make us laugh, weep, swell with pride or rise with indignation. A story badly told can be boring and uncomfortable and also positively painful to experience. As human beings we seem to be fundamentally hard-wired to tell stories. Stories are how we record both the monumental events of our lives and the small, everyday moments.

 

Become a Master Storyteller:

Ancient philosophers recognised that expert communication had to have two parts working together: Logic and Rhetoric.

 

Logic involves getting the facts right and making sure that the speaker knows that what they are saying makes sense and follows sound reasoning.

 

Rhetoric is all about how things are said, how emotion is used, and how convincing one is in the way they tell the facts so as to have maximum influence on others.

 

The Greeks recognised that both logic and rhetoric had to be combined and that too much of one without the other would diminish the impact a person could hope to have. Storytelling focusses on the rhetoric part and it’s a skill that recognises that there is more to influence than just intelligence.

Although it is incredibly useful and important to be smart and correct, facts on their own rarely move people to action.

 

Influence comes from being able to tell an engaging and moving story that captivates an audience and wins them over with its power. Example: why do movies have so much more effect at bringing world problems to people’s attention?

 

We need stories to move us into action and people who own the room need to be able to move others into action, which means we have to become Master Storytellers.

  • We need to use vivid language to tell our stories “Imagine the worst flight in the world . . .”

There is power in injecting emotion and drawing out the detail – instead of just saying “yeah, so my flight sucked today.”

 

Are you a good story teller?

 

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