SIX STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TELL

From

Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

By Annette Simmons

© Annette Simmons

2014

2|

Story ThinkingWhat does that even mean?

Long ago, before you learned to be more objective, you thought you were important and the people around you were important. Chances are you asked questions that made other people uncomfortable.

To protect you from a life of narcissistic, emotional waywardness, you were sent to school to learn how to be useful. You learned the scientific method. You learned you aren’t important. You are actually just a dot on a bell curve.

Later you learned that nothing is true if you can’t test it and can’t prove it’s true in repeated experiments. Critical thinking, rational analysis, and objective thinking prepared you to put emotions aside and make better decisions.

Since then, making objective, unemotional decisions has served you well. You can prove things are true with cost/benefit analyses, models, and bar charts so other people can see when you are “right.”

However, being right has lost its luster. Like any good scientist, you have gathered data that proves being right doesn’t mean people listen to you. In fact, there seems to be no significant correlation between being right and creating compliance.

You’ve come to the conclusion that clear communications, objective thinking, and rational decision making have their limitations when applied to the unclear, subjective, and multirational world.

If you are ready to acknowledge the limitations of objective thinking you are also ready to entertain the idea that subjective thinking is not as irrelevant as you were taught.

You can observe that people insist upon behaving as if they are important and the people around them are important.

Decisions are always subjective.

Being right doesn’t mean people listen to you

Objective thinking has its limitations

Decisions are always subjective

3|

Subjective is NOT the Opposite of Objective

Objective thinking is important, valuable and unimpaired by subjective thinking.

Learning to use a subjective thinking tool will not erode your ability to think in objective terms. You will still be able to conduct a cost/benefit ratio or analysis with the best of them.

By adding subjective thinking to your repertoire you add another tool that increases your ability to assemble the many different interpretations that might be drawn from your objective data.

Knowing these ahead of time helps you predict, understand, and influence interpretations before they are set in stone.

You already know how to use numbers—the language of objective thinking—to great benefit.

What you may not realize is that you also know more about the language of the subjective than you suspect.

The language of the subjective is story. Story is how humans interpret things as good or bad, important or irrelevant, safe or dangerous, and who is “one of us” or “one of them.”

These subjective interpretations do not degrade objective thinking but enhance objective thinking so that you can forecast how your obviously “rational” decisions will be embraced by irrational humans.The language of the subjective is story

4|

Stories That Deserve Attention

In a way it’s unnecessary to “learn” storytelling because you tell stories every day.

Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins is designed to help you pay more attention to the stories you tell so you can be more mindful about the perceptions you build and sustain.

Most of the time you don’t even realize you are telling stories. It is less obvious still how powerfully these stories impact your life.

The fuel of perceptions—good and bad—is storytelling. That’s why we need to be more intentional about the stories we tell.

Maybe you think data is more important than your informal and subjective stories. No. Nothing is more important than the stories you tell yourself and others about your work and your personal and community life.

Let’s look at six kinds of stories that deserve your attention.

The six types of stories are:

1. Who I Am

2. Why I Am Here

3. Teaching

4. Vision

5. Values in Action

6. I Know What You Are Thinking

You may not realize every story you tell is important

The Six Stories

Who I Am

Why I Am Here

Teaching

Vision

Values in Action

I Know What You Are Thinking

6|

Who I Am Stories

What qualities earn you the right to influence this person? Tell of a time, place, or event that provides evidence that you have these qualities.

Reveal who you are as a person. Do you have children? What were you like as a child? What did your parents teach you? What did you learn in your first job? Get personal. People need to know who you are before they can trust you.

Your ability to influence people is directly related to what those people know (or believe) about who you are—you personally and your organization.

7|

Why I Am Here Stories

When someone assumes you are there to sell an idea that will cost them money, time, or resources, it immediately discredits your “facts” as biased.

However, you chose your job for reasons besides money. Tell this person what you get out of it besides money. Or if it is just about the money for you, own it.

In most purchase decisions people choose to buy from people who are in the business for the love of it as well as the money, over those who are in it only for the money.

8|

Teaching Stories

At its best, a Teaching story transports your listener into an experience that lets him or her feel, touch, hear, see, taste, and smell excellent performance. It demonstrates in the mind how new behaviors create new results.

Certain lessons are best learned from experience—some of them over and over again during a lifetime.

Patience, for instance. You can tell someone to “be patient” but it’s rarely helpful. Better to tell a story that creates a shared experience (simulated, of course) of patience along with the rewards of patience.

Your story will change behavior much better than advice. Story is as close to modeling patience as you can get in three minutes.

A teaching story is a no-risk demonstration—a trial run by imagination.

9|

Vision Stories

A Vision story raises your gaze from current difficulties to a future payoff that successfully competes with the temptation to give up, compromise, or change direction.

Without a visceral and easily remembered vision of why in the hell we ever wanted to do this in the first place, it is easy to forget.

A worthy, exciting future story reframes present difficulties as “worth it.”

Big projects and new challenges are difficult and frustrating for implementers who weren’t in on the decision. Without a vision, these meaningless frustrations suck the life energy out of a group.

With an engaging vision, however, huge obstacles shrink to small irritants on the path to a worthwhile goal.

Note: Vision stories that promise more than they deliver do more damage than good.

10|

Values in Action Stories

Values are subjective. To one person, integrity means doing what his boss tells him to do. To someone else, integrity means saying no even if it costs her job.

If you want to encourage a value, you have to provide a “demonstration” by telling a story that illustrates in action what that value means, behaviorally. Hypothetical situations sound hypocritical and preachy. Be specific.

Think about a difficult situation that left you unsure. In the end, what did you choose to do? If that action left you feeling like you did the right thing, you probably based your decision on a value.

11|

I Know What You Are Thinking Stories

People like to stay safe. Many times they have already made up their mind, with specific objections to the ideas you bring.

They don’t come out and say, “I’ve already decided this is hogwash,” but they might be thinking it.

It is a trust-building surprise for you to share their secret suspicions in a story that first validates and then dispels these objections without sounding defensive.

Choose one individual or group and itemize the objections they have to your new ideas or methods.

12|

Call to Action

Every problem in the world can be addressed—solved, made bearable, even eliminated—with better storytelling.

Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins should give you the tools to make more money, increase cooperation, and decrease resistance in any situation.

It also gives you some tools to help you make a difference in the world.

13|

Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons will be in Sydney, Australia for one day only on Thursday 5 June 2014 to lead the workshop, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.

Places are limited. Register at http://leadershipstorytelling.net