How To Perfect the Timeless Craft of Storytelling

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmies. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

Being unforgettable on stage is one thing, and there are many, many people who step onto a stage and they're very forgettable. That's sadly the truth. But there's the principles that make somebody unforgettable on stage are just communication principles. They're the very same principles that would make somebody unforgettable on a date or unforgettable in a business meeting or in a small conference room. And it has to do with things like the confidence with which you're presenting the information. It has to do with the vocal variety that you're using so you maintain a level of interest rather than having this monotone delivery. And it also has to do with the logical construction of the. Of the delivery. I was at a talk today, and I saw somebody speaking about quantum computing and AI, and at one point she stopped and she goes, are you guys with me? And that's because she had gone so far ahead of the average person's understanding of the content that it was becoming very forgettable. And so that's another component to it, is making sure that you're delivering the information at a sort of like in old modem terms, at a baud rate that people can receive that you're giving it to them in a frequency that works for them. And if you do that, and stories are one of the most effective ways of making that happen, because everybody can relate to stories. So if you do that through storytelling, through great metaphors, through exercises, through things that people get to actually model in their minds, then it becomes unforgettable. And that has, you know, that has nothing to do with how big the audience is. That could be 10,000 people, or it could be one person across the table. You know, how one becomes a good storyteller is it's backwards from what almost everybody thinks. And what I mean by that is that there are certain skills that if you want to learn them, they take instruction and mentorship and practice and feedback and more and more and more and more. And, you know, if you want to learn to play the guitar like you're have to learn the chords, and then you're going to have to practice those chords, and you first you're going to be looking, and then you have to learn not to look. And then you have to learn all the different finger styles and all these different things. If you want to play golf, you got to go get a golf instructor, and you got to go play golf five hours a day and get a. But what's interesting about storytelling is that very often it's just a switch. It's quite literally just a switch for some people that they don't. They're not being a good storyteller, and then they flip the switch and then they are. And that's because it's a skill that's already inherently inside everybody. And one way to prove that is, like, nobody becomes a better golfer after two glasses of wine. It just doesn't work that way. And nobody becomes a better guitarist, like, you know, with alcohol. But, you know what's crazy is most people in a social situation give them their second glass of wine, suddenly they're a much better storyteller. Proving that it's not a set of skills that you have to acquire from the outside, but it's actually a set of skills that are already inside. And the project of becoming a storyteller is often just letting that out. Of course, there are some mechanisms, there are some tools, there are some skills that can make a story even better, but the first part of it is letting go of this. I heard somebody call it a prisonality, your personality that you're trapped by letting go of this. Worry about other people's judgment. Say, we found somebody who's in a position to be authentically themselves, so you actually don't really need to train them a great deal about storytelling. And one of the best ways you can demonstrate this is put somebody in a stressful situation. Up or down, good stress, bad stress, it doesn't really matter. Let's say they just had the most incredible vacation. They just. They just. They were. They were horseback riding in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and elephants came, and it was like. And then. And you see them two hours later. How are they going to tell you about it? There's no way they're going to go. And we were riding horses in the delta, and then the elephants came. It's not going to happen. What's going to happen is they're going to do all the natural things that you should do in your time. They're going to be excited. They're going. We're riding along, and all of a sudden, these elephants that came out of the bush. Well, that's a natural state. Now, let's use it another way. Somebody Has a terrible customer service experience. They go to a restaurant and the food is bad and the service is worse, and what have you. When they tell you about that, they don't go, yeah, I went to this restaurant, and the food was really bad. And they go in. They go into the experience like, oh, my God, the service was the worst you've ever seen. The food was so bad, I'm thinking about giving up food for the rest of my life. And then the service. The service was even worse. They speak like that naturally, and they do that when they're in comfortable social circumstances and they're very excited about the content. The clues are all in there. Now, the problem is we take people and put them in a socially awkward situation. 500 people in the audience, or 5,000 or 5, and then we have them prepare a presentation. And of course, now they remember all the crap that they learned in school that they should never have learned, and that is, write your speech out and practice it in front of the mirror, and all that kind of stuff. And all of that slowly but surely chisels away their actual personality and has them walk out and become a monotone delivery. So the truth is, many of the skills in great storytelling are already inherently inside us if we're excited enough. But once we know that, here's what some of them are. Vocal range, right? Like, you know, getting louder and faster when you're really excited, and then dropping down into those careful, quiet moments. Like, those vocal range things help a great deal. Again, people do that naturally when they're excited enough. Another one that I think a lot about is details. There's a great exercise that we do in our training programs, and it's where we have people go into a group, and one person tells, say, an embarrassing story, and the other four people have to learn the embarrassing story. Then all five of them have to deliver the embarrassing story in front of the whole room. But the goal of all five of them is to make the audience believe that it was their story, so they got to tell it like it was their story. Well, what's interesting is that when they go through that exercise, they bring out a bunch of mechanisms that are designed to make the story more believable, which is not something people do when they're telling their own story. They feel no need to make their own story more believable because it's true. But the minute they're telling somebody else's story, they're like, oh, oh. And there was, like, wallpaper peeling from the. And they come up with these little details. Or, and then I thought to myself, they come up with these thoughts. The truth is, is that they come up with those things because those are the details of an authentic delivery. So the first thing is to be willing to tell the story authentically with all the excitement or all the pain that the story comes with. And the next bit is to, you know, really paint it with good details, low level details, like, what was it really? Like, what were you saying to yourself, what were you thinking? And, you know, using the vocal range and all that kind of stuff. And then the story develops a reality. And one great tool for that, I think, is to create, to use a clumsy Star Trek metaphor to create a holodeck. So if I'm telling you a story, even now when I joked around about, you know, say, elephants crashing through the bush, I saw them, you know, I saw them. And if I can, if I can create that holographic experience, then in a weird way, I don't have to remember anything. I just have to experience it and describe to you what I'm seeing.

So that's it for today's episode of Unforgettable. Head on over to itunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private $25,000 VIP day with Eric Edmeads himself. Be sure to head on over to Unforgettable show and pick up a free copy of Eric's gift and join us.

On the next episode.