TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

20 Feb 2019 · 3 min

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2:38

TJ Walker (live-stream) introduces the course/module by framing why storytelling is essential in presentations. He emphasizes that audiences consistently remember stories (and the storyteller’s delivery) rather than slides, bullet points, or data; he urges reversing the common belief that facts are primary and stories are secondary, and previews a later section that will break down how to craft stories element-by-element.

Chapters

If you want to jump right ahead and go to the next section, we'll really delve with the nitty gritty of how you create stories, break it down element by element so you can start crafting your own. But I do want to ask your indulgence, bear with me a little more in this section because I want to really establish the right framework of how to think about stories and just change your whole approach to stories. I appreciate you being in in this course. You obviously have an interest in improving your storytelling abilities for your presentation, but I want to take just a few more minutes to really step back a minute and look at why this is so important. I've been doing public speaking training around the globe for more than 30 years. And I always ask people, who's the best speaker you've seen in the last year in your industry, last five years, maybe ever? And what do you remember? I've never yet had anyone say, well, I remember this person who had 18 slides and all these bullet points and the color coded charts and the graph. I've never had anyone mention that. The only thing I ever have people mention consistently, the stories, they say, oh yeah, I remember the story this speaker said. And they go into explicit detail. Now, they may remember humor that the person walked around, it was engaging, but when it comes to the substance, they remember the stories. In my experience, the one thing and the only thing that unites all great speakers across continents, across industries, doesn't matter what field they're in or even what level they are in their profession. The one thing that unites great speakers is they use stories consistently in every single presentation they give and in every single point in their presentation, they illustrate it with a story. Great speakers know something that the rest of us don't, which is that it's the stories that are essential. More and more facts, data, that's an extra. The big problem most of us have is we go into a presentation with this mentality of, oh, it's about the facts, it's about the data, and the story is the extra. I want to really get you to reverse your thinking, not because we're just here as professional storytellers, but because the stories are what are remembered first and often last by your audience.