Chapter 17: Telling Tales to Reach the Unconscious: Stories, Fables, and Metaphors 273
Discovering more ways to fl ex your storytelling muscles
Effective storytelling is a fabulous skill that is worth developing – a well-told
story captures the audience and remains with the people long after the other
details of an event are forgotten. Here are some suggestions for you to hone
your technique:✓ Start with simple stories and then get more adventurous as your skills
grow.
✓ Head for the children’s library for all sorts of examples of folk and fairy
tales that you can adapt well to any context. One of our clients describes
Alice in Wonderland as the best business book ever written.
✓ Remember that when you tell a story the focus is on you. Practise and
live with your story so that when you perform, you can command the
audience’s attention and take everyone with you. Know the first lines
and last lines by heart and simplify the structure to a few key points.
✓ Tell a humorous story with a deadpan serious face and you can make
much more impact than when you smirk all the way through. The
element of surprise is powerful.
✓ Hold on to that essential ingredient of rapport to keep people listening
(head to Chapter 7 for more details on creating rapport).
✓ Arrange the time, place, and setting in which you tell the story. Make
sure that people are relaxed and comfortable. Campfire settings and
flickering log fires make for perfect storytelling moments – as do seats
under shady trees on a lazy summer’s day.
✓ Think of your voice as a well-tuned musical instrument. Notice how your
breathing affects your voice and practise a range of sounds and volume.
Enjoy exploiting all your skills to perform to the full range of expression.
✓ See what you can discover from other people’s stories and the way
they tell them. You may adapt part of their story to make it your own or
notice how they work with their voice, the audience, and the stage.
✓ Speaking from the heart rather than reading from a book or script is
more powerful... and people allow you to be less than word perfect.
✓ Stimulate your audience’s senses so that they can see vivid pictures,
hear the sounds, get in touch with feelings, even smell and taste the
delicious tale you’re concocting for them.
✓ Have a great beginning. For examples of memorable openers, head to
the later sidebar ‘Hooking people in’.