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‘Do Story: How to tell your story so the world listens.’ By Bobette Buster.
All audiences listening to a story ask: Why should I care? Please move me so I care.
“Facts pander to someone’s guilt for which they’ll never forgive you. Dare to unlatch their heart, for which they’ll always be grateful.”
Interviews: Bill Simon says interviewers remember ’emotional resonance’. Give a purposeful story about attitude and passions and watch your CV, data and facts become memorable.
10 Principles of storytelling:
1. Tell your story as though talking to a friend, no matter who or where you’re talking.
2. Set GPS: give an exposition [something I talk a lot about], use Kipling’s Six Wise Men, who, what, where, why, when, how. Keep it factual and short.
3. Use active verbs, but don’t qualify or be too erudite.
4. Juxtapose: Take two ideas, images, thoughts and place together. Let them collide. This is the route to all successful stories.
5. Gleaming detail: [My biggest takeaway from the book.] Choose one ordinary moment or object that becomes a gleaming detail. something that captures and embodies the essence of the story – make the ordinary extraordinary.
6. Hand over the spark: Carry the fire, reflect on an idea that originally captivated you and hand it to the audience.
7. Be vulnerable: Doubt, confusion, anger, sorrow, insight, glee, delight, joy, epiphany.
8. Tune in to your sense of memory: Choose the strongest of 5 senses in your story and use it for deeper connection to the audience connection (there’s always one sense that dominates memory).
9. Bring yourself: A story is as much about you as anything else.
10. Let go: Hand over your story, build it to emotional punchline, then end it and get out fast. Leave audience wanting more. Less is more.
Carry that fire
Story Exercises
> Tell us something we wouldn’t otherwise know – use humility and humour.
> Try and recall a favourite childhood story.
> Tell us about an antagonist or force of nature in your life.
> How were you affected by a seminal cultural or sporting event.
> Share a ‘cusp of an era’ moment; graduation, left home etc.
> Tell us about a major event many of us shared.
> Can you recall a small event that moved or changed you?
> Sell us an idea of yours, a cause you really care about: Don’t preach, share as a possibility to consider, have a gleaming detail, hand over the fire, how has this changed you and why do you care?
> What’s a passion of yours and why? What is it? What is it about you, you are revealing? When did you first fall in love with it? What specifically caught your attention? How has it changed your life? Where has it specifically led you? What sense memory relates to this event? What was your life before and after? How would you describe this passion to someone else? Be kind and tell it with a smile.
Interested in speaking about speaking?
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