The way you talk nice to a dog you don’t know, while you’re trying to size it up. “I’m sure it won’t,” my coach said, soothingly yet without convincing me he believed it. Sometimes you say something you hope will be true. I’m not sure I believed that statement myself. “I promise this won’t happen up in front of everyone,” I said. That was about four hours before the speech was to take place. I was second-guessing every word that came out of my mouth, from “how are you?” to “I have an outline of a few bullet points.” I could barely hold a human conversation. When I called my storyteller coach to discuss how it was going, I completely froze up on the phone. I thought I was back watching myself on video again. It’s more like taking a test than getting help. Even if you choose wrongly, at least you feel you are qualified to choose.īut when you are working with someone billed as a “professional,” it’s a little more nerve-wracking. But let’s face it: it is easy to pick and choose what to do about feedback from your peers. I’ve had lots of feedback, constructive and not-so-constructive, over the years. But apart from the pain of having to watch myself present on videotape, in my first job out of college, I haven’t had any professional coaching. I’ve given many presentations and speeches to various groups over the years. I was given the benefit of coaching from some professional storytellers. More likely to be implemented, or considered further. The point of this part of the leadership course was that wrapping your message in a story - as opposed to using some other form of discourse - makes your ideas more memorable and relatable, and therefore more effective.
Also, it is possible I returned a phone call others had not returned… Why Storytelling? Why Me?īecause I had taken the class a year earlier and therefore could be expected to demonstrate what I’d learned. The audience: about 20 professionals, many of whom I’d known for up to 20 years, in a corporate leadership skills session.
My task: demonstrate storytelling as a form of communication. This post contains the basics of a speech I gave at a business dinner in August, 2016. Full Disclosure: Recycled Story Ahead Unsplash / Pixabay
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