Many of us would have grown up listening to wonderful stories from our grandparents. I am quite certain that these stories are now shared across generations. If you listen to some of the greatest leadership speeches, many of them are embedded with multiple anecdotes to substantiate the messages. Stories also help us remember morals and hence the phrase "moral of the story". Let's look at a few other examples as well - biographies, leadership/management books, articles - all of them are made interesting through stories.
Leaders need to have a bagful of stories from their own experiences or what they have read, observed or heard. Imagine a situation addressing a team gathering and trying to share messages on motivation, inspiration, handling adversity - while it would be ok to share theoretical concepts, you would be hitting home the message with the right set of incidents. Think about it for a minute, why do stories help? There is structure, content, actors, build up, drama and finally a climax - it helps the audience visualize and that's indeed powerful.
Here are a few tips to practice and develop the art of story telling
Pick the right story based on the context
Don't force fit stories without relevance
Create the situation for a right story and deliver it at the right moment
Make sure you share the moral of the story
Relate the story to your message.
Refresh you story bag frequently and keep a few genres such as humor, inspirational, passion and so on.
Don't quantify stories by embedding metrics, rather bring in the emotional quotient out
Stories are a powerful way to communicate. So go out there and be a story teller. Good luck and god bless !!!
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