Tag Archive for: persuasion

Ramping up your impact with the bigger story

Behind your business story your personal story, your leadership story, there is a bigger story.

 

 

Whenever we tell a story – in a speech, online, as a leader, as a motivator, we drop the energy, but increase impact.

If we do it well, we have our readers, audience, teams in the storytelling trance, in our story with us, following our lead.   Their brains and heart rates drop and they relax both their physiology and their resistance.

Nevertheless there is powerful impact happening with that storytelling, points communicated, minds moving towards change and messages embedded.

What we do after that can break the spell and undermine the success of our message or it can support it, build on it and add even more power.

Take your audience|readers|team out of the story trance and shift the energy and the brain patterns by introducing some left brain, rational support for the point you are making.

Tell the bigger story.

Why is this relevant to the times?

Why is this relevant to the industry you all inhabit?

Why is this relevant to your part of the world or your culture?

You are bringing yourself and your audience back into why this experience you have created with the story, and the message that is embedded behind it, is so very relevant and important to them on a much larger scale than their personal needs or wants.

They feel swept along in a movement far greater than themselves.

Then you can take them further along in the flow of your message.

The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business

“Every great leader is a great storyteller,” says Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner.

According to master storytellers Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, storytelling is a lot like running. Everyone knows how to do it, but few of us ever break the four-minute mile. What separates the great runners from the rest? The greats know not only how to hit every stride, but how every muscle fits together in that stride so that no effort is wasted and their goals are achieved. World-class runners know how to run from the inside out. World-class leaders know how to tell a story from the inside out.

In The Elements of Persuasion, Maxwell and Dickman teach you how to tell stories too. They show you how storytelling relates to every industry and how anyone can benefit from its power.

Maxwell and Dickman use their experiences—both in the entertainment industry and as corporate consultants—to deliver a formula for winning stories. All successful stories have five basic components: the passion with which the story is told, a hero who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his or her eyes, an antagonist or obstacle that the hero must overcome, a moment of awareness that allows the hero to prevail, and the transformation in the hero and in the world that naturally results.

Let’s face it: leading is a lot more fun than following. Even if you never want to be a CEO or to change the world, you do want to have control over your own work and your own ideas. Ultimately, that is what the power of storytelling can give you.

You can buy the book from Amazon or Abe Books