You are sitting in an unassuming corner of the room and allowing everyone else to talk.
You wait for a pause in the conversation, and then, in a quiet voice — but loud enough to be heard — say, “I have a story to tell you.”
That’s the secret.
Telling a good story. That’s all you have to do to make that favorable first impression. You will capture their attention.
Keeping control is another matter. It will depend on the strength of your story and the skill and generosity with which you tell it.
Tell the story well, but don’t perform it. Tell it with great care, great involvement, great vulnerability, and great sensuality.
The story shouldn’t be like a spotlight shining on you; it should be like a gift you’re giving the listeners.
Giving gifts is how you take over the room, and the best gifts are stories.
The reason that stories are so appealing is that you can transport customers into the story and give your message more meaning.
Here are 12 ways to create a story that will permit you to hold onto that favorable impression that you have captured.
Your story components
Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your story.
Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.
Resolve your themes, mysteries, and so on in the final third, the resolution.
Importance of the first impression.
Use your experience
To tell great stories, examine your life for times, places, and perspectives nobody else had. Where do you find material for storytelling?
Draw from your experiences and look inside yourself. Rely on what you know and draw from it. Capture a thought, truth from your experience, and express values from deep down in your core.
When you tell about these experiences, make it is as if your audience were there.
Good stories are largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think. In ways, that inspire.
Whenever you tell this story, speak authentically, from the heart. Don’t worry about what people will think.
Whether you swear like a sailor or are as clean-cut as they come, whether you are reserved and quiet or as intense as a Navy SEAL instructor, use your personality and style whenever you share your message.
Employ a strong theme
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
The theme is often not stated directly in the story, but it is the essence or the core idea at the story root.
A clear sense of your theme or controlling idea keeps you from trying to throw too many ideas into one story.
Create, challenge, or conflict
Good stories are about challenge or conflict.
Without these elements, stories aren’t very interesting. In its most basic form, a story is about someone who wants something, and either gets it or does not.
That character’s desire brings out the conflict that moves a story forward. The appearance of the conflict is the beginning; the resolution is its ending.
The compelling part of a story is how people deal with conflict–-so start with the people and the conflict.
Make it hard to separate the challenges from the characters.
You must raise anticipation.
Work on your ending
Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.
Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working upfront.
Raise anticipation
Raise questions. Provide “bait.”
The anecdote should raise a question right from the beginning. Implied in any question that you raise, however, is that you are going to answer it.
Constantly raise questions and answer them. The shape of the story is that you are throwing out questions and answering them along the way.
Give characters personality and opinions
Give your characters a unique personality and opinions on various topics. What is your character good at, comfortable with?
Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them.
How do they deal? Personalities add greatly to the stories.
Tap into your audience’s emotions
Whenever I can listen to the best storytellers capturing their audience, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in.
It is much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.
But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all.
There is no single answer.
One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings.
To make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke their emotion.
Build mystery and surprise
A well-told story is one where you can stop at any point and have the reader wonder “….and then what happened?”
Each time a piece of the mystery is solved, another one appears.
That’s what keeps us listening until we reach the ending.
If you find yourself struggling at times, step back and find some mystery.
Show and don’t tell
Show and don’t depend just on telling. Intensify the story with vivid language and intonation.
Tap into people’s emotions with language.
Use metaphors, idioms, and parables that have emotional associations.
“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway
Give them creativity
Be creative. Create a storyboard; draw it out.
A good story always has ups and downs, so “arc” the story.
Pull people along, and introduce tension. Make it just like in a fairy tale.
There should be nothing that is standard fare. Focus on making it always creatively unique.
Leave them curious
Great stories pull readers past the obvious (but wrong) to show them the profound.
You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need always to make your message painfully obvious.
This is not about being vague or unclear.
It is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out. Always create some curiosity.
That’s one of your jobs as one who creates a story. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct.
That’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.
The bottom line
Leonardo Da Vinci’s life as a creative thinker provides inspiration and lessons to learn for individuals and companies working in the creative sector.
The lessons above have a direct relationship with the design and innovation process inside companies.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of the business.
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