Storytelling is a pleasurable tool of communication that has intrinsic motivation. It can intertain, inform, educate, persuade and navigate one from dreams to destiny. If you want to achieve something important in your life, you must tell an inspiring story about it to yourself. Stories are a delight, we love them and they are a very useful. That is why storytelling, in its many forms, such as oral, written, film, theater, and video games has been used in business, advertising, religion, entertainment, and other fields to engage with audiences and to drive key messages home.
Storytelling, because it is such a pleasure, has no equal, when it comes to storing memories and painting pictures of posiblities. It can do wonders for your personal development. Tell me the story of your life and both you, the narrator and I, the listerner, will discover the reason for your success or failure. Storytelling if it is about your life, can chart your path and reveal where you are right now, in relation to the good life on the one hand and the life of misery on the other. You need to know this because, unsettling as it may be, we are never too far from either of them.
Storytelling is an Ancient Form of Communication
Humans have been telling stories for more than six million years. Compared to the written word, which is only six thousand years old, storytelling has deep pre-historic roots. With no way to record messages, ancient communities used storytelling to make messages memorable. What is memorable is transferable. To be memorable, they had to be delightful. Stories are all that.
The human brain has not changed much since ancient times, hence stories remain the most powerful form of communication to this day. Not surprising, storytelling is an effective way to teach kids, unite people, spread news, motivate workers, sell products, entertain, eulogize and change the world. In short, everything we are, we have become through the help of stories.
A Story is a Microcosm of Life
Storytelling works because stories are a microcosm of life. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the middle there is a problem or a struggle to overcome and at the end there is either a win or a loss, sometimes both. That is the story of our lives, from childhood to old age, our days are weaved into a long narrative. We intuitively know how to tell stories, even children do. Our brains have evolved to process stories most effectively.
Storytelling is a powerful tool used by great leaders in politics, business, social movements and religions to endear themesleves and to make their messages stick. Like all institutions, religions are pieced together from stories. In this case they are stories of salvation and enlightenment that followers believe in.
The other social intitutions are built on the same foundations of mythology and legends. Our public lives consist of overlapping narratives from cradle to grave. From stories in the news, courtroom, entertainment, and as the highlight of celebrations, as key note addresses at graduations, weddings, anniversaries, awards, and funerals. Stories are the stuff history is made of.
Storytelling provides the building blocks of our social constructs. Take money, for instance, without the story behind it, that piece of paper with a picture of an important leader of your country, is not worth much. An ancient ancestor brought back to life, would not think much of until they are told the story behind it and what it represents. When told well, stories become part of the virtual bubble that shape the mental world within us and physical world around us. If you use stories effectively, you can shape your own life.
Even Children Learn Better Through Stories
We were raised on a verbal diet of stories. Our brains are very receptive to stories. That is how our parents taught us values. We learnt much of our values from the moral of the story. Before falling asleep, children love to listen to bedtime stories. Even at a young age, the architecture of stories seems recognisable, and imbedded in their brains, as it were. They enjoy the beginning, the struggle and the resolution that stories go through. You can tap into these well beaten tracks in the human brain, by telling your true life’s journey as a story and inspire yourself to succeed.
Stories a Vehicles of Meaning
Storytelling is how people everywhere, from villages to cities, convey value and meaning. It transcends fashions and various ages in history. From village rumors to urban legends, to the morning paper, to radio news, talk radio, to the evening TV news, to Facebook, instagram and Twitter. Stories, as a communication form are ageless. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars every year telling stories to sell products and services. Stories fill the networks daily and our lives are lived through their medium.
Religions are Founded on Stories
The founders of the great religions told stories. This is true of the founder of Hinduism, the buddha, the founder of Chritianity, Jesus of Nazareth and the founder of Islam, Muhammed. They delivered the good news about the good life through stories. They taught through parables, those memorable stories with a moral lesson. They told them well. Altogether they have more than 5 billion living followers today. That is a success formula right there.
In Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques believers repeat those stories, which are immortalized in holy scriptures. They listen to stories of the good life and holy living, creation, the history of salvation, and the journey to enlightenment. If you ever had doubts about the power of stories, the sheer volume of people who believe in religious stories, should make you sit up and pay attention.
Our Public Lives are Lived Through Stories
When applying for jobs, we tell stories of what we did in the past that indicate the value we bring and possible achievements we may score for the new organization we want to join. Job interviews are storytelling sessions. When seeking justice in the courts, we tell our side of the story, about our innocence to convince the judge and jury that we should go free or be treated with leniency.
Entertainment Through Stories
The film industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry on the back of storytelling. So has Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. You can’t go wrong with a story as an effective vehicle for letting others know about the value you come bearing.
Communication is Better Through Stories
The telecommunications industry has grown on the back of the human need to communicate. We need to tell our story and to run a commentary on our lives as we live them. Telephone lines buzz with the vibrations of our voices. The internet and social media are bursting with such real time stories. That is because there is nothing trivial about storiytelling. It feeds a deep human need. There is nothing trivial about the story of your life and success. You can tell it through the same networks.
The Information Highway Goes Viral on Stories
The world wide web is a collection of connected stories that answer our questions and feed our insatiable need for information. Search engines rank the best sources high, creating hierarchies of relevant information and save us from being lost in the maze of useless information.
History is a Collection of Memorable Stories
Every nation, and organization, has its history, as memories of past stories. How the community came to have its identity, the truimphs and sufferings. For instance, during the holocaust of the Second World War, some of the survivors held on to the hope to live and tell the story of their ordeal to make sure that it never happens again. They wanted to keep the memory of such cruelty alive so that history never repeats itself. Such stories are written in books, captured in cinematic stories.
Celebrations are Occasions for Storytelling
At award ceremonies we listen to the winners tell stories of their road to success and thank the people who lifted them up. With lumps in their throats, trembling hands and tears in their eyes, they distill a multiyear story into a short story and brief sound bites.
Wedding Storytelling
At weddings, we tell stories of the bride and groom, we create a fairy tale story through the wedding ceremony and anticipate a future of love and joy. We drink a toast to them and urge them to anticipate pleasure.
Community Storytelling
In gatherings, around the village fire, the home fireplace, we still tell stories, to make sense of our lives. In watering holes, bars and restaurants, at business breakfasts and lunches, family meals, and while watching games we tell stories. We are not just hungry for food; we are hungry for narratives.
Funeral Storytelling
Right to the end, at funerals, we tell stories of the lives of loved ones through eulogies. Stories are a versatile vehicle for meaning and value. We live and die in them.
Storytelling in the Workplace
Your personal development influences your professional life. Once you learn the power of storytelling, you will take it to your professional life too. Just as well because, inside the company you work for there are stories waiting to be told about how the company touches its customers and changes their fortunes. They happen to be persuasive stories that prospective customers, in your company’s chosen market segments, need to hear. Stories that paint impressive, memorable and vivid pictures of how your company is the better solution to their challenges. It is more than a list of products and services.
Storytelling lifts your company’s brand, from behind the strategic positioning and the offerings to reveal the personalities at work to deliver value. These stories reveal the soul of the organization, the passion that drives it and allow stakeholders to engage with it. They are the stories that your company should tell well.
Storytelling is Good Work
Storytelling is an important step in our ability to shape our world. Set aside time to tell stories, to capture the promises, successes, dreams and the company spirit as a living and growing organization. You want the people and organizations that you interact with to know what you have done and what you can do for them. You want them to know what makes you tick. This important work. You do not want to neglect it.
Online Storytelling
Your online presense is crying out for stories, your proposals would represent your capability better with these stories, your promotional material and letters would be memorable, your company profile would be more gripping and inspiring. Your sales team would thank you for these stories that would help them capture the attention of busy customers who easily tune out because, they have heard sales pitches before. Your employees would use them to remind themselves every now and then why they are still working for your company.
Stories are more useful when they live in the memories of your stakeholders where they can raise confidence, built respect and gain mind share for your company or personal brand as a precursor to wallet share. They will give your message memory-stickiness, in a market place full of noise, where people have become experts at shaking things off and tuning out.
Conclusion
Whether in the marketplace or in your personal life, you need to tell your stories well. Even if only to yourself. Especially, to yourself. They will help you make sense of your life. They will help you create your destiny. After all, we are nothing without our stories. Without them there are no nations, no religion, no science, no business, no families, and no personal identity, That is right. We are our stories. Influencial people know this and they use stories to shape our lives. We can take back the controls and use stories to shape our own future.