Stories are the fiber of what holds everything together. Stories can be personal or they can be professional. The elements that make a story great remain consistent, but the emphasis on different elements of a story may shift. When you go home at Thanksgiving, your grandfather wants to hear all of the details of your new job, but when you face an executive review board at work, you need to keep your words to their most effective minimum. This is the difference of when emphasis shifts. Knowing the give and take of a good story is where the art exists. And that is where practice makes perfect.
1. The Audience: Knowing your audience is one of the biggest keys to a good story. By knowing the expectations and world view of your audience, everyone is on the same team. When your story resonates with the audience’s belief system, this is when stories are spread. (Remember, you are resonating with an existing world view, not trying to bully pulpit the audience to think the way that you do.)
2. Clarity: Details are important, but not at the expense of your main point. Make sure that the main point of what you are saying is not lost in all of your attention to the telling of the story. The reason you are telling the story is to evoke a response—inspire, motivate, create urgency, give warning. Make that happen by always returning to the main point.
3. Credibility: This goes back to the audience element. If you cannot evoke trust, you aren’t just telling a story, you are telling a lie (which ironically some people call a story). Be authentic and maintain the trust of the audience. Don’t contradict the belief system that your story appears to espouse. Be authentic and win friends.
4. Brevity: A simple story is more successful than a complicated one. Understatement carries a big impact. Maintain a cadence and progression in the story.
5. Add Context: Appeal to the senses, not to logic: descriptive language makes you feel like you are there and relates to the audience. A Forbes article published in 2013 states that 80% of what we hear is gone within 24 hours, and a story makes information sharing more memorable.
6. Create tension: Any time that you want to connect with an audience, you have to create some form of interaction. Ask a probing question to make them think (bonus: require that someone in the audience responds). Tension makes the audience wrestle. Make the audience feel invested.
7. It never hurts to add humor: As Mark Twain says, “The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.”
The final element of a good story is practice. As much as we would like to think that storytelling off the cuff will come easy, the best story tellers will attest that practice makes perfect. Given the value of a story, mastering this art is worth it.