As powerful as storytelling is, it’s a good practice to not announce you’re about to tell one. “Let me share a story with you,” is not a strong opening line. Instead, always start your story with a great hook – a single sentence or phrase that demonstrates to your audience why they should listen to your story, advises Paul Smith, author of “Lead With a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives that Captivate, Convince and Inspire.”
As Natasha Che, founder of audio publishing platform Soundwise, points out, instead of saying, “Let’s get today’s meeting started. And I’ll begin by telling you a story,” you’ll grab and hold more people’s attention by saying, “Something happened last week that completely changed my thinking on how to run this department. I thought I’d tell you about that.”
The former way is awkward and likely met with resistance from your audience. The latter way is an excellent hook that gets your listeners’ attention immediately, Che says. In fact, she recommends not even using the “s” word. Che shares these additional tips for using stories effectively:
Don’t apologize or ask permission to tell a story. Many people don’t know how to start telling a story, especially at work. They begin by saying things like “I’m sorry, but can I tell you a story about this?” or “I promise it will be really quick,” as though they were apologizing for doing something wrong. When you start a story that way, the message you’re communicating is “this story is not important.” Then why should your audience listen to you? If you don’t think your story is that important, don’t tell it. If you think it’s worth your audience’s time, don’t apologize.
Don’t give away the ending. A main reason why stories make people pay attention to you is the suspense factor – we all want to know what happened next. Don’t sabotage yourself by prematurely telling your audience how the story turned out. For example, in the middle of your story don’t say things like “Eventually what happened is [insert the ending], but at that time I didn’t know better.” You just ruined your story!
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