One of the most effective ways of pitching your message is to weave in a story. Many great communicators convey their message through stories. Stories are more interesting. They're more memorable and they connect with the audience at an emotional level, making the message more persuasive. Now, Robert McKee once said that storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today, stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clear and more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

And I like that quote, because stories really have been used as the beginning of mankind to share valuable lessons from one generation to the next, beginning with cave drawings, the Bible, to fables, to legends, to case studies, stories are extremely powerful. And when we tell stories, we hold the attention of our audience for longer periods of time. When information is presented as data and statistics an audience immediately moves into analysis mode. turns on their critical thinking skills. And when we're in this critical thinking mode, our audience challenges us and tries to prove us wrong. Now, sometimes you may want to create this effect.

Say if we're putting up a startling statistic like this one, did you know that 5% of your company's revenue is lost to fraud each year. Now, a statistic like this one forced at the audience to consider this statistic in relation to their own expectations. It's engaging, but recognizing that you're setting a different context, because instead of bringing the audience along with you, your presentation is going to challenge their thinking using a logos driven message that may or may not be effective. But more often, we want to engage our audience in broadening their thinking, not narrowing it. And so various researchers have tried to quantify the powerful effect of storytelling. And in one such study, Robert Walker and Joshua Glen went out and bought 100 nondescript objects from the thrift store.

Costing on average about a buck 25 more or less per object. They then wrote a story about each one of these objects that they purchased. And then they sold them on eBay. So you can follow the story on the the website significant objects calm, they made a total investment of $128. But get this the total proceeds they got from the eBay auction was $8,000. Okay, so as the finance person in the room, the total investment and the return on investment was that remarkable 6,250%.

The only difference being between the purchase and the sale was that the products were sold with a story. So storytelling is extremely powerful and extremely valuable. It's one of those techniques that we're going to discuss in this lesson to help your message stick and in turn elevate your level of executive presence. In business training. We very often use case studies to tell stories. Case Studies can be useful when we are training our people.

When you tell Have a story about something that went wrong, or perhaps was a challenge confronting an organization, you're amplifying the message of what could go wrong to avoid making similar mistakes. On the other hand, sometimes we will share success stories, and success stories are effective for motivating and empowering our audience to strive for higher levels of achievement. If someone else could do it, why can't we? There are all sorts of business themes that can be used to weave into any situation, and interesting and compelling story. And we can all imagine how each of these stories can be woven into financial results. And in doing so, you can make people dying to listen to your latest financial result, as opposed to the typical reaction, more boring numbers.

So telling a good story requires some thought and some practice. There are plenty of examples in our lives where we've heard bad stories, stories that make the situation even more tenuous or worse. alienated from the Speaker good stories first and foremost must always be relevant to the situation. Okay, humor is nice to have but very few of us in finance are stand up comedians. Don't try and be someone that you weren't. Instead of going for a left, simply go for a smile.

Having a sense of humor means that you're able to see and convey life in a light hearted way. It doesn't mean that you have the ability to tell you know, raunchy jokes. Comedians, tell jokes that always have punch lines, and even if we in finance are unable to tell a joke, or go for a laugh, that doesn't mean that your story shouldn't have a punch line because it most definitely and certainly should. To show you how the lighter side to you and to your to your content, consider including in your presentation and your comments, personal anecdotes, maybe humorous quotes, a humorous cartoon, a visual aid or a visual Prop, or sometimes just a sarcastic facial expression will convey humor. There are a few rules that executive should Keep in mind as you incorporate humor into your message, first of all, number one, avoid offensive humor. Just skip the dirty jokes altogether.

Number two, never make someone else feel uncomfortable because comedians might get away with picking on members of the audience, but you shouldn't because comedians don't need to work with their audience The next day, you do you self deprecating humor to endear yourself to your audience. Everyone has imperfections, acknowledge them in a humorous way, demonstrate your own humility and your vulnerability. However, in doing so, never diminish your own credibility, because we've all made mistakes. But unless you can demonstrate how you learn from your mistakes and it made you stronger, never confess something that a roads, your ethos, and then finally, respond in the moment to things that are happening around you, you know, perhaps some alarm going off in the background, or a comment from the audience. This ability shows that you can think on your feet and that you aren't a scripted robot. But how do you tell a good story?

Let's kind of work through the process. First of all, as I indicated earlier, personal first hand experiences make for the best stories. Because we're most credible telling stories in this situation. People tend to relax and they listen naturally to stories, there is anticipation and an expectation that an idea is going to emerge from your story. So make sure that you just are telling a story that doesn't go anywhere or lacks relevant to your message. It's important to make sure that your story builds on your credibility or on the credibility of others who had a part in resolving the challenge.

Secondly, tell stories with gusto with passion. Put your listeners right into the story, set the context by giving them a timeline, roles and characters. A little local color or the personalities or the places can really help pique the interest of your audience. You can create scenes, let the characters talk to one another. Let the audience see the middle. Then you can get into identifying the daunting challenge confronting the hero in the story.

The climax happens when you describe how it was resolved, the solution has got to be interesting, not what one would expect, or conventional wisdom would suggest. If the ending is predictable, it's not really a good story. You don't want to have an ending where someone is wondering what happened or questioning the relevance of the story in the first place. And finally, we have a takeaway, a very powerful takeaway, which is the learning it's the moral of the story. And ideally, you're going to try to make this as memorable or quote worthy as possible to make it stick and resonate with your audience. Stories need to deliver kind of an emotional wallop that helps your message become more memorable and ultimately more persuasive with your audience.

Now many executives have a selection of war stories that they can use in different situations to carry a conversation or convey wisdom to staff Or to build rapport with an audience? What is your repertoire favorite stories? So before you go on in this lesson, let's see if you can identify three potential stories that you can convey in any business situation. After you've done that, in our next lesson, you're going to learn how to improve your writing skills.