If you ask people what sort of a communicator they want, what sort of a speaker they want, they will tell you, oh, we want someone direct. We don't want someone coming here telling us a bunch of war stories. We want someone to just give us the meat give us the substance abuse direct as possible. Yeah, well, I hear that. I don't believe it. Now, if you look at polls, polls will also tell you that voters hate any candidate who uses negative ads will vote against candidates using negative ads.

And yet the candidate who uses the most negative ads often wins in political campaigns and my apologies to those of you in countries outside the US I realize that's mostly a US reference because so many countries don't allow paid political TV ads. My point is what people say they want and what they want are often different things I could say I want to lose 30 pounds and eat nothing but fresh fruit and vegetables. And yet you might catch me later eating Ice cream bar. Why is that? It's because you can't always listen to what people say you have to listen to what actually works on them in what, what they do. And that's the issue with stories is it's not direct.

Telling a story is less direct than just telling somebody what to do or telling somebody what the point is. The beauty of it is, it's effective because it's not direct. It allows people to visualize your point and allows them to think about it, and quite often allows them to think that the idea from your story is actually their own idea. That is the beauty of stories. That is the beauty of indirect communication.