Here's something you're not going to hear from most instructors on storytelling. Be careful about this. Don't tell me when I told you this. But here's the thing. Even bad stories work most of the time. Why is that?

Why would you intentionally do something bad? I'm not asking you to start off trying to tell a bad story. But what I mean by that is most presentations are so boring, so devoid of anything interesting. They don't have any stories, that if you put in a story to flesh out a point, even if it's not well told, even if it's missing some details, even if it doesn't have the dialogue, and I'd love for you to have dialogue. It's still going to be so much better than the person who spoke before you and the person who spoke after you in most situations. So I say this to motivate you to try.

Don't wait until you have The perfect story. Don't write me write, rewrite, and treat this. Like it's a perfect piece of art that's got to be polished for 20 years. If you have some story elements that relate to the message you're trying to convey to your audience, go ahead, put it out there. Something beats nothing. Most presentations have nothing.

They're just boring. Data dumps. So a story, any story, even a story that's not told very well is going to be so much better than nothing. So keep that in mind. Don't wait till you have the perfect story. Put a story out and we can always make it better the next time