I’m the author of this book on storytelling and I’ll confess, even I struggle to make up good stories on the spot. But that’s not a problem because my best stories are stored safely in my memory, have been practiced and refined over and over again and are ready to take out the moment I need them. Not a single one of my best stories have ever been made up on the spot.
If you want to be a good storyteller, you need a story pool. This is a database of stories stored safely in your memory, ready to take out and use whenever you need them. The good news is that if you are a human being, which I assume you are, then you already have a story pool.
But in my workshops I find most people’s story pools have two main areas for development. Firstly, they need more stories in their story pool. Secondly, the stories they do contain need more refinement. So let’s look at how to solve these two problems to create better story pools.
Finding more stories
If your story pool doesn’t have enough stories, then the solution is to find more stories. That is actually a lot simpler than it sounds.
Practically every moment contains a story. The problem is we rarely notice them. But when we start looking for stories, we see them all around us.
So here’s a challenge for you, reflect on everything that happened last night. Somewhere in there is a story. What story can you find?
I give this challenge to people who attend my storytelling workshops, and some of the things people come up with really surprise me. Like one guy called Jin. After giving him a few minutes to reflect on what happened the previous night, he found quite a meaningful, and frankly entertaining story, from what on first glance is a pretty meaningless experience!
“I was on my way home from work last night, as per usual, and as I got into my compound I saw a stray dog. Now I really love animals so this dog really caught my attention. As I looked at him, he looked back up at me with those sad puppy dog eyes. He looked so sad and desperate, I thought he must be starving. I felt so bad for him. So I decided to go to the shop across the road and buy some food for him. I went into the shop and looked around and found a sausage. So I bought the sausage and then walked back towards the dog. As I approached the dog, he saw me with something in my hand and started wagging his tail excitedly. I felt really good, I was about to give this poor dog some much needed food. I unwrapped the sausage and put it on the floor. He walked up, took one sniff, then looked up at me as if to say “Is that it???” and then walked away!”
What impressed me the most about this story was the conclusion he found from it:
“I thought that dog needed some food, but clearly he didn’t! I learnt from that experience that what we think others need is not always what they really need!”
Every single day, we have countless experiences like the one above. Stories are out there, waiting to be discovered. All we need to do is start looking.
So a useful thing to do is to reflect for a few minutes on what kind of stories you need for your work and life. They should generally fall under the following 3 categories:
Stories to help make things:
- Understandable
- Interesting
- Memorable
What things in your work and life do you need to make more understandable, interesting or memorable?
Maybe you need to help people understand why and how to follow that new HR policy, or get sponsors more interested in that idea you have so you can get funding for it, or get your team members to remember that important lesson about how to speak to customers.
Or maybe you need to get your child to understand why they shouldn’t put their finger on a hot stove, or get your friends to think your job is actually interesting, or help your spouse to remember to put their shoes away when they come back home.
The next step is to start looking for these stories.
Creation is not a process of making things magically appear from thin air. It’s a process of building on inspiration. These stories we put in our story pool don’t start from nothing, they start from inspiration. So start looking for that inspiration.
There are many sources of inspiration just waiting to be used, such as:
- Day to day experiences
- Memories
- Other people’s stories
- Books, articles and videos
When you plant the intention to look out for particular stories, you will start to remember whenever you encounter a source of inspiration.
For example, as a trainer who focuses on leadership and communication skills, I am constantly on the look out for stories about leadership and communication. My story radar is extremely strong.
One time, I had just finished a training in Shanghai and was about to get the subway home. As I got down to the platform, I noticed two men fighting. One was wearing a grey coat, the other wearing a red coat. I didn’t want any hassle, so quickly moved towards the subway that had just stopped at the station. As I was just about to get on, I noticed these two men had now taken their fight to the ground. This was extremely dangerous, if one of them hit their head on the hard ground then they could get seriously hurt, or even die. Several others around me also realised this danger, so we all rushed over to quickly pull them apart.
We split into two groups, one grabbing the man in the red coat, and me and a few others grabbing the man in the grey coat.
As we grabbed the grey coat man he kept on shouting “He hit me first! What am I supposed to do? Just let him get away with it?!” in Chinese. He was clearly angry. We told him to calm down, but it was useless, so we kept on holding him back.
After a short while, the man with the red coat was encouraged to head up stairs and walk away. Finally, as he got to the top of the stairs, we thought it was now safe to let the grey coat man go. But as soon as we did that, the grey coat man started rushing towards the stairs to chase Mr. Red Coat. The others decided to give up at this point, so I was on my own! I quickly rushed after him and tried to hold him back again.
Again he said “He hit me first! What am I supposed to do???” and again I said “Calm down!”, to which he responded again “He hit me first!!!”.
At this point I realised telling him to calm down wasn’t working! So I stopped to reflect and think from his perspective. Why couldn’t he let this go? I thought back to when this first started and remembered he was the first person to get hit, and in front of a large crowd of people as well. He was also the first person to get pushed to the floor, again in front of a large crowd of people. Aha! He was embarrassed. He had lost face, which in Chinese culture is a pretty big deal.
So I thought maybe I could try giving him some face and see if that changes anything. So the next time he shouted “He hit me first! What am I supposed to do?” I immediately responded “So, don’t be like him, you’re better than him”.
As soon as I said those words to him, he calmed down, looked at me, and in English said to me “Thank you”. And as if nothing had happened he just walked away!
I was amazed at how simple it was to get him to calm down. And in that moment, I suddenly realised I had a new story to add to my pool! I have now told this story countless times in my training to emphasise the benefits of using empathy to solve problems.
Refining your stories
Once you start adding stories to your story pool, the next step is to refine them.
This is where the principles of storytelling come in useful. Remember, these principles are split into 3 categories:
- Making things understandable
- Making things interesting
- Making things memorable
As you look at your story, what aspect of it do you want to improve? Do you want to make it more understandable? More interesting? Or more memorable?
Maybe use more Show by adding more vivid language. Maybe you could even replace the story with a simple analogy.
In fact, I would strongly encourage you to build an Analogy Pool alongside your story pool. Think of concepts and ideas you frequently find yourself explaining to other people, and find analogies to help you with these. Analogies are shorter and sometimes much more effective ways of helping people understand a new concept.
Maybe you could make them more interested by increasing their curiosity, or showing a striking contrast, or making the character’s goals more relatable to them.
Or maybe you could make it more memorable by really emphasising the cause and effect chains leading to and from the character’s goal, or filtering out irrelevant details, or showing the rollercoaster of emotions that the character went through and why.
The possibilities here really are endless.
But probably the most important part of refining is to actually test it out. It’s only when you tell your story, or analogy, that you can see how your audience react. Did it help them understand? Did it help increase their interest? Did it help them remember?
Several years ago I had just finished a 3-day training session that I had designed for a group of trainers to take away and deliver internally. It was quite simple really, all they had to do was follow the slides, follow the instructions exactly and then they’d be able to deliver the training. But at the end of the training, one of them asked me a question:
“How can we deliver as well as you? Everything you say is so clear and so persuasive. You have so many stories to tell. How can we deliver like you?”
What I didn’t include in those slides were all the extra stories and explanations and examples that I kept pulling out at opportune moments to enrich the training. And enrich they did, and always do. But that’s not because I’m a gifted storyteller.
The truth is any story or explanation that I use with great impact in training I’ve practiced hundreds of times already. It has literally taken that many practices to get the impact that was impressing those trainers so much.
Your stories probably won’t go down well first time and that’s fine. That’s normal.
Still to this day, despite everything I know about explaining things, about training and about storytelling, when I try to explain something for the first time, or tell a story for the first time, it’s not amazing. It might just about get the message through. But it’s rough, it’s long winded, the points are not clear, I repeat myself too much, I have to reexplain certain parts.
And that’s just part of the process.
Perfection is a process. It’s the same for anything. The first time is supposed to be bad. But you have to improve it and keep improving it until you finally achieve the impact you’re looking for.
Don’t expect to get these right first time. Expect your stories to fail somehow first time. And then improve on those failures. And eventually your stories will be so clear and refined that people will start asking you “How can I tell stories like you do?”. And your answer will be “Because I’ve practiced them over and over again!”.
Building your story pool
Building out your story pool is actually very straight forward. It doesn’t require a huge investment of time, it doesn’t require a lot of creativity. All it really requires is a bit of attention and a bit of practice. So remember these few steps:
- Set the intention to search for stories to suit particular purposes in your work and life
- Pay attention to the inspiration around you
- Use the storytelling principles to refine your stories
- Practice them and refine them again until they match your expectations
