May 6, 2024
Over the past 3 years, I’ve tried hundreds of storytelling exercises, but there are two I’ve done every single day.
Those exercises will help you feel super comfortable telling stories in front of friends, colleagues, and on video.
These two only take 5 minutes to complete and will change the way you speak!
The biggest blocker that stopped me from telling stories is that I didn’t know what stories to tell.
I thought, “Ah, my life is just so average. I don’t have any interesting stories.”
What I learned over the years is that the problem wasn’t that I didn’t have enough interesting stories, but the problem was that I didn’t know how to spot them.
Every day, there are countless beautiful moments that could make an incredible story. I just had to become aware of them.
How?
It’s by doing an exercise called “Homework for Life” by Matthew Dicks.
Here’s what I do:
At the end of each day, I take a moment to ask myself,
“If I had to tell a story from today, what would it be?”
It doesn’t have to be something huge—just a simple act of kindness, a funny conversation, or even something that annoyed you.
Once I’ve identified that moment, I write down:
Here’s a screenshot of my Homework for Life:
Now, at first, it wasn’t too exciting. My entries were like “I enjoyed my breakfast this morning” or “I felt proud after finishing my presentation.”
But after doing that exercise for a few weeks, I started to have hundreds of stories.
Stories that I could pull out in front of my friends, coworkers, or on stage.
But before sharing that moment with other people, I make sure to do the next exercise.
Once I’ve identified my storyworthy moment, I improvise a story on the spot.
When I improvise, I usually try to follow some sort of structure: Something like Context, Challenge, and Resolution.
In case you want to learn exactly what structure to use, you can check out my article on The Storytelling Structure That I Use For 99% Of My Stories.
Let me give you an example first.
Today my storyworthy moment was:
Getting angry while cleaning up the horse shit at home.
Here’s how my improvised story would look:
Today, I had a major realization on how to make any work enjoyable.
This past week, I’ve spent on my mother’s farm in Germany. She had asked me to take care of the animals while she’s traveling.
And even though I do the work, I don’t like it too much.
So this morning, I arrive in the stables and I look around and see horse poo just everywhere. And I thought, “Stupid horses, pooing everywhere. And now I gotta clean this up. Man, I hate this.”
Annoyed, I start to clean it up.
But while I was lifting the shi*t into the cart, something hit me.
“I’m not doing this to clean the stables, but I’m doing this for my mother.
I’m doing this because I love her.”
The moment I realized that, something switched in my head.
While before, I got very upset about the task, now I started to even like it.
What I realized is that you can trick yourself to like any boring task by thinking of how this will help someone else.
That’s my improvised story. Now, could I tell it better? For sure.
But that’s not the goal.
Improv is a bit messy. You’ll make mistakes, but not striving for perfection. It’s about having fun and trying out new things.
Improv trains your mind to think on the spot.
You’ll learn how to tell stories at any moment without having to prepare like crazy.
Give it a try. Sit down and ask yourself by the end of the day:
“If I had to tell a story from today, what would it be? What was my storyworthy moment?”
Then go ahead and improvise a story based on that moment.
But hey, I’m mindful that you may need some more help to structure your stories. If that’s the case, you may want to check out this next article in which I’ll share my favorite storytelling structure.
Enjoy!
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