January 15, 2024
By now, I’ve spent roughly $15,000 on storytelling courses.
In these courses, I learned three lessons that made the entire investment worth it. These lessons will help take your story from average to WOW.
Let’s go!
Quickly think of a childhood memory. Any memory that pops into your mind.
Got something?
How old were you at that time? What did you feel at that moment? Why do you think you remember that moment?
I’ll tell you why: It’s because of the emotions you felt in that moment.
These can be pleasant emotions like happiness, excitement, or unpleasant emotions like fear, sadness.
Compare that with how much you remember from a class, meeting, or encounter a week ago. You probably forgot 99% of what they talked about, right?
Lesson #1: Bring in emotions
One very powerful technique to make your stories more emotional is to share the character’s thoughts during the crucial moments in the story.
What does the character hope, dream, fear, or plan in key moments of the story?
Examples:
See the difference? Sharing your thoughts makes the story much more emotional.
Just keep in mind that our thoughts are usually not very intellectual.
Give your listeners your unfiltered, raw thoughts.
If you combine this lesson from the best storytelling courses with the next one, your stories will already be better than 99% of the stories.
Let me give you two examples to show that lesson:
First example:
“On that day, very surprisingly I lost my job.”
—> You’d be like “Cool. Whatever”, right?
Second example:
“That day, I walk into my manager’s office. It’s a very cold office. No decorations on the wall. No natural sunlight. He points at the seat and asks me to sit down. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘This is weird. Why does he want me to sit down? He has never asked me to sit down.’
He then says: “Philipp, Look, aahmm. I like working with you. You’re a great person, but, aahmmm. [Pause], our investors asked us to be leaner.” [Pause].
Me: “Wait. What do you mean? Leaner? What are you talking about?”
Him: “Philipp, we’ve got to let you go.”
See the difference between the two examples?
The result is the same, but the second example brings us into the physical moment.
Lesson #2: Bring your listeners into the scene.
Scenes are the physical locations where your story takes place.
The first scene could be you in your manager’s office.
The next scene could be you in the bathroom, crying.
The third scene could be you, standing in the rain in front of the office.
In each of the scenes, describe the details – the color, sights, sounds, smells, and the dialogue that bring stories to life. The more details you give, the more memorable your story will be.
Scenes and emotions are very powerful if you already have a story, but a lot of people struggle having the right story. So, let’s fix that.
The #1 thing that stops people the most from telling stories is that they think that they don’t have any interesting stories.
They’re like “Ah, I don’t have any stories. My life is just normal. I don’t think that anyone would care about my average day.”
From the best storytelling courses I learned that the problem is not that you don’t have any stories.
The problem is that you don’t know where to spot them.
Lesson #3: You already have incredible stories.
You just need to dig them up.
How?
One exercise you can do is called FIRST, LAST, BEST, WORST by Matthew Dicks.
For that, take out a piece of paper or open a spreadsheet and draw a table with five columns: “Prompt”, “First”, “Last”, “Best”, and “Worst”.
The prompt can be any category that triggers a memory.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s pick “gift” as my first prompt. So I ask myself…
I repeat the same process for other prompts: These could include: Kiss, Injury, Hobby, Car, Book, Trouble.
For each prompt, I ask myself what was first, last, best, worst, and I write down a few words to help me remember that event.
At this point, I just want to activate as many memories as possible. I don’t flesh out any story yet.
Once I’ve gone through all the prompts, I review my entries. This time, I ask myself: Do any of these memories stand out? Anything that is very entertaining, emotional, or surprising? If the answer is “Yes” to any of these, that’s a story I could tell.
Alright, these were the three lessons I’ve learned from the best storytelling courses. Do you want to go deeper into storytelling? Check out this next article. There, I share the three lessons that I’ve learned from reading 34 books on storytelling.
Are you ready to transform your storytelling skills?
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