4 Storytelling Tips That Will Make You A Better Leader

“What gets you excited about what you’re talking about? Why do you care?
If the audience knows why you care, they’ll have a reason to care.” In other words, the story needs to have stakes. And they don’t necessarily need to be significant. You can conceivably make a great story about a smaller thing if the storyteller is very interested in it.

Tiffany Haddish passionately shared the crazy, amazing story of how she ended up taking her Girls Trip costar Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith on a Groupon swamp tour in New Orleans. “It’s just this perfect illustration,” says Tellers. “She showed us what she really cared about, and it really paid off in spades.

The mark of a great story is that the experience being shared has changed the person in some way. It doesn’t have to be a drastic change,. It could simply be a perspective shift or a reinforcement of a belief or an idea.

When communicating in business, ask yourself what change you want to see in your audience. If you’re pitching a new idea to people, start in a place where you can relate to and understand any reason why they would have skepticism or questions or feel discomfort. Identify that and then use the story as the map to where you want to land them. You’ve given them a relatable way to come to a place where you have a common understanding.

Your theme or big idea is your editing tool.

You always want to think about what you’re leaving your audience with thematically. What’s the theme of your story, what’s the big idea?. Your story will be filled with lots of specifics, of course. In fact, one of the most beautiful things in storytelling is that specificity breeds universality. So the more specific you are in a story, the more universal the story becomes. But think about how every single detail in your story relates back to that big idea.