In his book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker explains how and why all stories boil down to one of 7 plot structures, and how these can act as outlines for effectively presenting all sorts of information. By organizing presentations to follow these story structures, your audience will recognize the familiar flow, and find it easy to understand you and your content.

Storytelling Structures

The typical story of courage, of hero versus villain. Learn about the monster -> Train for battle -> Monster revealed -> Losing the battle -> Try different approach -> Defeat monster. Use it to display your problem solving skills: Tell a story about how you overcame a big problem at work and what you learned from trying a different approach.

Overcoming a Monster

The hero goes triumphantly from difficult circumstances to great success:Terrible early life -> Leave -> Minor struggle and small successes -> Hit rock bottom -> Defeat the crisis -> Win and get reward.Use it to show you are able to use your vulnerabilities to achieve results at work and how you overcame struggles through risks.

Rags to Riches

The hero journeys to new lands, defeats darkness and return home wiser:Quiet life ->Transported to other world -> Explore new surroundings ->Feel uncomfortable -> Confront with darkness -> Escape and defeat evil -> Return home wiser.Use it to demonstrate you are able to step out of your comfort zone in order to learn new things.

Voyage and Return

A story about team work - a group sets off on a journey with a goal in mind and through working together, they overcome all obstacles:Team receives mission -> Smaller obstacles presented and overcome -> Final dangerous test revealed -> Final test accomplished -> Team wins prize and travels home.Use it to emphasize the importance of achieving goals through teamwork.

The Quest

A tale of a transition from state of confusion into one of enlightenment:Use it to show the importance of communication avoid confusion and unnecessary conflict.How to use it: Share a story about a time when you had a disagreement on a project due to miscommunication; explain how you resolved it and developed a better working relationship.

Comedy

A cautionary tale - the downfall of a villain who chooses the wrong path:Villain finds goal to achieve ->Sets out on path of destruction -> Commits dark acts that seal fate -> Sees plan unravel -> Is defeated.Use it to show that you can learn from mistakes to improve yourself and succeed next time: Tell a story about an error you made due to bad choices and openly discuss the impact it had on your work.

Tragedy

A story of a villain who finds redemption and is reborn as a better person:Villain falls under a dark power ->Things go well for him-> Imprisoned by darkness -> Dark power has seemingly triumphed -> Redemption figure resolves situation -> Hero is reborn as a better person.Use it to demonstrate that you are able to learn from others to make better choices.

Rebirth

1 min read Giving presentations, whether during meetings with co-workers or to potential new clients, can often seem intimidating. But luckily, there are tried and true ways to organize your information so that it is both easy to present and clear to your audience.

7 Storytelling Structures to Improve Your Presentations (Infographic)

...the process of using fact and narrative to communicate something to your audience.
Some stories are factual, and some are embellished or improvised in order to better explain the core message.

Storytelling is...

<ul>
<li>Stories solidify abstract concepts and simplify complex messages;</li>
<li>Stories bring people together: stories connect us through the way we feel and respond to them;</li>
<li>Stories inspire and motivate, by tapping into people’s emotions and baring both the good and bad.</li>
</ul>

Why we tell stories

<ul>
<li>Entertaining. Good stories keep the reader engaged and interested in what’s coming next.</li>
<li>Educational. Good stories spark curiosity and add to the reader’s knowledge bank.</li>
<li>Universal. Good stories are relatable to all readers and tap into emotions and experiences that most people undergo.</li>
<li>Organized. Good stories follow a succinct organization that helps convey the core message and helps readers absorb it.</li>
<li>Memorable. Whether through inspiration, scandal, or humor, good stories stick in the reader’s mind.</li>
</ul>

Good stories are …

<ul>
<li>Characters. Every story features at least one character, and this character will be the key to relating your audience back to the story.</li>
<li>Conflict. The conflict is the lesson of how the character overcomes a challenge.</li>
<li>Resolution. Your story’s resolution should wrap up the story, provide context around the characters and conflict(s), and leave your audience with a call-to-action.</li>
</ul>

Components of a good story

<ol>
<li>Know your audience;</li>
<li>Know your audience;</li>
<li>Decide what kind of story you’re telling;</li>
<li>Establish your call-to-action;</li>
<li>Choose your story medium;</li>
<li>Craft your story;</li>
<li>Share your story.</li>
</ol>

Steps of the storytelling process

If your objective is to:<ul><li>Incite action: describe how a successful action was completed in the past and its steps.</li><li>Tell people about yourself, feature genuine, humanizing struggles, failures, and wins.</li><li>Convey values, tap into familiar emotions and situations so that the story feels relatable.</li><li>Foster collaboration, tell a story that moves readers to discuss and share your story with others.</li><li>Educate, feature a trial-and-error experience, so that readers can learn about a problem and how a solution was discovered and applied. </li></ul>

Story objectives

While this definition is pretty specific, stories actually resemble a variety of things. This graphic from ReferralCandy helps outline what stories and are not. Storytelling is an art form as old as time and has a place in every culture and society. Why?

The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling

Storytelling has always been a powerful, influencing tool since ancient times.
Crafting a good story around yourself is a great way to make anyone feel better about you. If we simply voice out our opinions, it sounds polarizing instead of persuasive, and if we really want to tug at the other person’s heartstrings and change their mind, we need to weave an engaging narrative.

The Right Narrative

A job candidate has an incredible tool to use during an interview: Crafting a beautiful story that evokes positive emotions in the recruiter. 
The art of storytelling releases a rush of dopamine in the brain of the listener and makes the meeting memorable. It is also good to have a theme that you promote in your job hunt with consistency, as it builds upon the memory and makes your profile unforgettable.

Storytelling: All The Power Is Yours

We normally dole out a lengthy list of accomplishments, experience, projects and activities in our job application, hoping to be caught by the keyword searching tools used by recruiters. 
While this seems logical in this competitive world, we need a different approach to stand out from the crowd: To not be a cookie clutter applicant, but a real human.

Storytelling: Making Yourself Look..Human

Knowing your audience, who are recruiters, in this case, matters while we are trying to get a job in a sea of candidates competing for the same profile. Recruiters look for technical skills as well as soft skills:
<ol>
<li>Being a people person.</li>
<li>Having emotional intelligence.</li>
<li>Being authentic.</li>
<li>Strong communication skills with equally good listening skills.</li>
<li>Mindfulness and inclusivity.</li>
</ol>

Storytelling: Start With Knowing Your Audience

We can conduct research on Linkedin and find out what the recruiter wants, and the needs of the industry. We need to find out the problems, issues and challenges that the hiring managers have and provide them with a solution. 
The recruiter should look at our resume/cover letter and find the answer to their current problems.

What A Recruiter Needs To Hear

Listing your accomplishments as narration is only half the work done. We need to expand our profile and let our personality shine by giving context to our story, the three elements that flesh out the narrative: Setting, characters and conflict.
The Three Basic Elements Of Your Story:
<ul>
<li>The setting is the place where the events of your story happened.</li>
<li>The characters are the people in your story, like your family, your team, your client, or your boss.</li>
<li>The conflict is the crucial problem of your story that spurred you into action.</li>
</ul>

A Story With Context

Do not sprinkle your resume with jargon and buzzwords, as it does not convey any story, but only feels like hollow boasting to the person screening your profile. 
Go for the simple approach and craft a story that hooks the recruiter, and sets you apart from others.

Storytelling: Avoiding Jargon

The prospective candidate needs to end the story as a hero, giving the listener a reason to care about the conflict, the handling of the problem and the main characters, and eventually the final resolution (an impressive metric) to provide a sense of closure and accomplishment that says: Hire me now!

Be The Hero Of Your Story

The narrative should have a big idea in the beginning, followed by the conflict and the characters who are impacted. One can then describe the setting and add more characters. After fleshing out the conflict and creating suspense, one can end the story with a resolution.
Just by narrating the same facts which are already listed in your resume in a storytelling format, one can influence the recruiter.

Storytelling: The Right Approach

Four tips that will help you get noticed (and get ahead) in your career.

The Key to Landing Your Next Job? Storytelling.

Stories are like instruction manuals that explain how we move from one state of being to another.Stories help us imagine how we can improve our own lives or avoid unpleasant consequences. Because we can imagine living out the consequences of certain choices, we are often inspired to change our behavior and act in a certain way.

Why storytelling works

A good story can make us laugh or cry, our bodies can tense with a dramatic horror movie, or we are flooded with relief when the hero comes to the rescue. This experience is called transportation.
Transportation allows us to experience a story's movement through its characters. The characters' struggles and their rewards become our own.

A good story moves us

Good stories catch your attention, connects you by drawing you in and move you to action. Stories that don't capture your attention will fail to deliver their message.
When participants remain engaged with a story and see characters overcome conflicts, they will empathize with the characters and be more willing to act on these feelings.

Our relationship with stories

"Metaphor" means "to transfer." Like stories, metaphors subconsciously encode complex ideas.
We find metaphors so gripping because we process them with sense or motor imagery in terms of those physical experiences. For instance, "I saw the light" or "I ran out of time."

Metaphors are the most basic stories

The same parts of our brain we use to smell or to wave also help us understand the words we use to describe those experiences.
These neurological insights bring much-needed substance to the storytelling conversation.

Stories make ideas real

The importance of storytelling has become universally accepted in today's marketing world, but why does it work so well? Contributor Peter Minnium delves into the biological underpinnings of how stories affect us.

The science of storytelling

In the workplace, storytelling serves as an essential, powerful tool for effective communication.It gets people excited around an idea, or a value, or perhaps some drier information that might not have been as interesting before.

Purpose of storytelling

Great stories reveal a piece of yourself. 
Ask yourself:
<ul>
<li>What makes you care about the work that you do? </li>
<li>What part of you outside of your work is present inside of that world? </li>
<li>If in financial services, for example, what is it behind the numbers and data that are at the emotional core of your work?</li>
</ul>

Make your story personal

“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.

Show passion when you're telling a story

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.

Demonstrate change

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.

Focus on one big idea

As human beings, we've been telling stories for thousands of years-to share our experiences, to pass down lessons, to understand and relate to one another. But in the workplace, storytelling also serves as an essential, powerful tool for effective communication.

4 Storytelling Tips That Will Make You A Better Leader

Walt Disney took suspension of reality a step further building theme parks that brought people into his world. You can bring people into your world through storytelling and brand activation.Brand activation is when you combine storytelling with unique experiences to increase awareness and engagement with your company.

Bring People Into Your World

Suspending reality is a powerful storytelling technique as it creates a safe, magical world in which to contend with powerful emotions and themes, and it allows the viewer or listener to be transported and associate that escape from reality with the story.Anything is possible and that becomes inspiration.

Suspend Reality

Disney stories have a near universal appeal because they are designed around struggles and desires that are common to humans everywhere.You can apply this message to storytelling in your company, too. When you’re communicating with your customers, you should focus on the shared experiences and desires that make your product so valuable.

Focus on Shared Desires

In a corporate context, storytelling can invest your employees in your next undertaking, or your clients in the value of your product.People were skeptical of the feasibility of a movie in the unprecedented scale of Snow White. Walt Disney convinced investors and animators by inviting them to a play where he acted out the entire story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He convinced people of the movie’s value, even though it seemed like a wild and crazy proposition.

Stories Are a Powerful Investment Tool

Is the activity of writing or telling stories and can empower one to convey a message in the strongest possible way. It’s a cultural and social activity that stimulates the imagination and builds a sense of wonder and community between teller and listener(s).

Storytelling

Corporate April 05, 2018 It's no secret that we love stories at Museum Hack. From the behind-the-scenes secrets and shocking tales told by guides on our signature tours to the engaging and unique stories shared on our blog , we believe that storytelling is the best way to fulfill our company's mission: to teach people that museums (and history and science and art and architecture and mythology and and and) are f***ing awesome.

4 Lessons in Storytelling From Walt Disney - Museum Hack

How to use stories to differentiate, connect, and influence

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

⚡
The Power of StoryTelling

7 Storytelling Structures to Improve Your Presentations (Infographic)

The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling

The Key to Landing Your Next Job? Storytelling.

The science of storytelling

4 Storytelling Tips That Will Make You A Better Leader

4 Lessons in Storytelling From Walt Disney - Museum Hack

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

⚡The Power of StoryTelling

7 Storytelling Structures to Improve Your Presentations (Infographic)

The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling

The Key to Landing Your Next Job? Storytelling.

The science of storytelling

4 Storytelling Tips That Will Make You A Better Leader

4 Lessons in Storytelling From Walt Disney - Museum Hack

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

⚡
The Power of StoryTelling