Not too long ago, I was invited to speak to a group of college students. The subject is unimportant, but a comment that one of the students made after my talk struck a chord with me. The young student said that the thing that most impressed her by my presentation was my sue of stories and anecdotes to illustrate my points.
I’ve always been a storyteller. And by storytelling I don’t mean liar as such. I mean, I’ve always used made up stories or even factual retellings of incidents as a way to make sense of whatever I tell people. I developed this talent as a child almost as a defense mechanism, as w way of easing the fear of speaking to people. Somehow, when I told stories it made the daunting process of talking to strangers a little less so.
As I grew older, got over my reluctance and fear regarding talking to people, I discovered that stories and anecdotes were an excellent way to get things to stick in people’s minds. You can recite a set of principles until you’re blue in the face, but if you tell a story that illustrates those principles, people will remember them longer.
An example is the story of the frog and the scorpion which I use to remind people that a person’s basic nature seldom changes and if you know what it is you can more accurately predict what they’ll do in a given situation. The story goes something like this. A scorpion comes to the bank of a stream one day, and has no way across. He sees a frog in the water and ask the frog to give him a ride. The frog refuses, saying that he’s afraid the scorpion will sting him, which would be fatal. The scorpion swears up and down that he won’t, and finally the frog relents. Halfway across the stream, the scorpion stings the frog. As the dying frog is about to sink he says that the scorpion broke his promise and now they will both die. “Why’d you do it,” the frog asks. “Because it’s my nature,” the scorpion replies.
That story helps people to remember if you’re talking about how humans don’t easily change their basic personality easily, much better that just telling them. My grandmother used stories to instill basic good behavior in me, and now, more than sixty years later I still remember, not because I memorized proper behavior, but because I remember her stories.
Whether it’s educating or leading, stories are a wonderful tool for helping people accept, understand, and remember things. The greatest compliment you can pay a person, I think, is that they tell great stories. | NWI
