Tap The Power of Story To Max Your Message or Campaign
By Rob Kall
The most powerful way to get people to embrace your ideas is to package them in stories. This article describes how to identify stories to use to promote your candidate, issue or product.
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It is said that the truth is often ugly or plain. Often, when we start a sentence, "To tell you the truth..." we're going to say something that hurts. But when you wrap the truth in story, it changes everything. People love stories. They are drawn to them, embrace them and enfold them in their hearts.
The most powerful way to get people to embrace your ideas is to package them in stories.-
The way to reach voters is not with ideas, not with framing, but with stories. Stories are to ideas for the heart and mind what enzymes are to the body. They turn them on and act as delivery systems for putting ideas that are properly framed into dynamic, energized action in the heart and mind. If you take a candidacy, an issue you advocate, even a product or service and tell a story that explains why the listener should support or buy it, vote for it, and advocate for it, you will be much more like to get a positive result.
I have been helping candidates to identify stories in their lives that help them define who they are, their values, accomplishments, and then, how to weave them into stump speeches so they support issue positions. The key is HOW they are presented, so they are most effective at reaching not just the heads but the hearts of the people in the audience.
Here's how it works.
A candidate decides he or she wants to take his/her stump speech beyond just the intellectual, that the next level is to share more about his/her self and reach potential supporters hearts as well as heads.
We set a meeting time. I give the candidate homework:
Dredge up stories in your life that exemplify who you are, what you stand for, successes, sacrifices. Don't expect them to come easy. You can't pull them up, like you can list the files in a hard drive directory. Some, a few will be easy, but then, you have to wait. Program your mind and then as they bubble up, as you go through your day, just start jotting them down.
Then there are the stories you have already been telling. Some, you may be telling in your stump speeches already. Some, you may realize you've been telling over and over again to teach some lesson. The goal at this point is to start inventorying the stories that mean something to you, that stand out in your memory.
I like to tell the story about my experience with the biofeedback ring I invented. I came close to getting rich. I tell the story to people who are in exciting situations with great opportunities who I see are ready to "ride the roller coaster" for the first time. My "ring" story taught, including flying in private Lear jets, signing million dollar contracts, full page ads published in national magazines taught me to view opportunities with a cooler head and a different perspective. I've told the story to a lot of people who are just starting their exciting ride on the roller coaster. It's a fun ride, but you never know where it will take you-- sometimes right back to where you started.
Next, start thinking about the heroes in your life. Who are the famous people who are living who are your heroes? Who are the people in your life who are heroes? Who are the heroes from recent and distant history who you respect. For each one explain why.
If Colin Powell is one of your heroes you better be a candidate running as a Republican or in a mostly African American district.
Nelson Mandela is probably the most popular hero among all the people I've asked. Most people also mention family or friends too. The reasons are where the gold is.
What are your greatest accomplishments in your life?
Now, try to remember some scenes in your life: high point (peak experience) low point turning points earliest memories Significant childhood scene significant adolescent scene significant adult scene Life Challenges Positive and negative people in your life
What are some of your personal beliefs and values, and, if you can think of them, scenes or stories that demonstrate how you've sacrificed, worked hard, struggled, suffered to stand up for them.
Some people put a lot of time into the homework. It's good if they do because we start off with material to work with.
Some will bring, email or fax articles they've written or that have been written about them. They'll show me the homework they've done.
Then we talk about why they want to do what they're trying to do-- run for office, get a job, sell something. I ask for the life story that leads up to this point.
You can tell life stories in so many different ways. -- people, achievements, challenges, lessons, jobs... It's interesting to see which aspect a client chooses. There are no correct choices.
The interview fleshes out the stories, gets into greater depth on what were the most important aspects of the story-- what were the parallel tracks, the back story, the climax of the story. What were the hero's journey, archetypal, heroic elements of the story? I will look for stories that fit the pattern of the archetpal "American Story" as described by Dan McAdams, in his groundbreaking book, THE REDEMPTIVE SELF; Stories Americans Live by.
Once we arrive upon a few strong stories, and reject some favorites that just don't work, we start the next step, weaving the stories into the presentation. If it's a stump speech, its good to be able to weave the stories into issue positions. If a politician has a life story that explains why he stands for something, that is so much more powerful than just intellectually supporting it.
Ideally, the stories are woven into the stump speech so they synergize each other and work together. A good movie, book or speech includes a number of stories. You may start telling one, stop, start telling another, shift back the first, start a third, shift back to the second, shift to the third, have some connection between the first and second so they end together, in a climax and so the third one ends, giving new meaning to the first two.
Finally, it's how the stories are told that make them work. You can totally kill, or minimize the power of a story if you tell it the wrong way. One superb expert on this is Doug Stevenson. His book--- I hate the title, but love the book, is Never Be Boring Again. It is well worth the read to learn HOW to give a talk. It also is VERY helpful in helping you to identify the different kinds of stories and how to find them.
Clearly, different people have different stories. Just putting together a speech, effectively identifying, using and telling the stories won't turn you into a winner. But an effective use of story by an average person with average stories could give you a win over a person with amazing stories who fails to identify them and present them effectively.
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.