Stories are our most persuasive technology. We have scientific evidence to prove it.
According to Professor Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, “Narratives that cause us to pay attention and also involve us emotionally are the stories that move us to action.” Stories work because of this physiological connection between the head and heart. Wherever you see a successful product, business, or brand, look for the powerful story behind it.
For Everything You Ever Want or Need, Here’s the Formula
My discovery took 40 years of listening to business leaders emphasizing their challenges with creating content or crafting a story that would achieve specific goals, whether in business, education, or personal communication. The best thing about experience and gathering millions of data points and information is you might discover a pattern.
Does everything have to be so hard? Is there a formula that works 100% of the time for every situation? I think I found the formula and I’ve been testing it for the past year with current conversations, reading, writing, and thinking. My wish for you is to try it out on everything you need, want, or have already experienced. Run it around the track at full speed and “stress test” it with the formula to see where the gaps and truths are for you.
The formula: Existence + Story + Relationships = Everything you want or need.
The formula for a life that matters and for work that is worth your one precious life has three parts, as connected and permanent as the three points of a triangle.
If you think that knowledge, services, products, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology tools matter, think again. They are nothing without a story and an audience. Oh, the stories I can tell you about hundreds of professional groups and businesses that put all of their money and time into creating and building things that came into being without the benefit of a customer (no audience) and without the story.
Let’s unpack it to make clear how this works 100% of the time. Just like gravity—you can argue that it’s not 100% and I assure you the consequences are real if you step off of that 12-foot wall.
Existence is anything real, actual, or in a state of being real, such as a thought. Some call it a thing or an entity and that can be abstract or real. To the brain, it’s the same.
The story connects people. The story conveys values and beliefs in a relatable way and creates shared experiences and emotional connections. The story makes abstract concepts concrete and memorable. It inspires and motivates you and others.
Relationships provide the source material and the audience for your stories. Relationship building is more than necessary for support systems, networks, community building, and the opposite of solitary confinement. Relationships are why there are other humans, plus animals, nature, inspiration, and awe.
Test it for Yourself
Start your experiment with a 20-minute exercise where you move thoughts to paper or a keyboard and write three questions—plus your best, short answer. You must write to make this real. Only you will see what you write. Your brain will tell you fantasy if you don’t commit thoughts to writing.
What happens when you have a great product, a good story, and no audience?
What happens when you have a great service, an audience, and no story—nothing to say or engage?
What happens when you have great stories, lots of friends, and no service (no product, no volunteer, nothing of substance)?
If you want to test it further, take it to the next level of two missing or weak elements:
Have you ever experienced someone with a great product or service and no communication skills and nobody waiting to hear about it? Describe it.
Have you ever experienced a desire to communicate, to tell a story, and there was no substance or point to the story and nobody waiting to hear your story? Describe it.
Have you ever experienced someone who built a large mailing list and had nothing of substance to offer and no story with credibility or trust? Describe it.
Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine
In future articles, I will show you the answers to these six questions. The best article would be hundreds of comments from all readers, putting these questions and their answers forward. You can start with one or provide as many as you wish to share with other highly intelligent professionals and communicators, much like you.
Do You Have a System for Working on All Three at the Same Time?
Assign a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being “excellent” to each of the three elements: Existence (thing, entity, substance), Storytelling, and Relationship Building. That shows you the gaps. That tells you what is throwing your life or your business out of whack or worse, not true to who you are and not serving your needs.
Before you rush to turn over your life and decisions to an expert, coach, therapist, guide, web developer, transformational leader, or best friend, take ownership of the three main parts and give yourself credit to come up with answers to those starting six questions. Nobody can help you, save you, or change your life until you have arrived at some core truths, that are already inside you and already your lived experiences. If you don’t know what your score is to start with, nobody —not even you, can know what you need to work on next, keep, or improve.
What Good Is A Story With No Audience?
Work first on relationships, network strategies, support systems, and community building. Strong relationships are crucial so that storytelling can add depth and interest to your relationships.
Relationships and storytelling—the connection is intrinsic, yet we miss the magic of life and what it takes to thrive in our work if we spend the time, money, and persistent effort to strengthen storytelling skills without the same level of attention to building relationships.
Relationships provide the source material and the audience for your stories. Why bother to tell stories and get better at it? Stories are the most powerful tool humans have for creating and strengthening relationships.
When things go off the rails, it’s not your content. It’s your network and relationship habits. Storytelling and relationship skills are not just for companies or professional storytellers. Story skills are essential for anyone who wants to have an impact.
Is Storytelling a Relationship Skill? This is not a chicken-and-egg conversation. Please get clear about how this goes together and what happens if you try to disconnect all three elements.
Momentum is the key. This feels like a flywheel at high speed when you get it right. Get clear and take action on the relationships. As you build stronger relationships, you gain more stories to tell. As you become a better storyteller, you become more adept at building and maintaining relationships.
Someone with great relationship skills but poor storytelling might struggle to:
Keep relationships engaging over time
Effectively communicate ideas or experiences
Inspire or influence others
Create memorable interactions
Put the relationships first and then use storytelling as the glue for each relationship. Most of the time it’s all about the other person you are observing, experiencing, and listening to. If the story is about you then it needs some mention of other people and places.
In a professional context, the dynamics of storytelling and relationship-building show up in businesses with one employee—the solopreneur, as well as in teams that share the same project, the same customer, and the same brand loyalty. There is no business (any size) without customers. Everything else is ephemeral and negotiable. Without another human or two, there’s no story and no product or service.
Your Service, Your Product, AI, and Other Things
For the past two years, we have seen the amplified frenzy over ChatGPT and many other AI products. What’s real and what is artificial? This seems like a lot of emphasis on the thing, the tool, but no story and no relationship. What is the lived experience of a tool? Does the tool love unconditionally and grieve over losses?
Are you trying to stand out in a noisy world? Are your ideas not getting the traction you hoped? Are you looking for a way to reach and resonate with more of the right people? When there’s simply data, it’s all noise. It’s impossible for a human being to absorb data without a narrative.
Why do we spend years amassing expertise or creating game-changing ideas, products, and services—yet, we don’t develop the skills to influence and inspire?
In a world full of experts and artificial, we need better storytellers.
Will storytelling distinguish us from artificial intelligence that gathers up data and gives us bullet points of data sets? What are humans telling us about their exhaustion with AI-generated articles with 10 tips and 20 hacks? The levels of misinformation, disinformation, and bullshit make it hard to know who or what to trust.
Trust is on the line and so is our time. We want wisdom and results stories. We don’t want pages and pages of process words. We don’t care about how until you show me why. Many of us were here when the internet started and the first time we saw email in the 1990s. We were here when Google launched a search engine that would search for information we wanted and provide a lot of somewhat related stuff that we never asked for. Rapidly, that produced two generations of armchair scientists and charismatic influencers and we are done with that.
Over the past 40 years, we’ve come to believe that storytelling is a professional discipline—a skill for the master storytellers at Disney or Netflix. We’ve stopped honing the story skills that came so naturally to our ancestors. We’ve forgotten how to tell small, powerful, everyday stories.
Gifted is how you are born. It's forever.
Nobody is a born storyteller. Like any skill, storytelling is something you can learn and reach mastery with practice.
We created the community for gifted professionals like you to learn and practice, in a safe space, essential skills to find, craft, and tell compelling stories.
We see too much emphasis on finding your voice. What we discovered is that voice has always been in you--not lost. The truth is your voice may be behind a door that you open. It's not locked. Sometimes you need the help of one other person to turn the door handle and let the voice come out.
Most professionals are good writers and they know that's not the same as story crafting, public speaking, or a memorable presentation.
Hearing a story about one person’s experience has more impact on us than all the data in the world. We humans are hardwired to be influenced by stories. And yet, we are rarely trained in the skill of storytelling.
Every one of us needs to learn these story skills if we are to inspire change. I want you to be your most influential and inspiring self so that you can use your stories for good.
There was so much more I could say and include. But I think that’s enough for now. If you feel overwhelmed and feel that the path to the community you want is too long, don’t put up with “stuck.” Pick one or two questions from the list above and get started.
As our co-founder, Sia Papageorgiou, FRSA, SCMP says, “One single act of care and connection can result in a lot more.”
Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing, but you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—real and retired, to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe, later, a short call to make sure you are understood.
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