168. How Story Can Change Everything in Your Career
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what if you could get a low cost effective way for making your points clear, concise and engaging? That's what we're going to talk about today. My name is matt a hams, and I teach strategic communication at stanford graduate school of business.

Welcome think fast talk mark the podcast. Today, i'm really excited to interview matt dips that is a best selling novelist, elementary school teacher and story telling coach matt rote. The book storyboard y, engage, teach, persuade and change your life through the power of storytelling math. Thanks for being here. I'm super excited for our conversation.

I am thrilled as well. Should we get started?

Yeah, let's get right. You've mastered the art of story telling in various formats to help us get started. Can you share how great storytelling can enhance everyday communication, particularly in a business environment?

sure. You know, I think that most of the business communication that I encounter in the world tends to be, what I say, round, White and flavorless, meaning it's ultimately forgettable and almost immediately forgettable. But when we tell a story about a product to service the people we work with, you know, our company, what happens as we become memorable and interesting and entertaining in a way that doesn't happen very often in business.

And so if we look at companies are we look at people and business, the ones who tell stories, the ones we remember, the ones who gain our attention, and those are the people who are going to sort of reach their goals. So I think when IT comes, the story telling, the great thing about IT is because so few people really engaging IT in a meaningful way, you can almost do just a little bit of story telling and really make a mark in business because so often IT is done poorly or not at all. So it's a no brainer for me and it's also beautiful and that IT doesn't after a penny, you know other than maybe hiring the consult, you don't have to build a building, you don't have to buy a program, you don't need to buy a machine. It's just leveling up what your people can already do because everyone, everyone, tels stories most people tell, you know not so great stories, but IT doesn't take much to become a very good story teller. So it's a crazy thing for business is not to be .

doing what makes for a good story. I know this is a big question, but i'd love to hear a sort of the essentials from your perspective.

I think the first thing people really have to sort of understand and embody is the idea that no one ever wants to hear anything. You have to say or show them unless you give them a reason to do so. I work with a lot of a vice president who's going to take the stage at the javits center.

And because there's five thousand people's in a chair and he has a microphone, the assumption, as they will listen to me and I have to, of dissuade people from believing that, because I have been in many audiences where i'm sitting in a theatre and I am not listening to anything anyone is saying, because that is genuinely not entertaining. So the first thing we have to do is storytellers is acknowledged that IT is are imperative to say things in such a way that make people want to hear us. And then in terms of telling a great story, what people really do need to think about is the idea that every story is about a singular moment in our lives, are in the lives of our business, which means there's a moment of change.

A story is designed to explain that moment of change with the greatest clarity possible. So about ninety five percent of a story is really just the set up to the singular moment that we're trying to achieve at the end. And this applies to every book you read, every movie you watch.

They're all essentially aiming to a moment where someone is going to encounter a situation where they have to make a decision that's onna result in a fundamental change in their life. The problem most people have is instead of telling a story which is about change, they report on their lives. I'm gone to tell you some stuff that happened to me over the course of some chronological period, and that is why we have spouses and parents.

So unless something meaningful happen that touches your heart and touches your mind in some significant way, you don't really have a story. So figure out what a story is, understanding what a story is not, and then really believing that your audience doesn't care about you unless you give them a reason to care about you. All those things are pregnant. If you want to delegate story.

can you share a few of the strategies you ach and teach people to help them be Better storytellers?

I tend to think that the beginnings of stories are the most important parts of a story. I used to sort of think that beginning and endings were equal, but I ve had to come to the realization that if people aren't listening to you, the end of your story is irrelevant. Sort of like a story is a plane ride from a to b.

But if they don't get on your plane, IT does not not matter if you ve taken a lovely journey, because no one was there to hear IT. So I tend to think the first thirty seconds, one minute of your story, however, along IT takes the sort of get out launched off the ground, is critical. And so if we're telling a story, I tell people one of the easiest things they can begin to do is simply begin your story with location and action meeting.

Where are you and what are you doing? It's a beautiful way to begin a story because, first of all, its silence is everyone. Our brains are trained to listen to story.

So as if you begin a story with location and action, it's a signal to everyone else is brain to shut the hell up. Because the story is being told. And our ancient brains say, this is gonna important.

This is gonna valuable. So we start with location. I'm standing in a kitchen. You automatically can see a kitchen.

You probably see your own kitchen or your parents kitchen, or maybe a kitchen you see on television. But I want to leverage your imagination. And then we begin with action as well, because people want stories to begin.

And most people don't start stories with action. They begin with explanation, but that's not how movies begin. Movies begin with something is happening, and we're going to teach you along the way what you need to know. That's what story tells have to do. So if they just begin with location and action on every story that they tell, they're instantly gonna come much Better story tell us, and people are .

going to listen to them. Wow, you said so many things that that are so important, that analogy to movies and how movies with action that gets you engage. And I love that you're reinforcing something.

We've talked a lot about that. Our brains are wired for story. We're not good with lists. We're not good with bullet points. What role do emotions like suspence and curiosity play and effective storytelling?

Our goal is storytellers is to get people to want us to say the next sentence, to wonder what the next sentences. And so one of the best ways to do IT is through suspense. And suspense, essentially, is just the strategic inclusion of some information with this strategic exclusion of other information.

So people always tell me what my story isn't suspenseful, and I say, no story is inherently suspenseful. IT is the way the story teller crafts IT that creates suspence. The best example I have is crossword puzzle.

Crossword puzzle is nothing more than a suspense device. IT says there's a five letter word for the color blue. So you now know you have a clue and you know it's five letters. I've created suspence in your mind and right now, in the minds of everyone listening to us. If you figured that out, you feel great.

And as a story, tell her i'm t because when you solve the riddles that I create and my story's dopamine is released and you suddenly feel good about yourself, and i'm the one who caused that to happen. So what makes you like me more? And the great thing about suspenses, the closer you get to having that suspense solved, the more suspense becomes inevitable at the end of a mystery novel, that is the absolute moment of maximum suspence, you have all the clues. Murder is about to be revealed, and you're absolutely as close to the edge of versy as possible.

So if I tell you that that five word for the color blue starts with an a, now i've actually increased a spence by giving you more information, right? And so now your audience is thinking, what is the five letter word for the color blue beginning with the letter a? right? So the more information that we sort of drip into a story, the greater the level of suspence, which is create the greater level of wonder, which means people want to hear more about what we're trying to say.

Can you translate that into something someone in business might do? So i'm creating a marketing presentation or in all hands meeting update. How might you use suspensions in that regard? I mean, you start by saying, hey, i'm going to share the results of our quarter with you, but first i'm going to do this. Or or how do you make that reality?

Steve jobs, when he launched the iphone, the initial iphone, the first thing he says when he comes out onto the stages, I have been waiting two years to share with you what i'm going to talk about today. Something has caused the CEO of this amazing company to wait two years in order to talk about IT, right? That instantly creates a sense of wonder what is going to happen.

So rather than saying i'm here to report on the quarterly results, I might say something like i've got three things to tell you about the quarterly results that already creates expense because that creates three mental buckets. And everyone's s mind IT is just inherently a need to figure out what's gonna in those buckets. And then if whoever reporting says I hate to report the quarterly results, I have two great things to tell you.

And one thing we need to work on that is also suspense now, which is strategic inclusion of information alongside the strategic exclusion of information we don't want to begin our talks with. We're going to talk about three things today. And then you say the three things, well, you've just killed all the suspence. Also, if you're building a deck, for example, people killed, suspends all the time with a deck by putting up words on a slide that they are simultaneously speaking. So if we can just be thinking about, how can I tell my audience some of the things that are coming, but now all of the things that are coming, and if I can be strategic about saying things that create wonder in the minds of the audience, now i'm going to hold for a longer period of time.

I'd like this use of the word wonder. It's a powerful way to think about what we're trying to accomplish from. We communicate.

yeah. And by the way, did you get the five little word for for blue? A have you figured?

I think it's sure, uh, very good.

I just had to make sure I didn't want your audience members to be suffering. Yes, very good.

The color of the cup. Yes and I have to admit part of the reason I knew I was as sure as IT was a word for me a while back. Um i'd love to get your insight into story and story structure. What do you think about how structure helps or doesn't in story telling?

Let's say i'm telling a personal story that i'm going to use in a leadership context. I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened to me and i'm going to glean from at some wisdom that i'm going to stop on my team. Just like a filmmaker, you want to think about each location that you occupy in your story as a scene.

And so each one of those scenes can be carefully crafted. You can actually use comic book panels, which a lot of my visual learners will use. People will draw what happens in the story, sometimes the list words that they have to say in each scene.

So thinking about that terms of structure is helpful. IT also allows you the ability to begin to manipulate the scenes, because often times the story is best told, not chronologically. So when you start to think about a story is a collection of movable scenes that can be adjusted and sometimes even eliminated completely, that really helps people sort of get a hold of story tunk.

And I I just want to get a point of clarification. I understand location when you're telling a story that takes place in the real world. But in a business context, location could I imagine, also mean we're going to start by looking at the financial data and they're are going to move on to a different location, which might be the implementation space.

So so location doesn't have to be like a physical space in the world. That could be just a landing space for content. Is that correct?

IT is, although if you can get physical spaces into these moments, I think it's really powerful. One of my, one of my inclinations, for example, if I was reporting on the quarterly results, I would probably begin with something to the effect of, I was sitting at my desk when the results came in.

I opened up the results and hear some things that i'm gonna report you today that creates a movie in the minds of the audience, right? They now see you opening those results for the first time at a desk. And now IT feels like you're sitting at the desk with them. We don't remember powerpoint dex, but we remember people sitting at desks open up quarterly reports and being surprised by what they see.

In addition to are beyond analogies, are there other tools to help us see the story and and ultimately engage and remember IT Better?

What we start with when we communicating is we want to ask ourselves what the theme, meaning or message is that we're trying to deliver. I was working with a contract torney recently, and he was talking about how he needed to talk to his team about being more specific in the which in their contracts that they were sort of fAiling to do that. And so we identified the same meaning or message.

The theme was consistency, relentlessness, attention to detail, that kind of a thing. And so then I said, what what story can we tell from our lives? Or what metafor can we find that will apply to that? Now he didn't have anything, so I gave him my example, which you ultimately store.

But I said, when I go to a restaurant, I always tell the server that I don't want to pickle on my plate, because the pickle is the only item that restaurants arbitrarily just place on your plate without warning. You watch a hamburger, and for some reason, an enormous little pickle can be found lying beside IT. I hate pickles.

I cannot stand them. And the worst thing about pickles is they infect everything else on the plate. Your hamburger and your friend prize will taste like pickle if there's a pickle on the plate.

So no matter what I order in a restaurant, I say, and please, no pickle on the plate. That was the story that I would tell his contract team. The approach that I take towards pickles when i'm ordering food at the restaurant is the same approach I want you to take towards contracts meeting relentless attention to detail. Even if IT seems unnecessary, I do not want there to be a single loops in any contract, which means clam shoulder does not come with pickles.

And we're going to say that even if that sounds crazy, he loved IT and I said, what's your story? And he am just going to use that one now ideally the best version of this situation as he finds a personal story that is related to him because then he becomes more reliable to his team at the same time. That's the beauty of story's ling.

If you take an actual story or a metaphor from your life, and you use that in your business story, not only of your communicating more effectively, but you're also sharing of yourself, you become known as the boss who hates pickles, right? And if you do that often enough, people get to know you on a personal level, and they start to like you and be more connected to you. Let me add one more thing that I didn't mention. The beauty of that pickle story is now, every time a pickle across the play of one of his team members, they're gonna be reminded of his lesson in the importance of IT.

Do you recommend that people stock pile story? And if so, how and where do they find these stories to stock pile?

So the best way to find stories is, in my mind, is something I, something I call homework for life. I was sort of desperate a little more than a decade ago now for finding stories. I was telling stories on stage is all over the country.

And I didn't want to become one of those story tellers who tells the same story every time. So in an effort to find new stories, I gave myself this homework and an elementary school teacher for twenty five years. So i'm inclined to solve problems through homework.

Essentially, what I started doing was this is the prompt actually gave myself what was the most story worthy moment that happened over the course the day, meaning, if someone kidnapped my family and want to give them back, unless I told a story about something that happened over the course of that particular day, what would the story be? Even if it's not entertaining, I write down the moment. My thought was i'll get one moment per day.

Maybe i'll find one new story per month, twelve new stories per year. That would be fantastic. Instead, what I discover as our lives are just filled with stories, our lives are packed with stories that we don't notice.

Things are said to us. So we see things are, we do things, and they sort of go on acknowledge in the business of life. And so homework for life taught me that all of these moments are happening all the time.

And when we capture them suddenly, in addition to a lot of other benefits, we suddenly have stories to tell. And instead of getting twelve new stories per year, I get hundreds of new stories every year because I see things that I previously did not see. And i'm not a unicorn in anyway everyone who does homework for life, tens of thousands of people all over the world now, they all report the same results.

And so it's the thing that generates the most content for me. And then the beauty of homework for life is everyone says that time flies, but IT doesn't really what happens as IT goes by unaccounted for. So if I ask you how many days from twenty, twenty three, can you really remember from last year?

If you're really good, you can remember maybe one hundred days. So of course, time flies for you because you've essentially wiped out two hundred and sixty five moments of memory that you've thrown aside. Those days were worth something like things happened on those days that were worth remembering.

Most people can probably only remember about maybe thirty or forty days from last year, which means you're really wiping out so much of your memory in twenty and fifteen. And I was capturing about one and a half moments per day, one point five last year, I was seven point eight. It's not because my life is more interesting last year than IT wasn't twenty fifteen. It's because my lens for story telling, my awareness for what makes a story, my acknowledged for what has meaning in my life, all of those things have increased .

considerably. absolutely. IT is one thing to craft to compelling story, but it's another thing to deliver IT. What advice do you have that can translate to people's everyday lives in terms of how we actually tell a story? Not crafted, but tell IT.

right? So I practices, unfortunately, the best advice I can give someone, which is tell more stories. The person who tells the most stories is probably the best story teller. And when IT comes to the actual delivery of a story, there's really four components that you can sort of play with, but it's basically posting, pausing, pitch and volume.

But what you want to be thinking about is things like, well, at this part of the story, i'm sort of in a rush, so I should increase th Epace, right? Or i'm approaching the end of the story. And when you approach the end of almost any story, you should start to decrease the volume and decrease your pacing.

It's a signal to the audience that we're coming to the end, which is great for an audience, right? And so story tellers can signal these things too, is by reducing our speed and our volume at the until let people know. Okay, hang on, we're coming to the end here and i'm about to say something important. So thinking about those things, but practice is .

gonna critical math. This has been fantastic. Before we end, i'd like to ask you three questions when I create just for you. And two, i've been asking everybody who's ever been on this show? Are you up for answering those?

absolutely. I love this part.

What of your students taught you so you teach elementary school? I can imagine you've learned a lot from your students. Can you share one of the lessons you've learned from your students that you use in your everyday life?

Every day I go to school and I occupy a room with twenty one other human beings, and i've doing that now for twenty five years. And in doing so, what i've discovered is that through them, through their presence, i've discovered that life is best lived when IT is filled with a diversity of people. And I will not have had that opportunity had I not occupied a singular space with twenty to twenty five people every day for the last twenty five years.

That lesson, I think, is very powerful. But more importantly, I want to point out that you use story telling techniques to answer your question, and i'd like everybody to just reflect on that for a moment. You started by putting us in your classroom, and then you use vivid description in detail to help us understand the lesson that you learn.

So storytelling isn't just for making your point. You can use story telling in answering your questions and giving feedback. It's a tool that allows you to connect and communicate.

Yeah, I almost never answer a question absent to story my wife can tell you that that is absolutely case. The simplest trick I give to people is if someone ask you how you're doing, you should never say good or bad or well, I will always say when someone says how you're doing, i'll say, well, I was a little crazy this afternoon because my son had little league and my daughter had dances and then they both had scouts, which is my of way of saying, i'm apparent with two kids, and they are very involved in a whole bunch of things.

Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

I'm gonna say my wife, which feels like a terrible couple, I admit my wife is a tremendous communicator because he understands the value of exceedingly direct communication. SHE does not ever sort of try to avoid a difficult conversation, and everything that he says is tempered with good intent.

Final question for you, matt. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? And I can imagine for someone like you, you've got lots of ingredients. What would you say the first three?

I'll say vulnerability first, meaning you're going to be willing to talk about the things that a lot of people avoid talking about that is a draw to anyone when we're willing to talk about our failures. You know, when dominoes in two thousand and nine came out with their campaign that said, our pizza is terrible. That campaign succeeded because of the vulnerability that they were willing to express in that campaign.

I think number two is relatable. I tell a story about going through the windshield of my car, seventeen, and I actually die on the side of the road and and brought back to life through cpr. That is not a related, able story. And yet, IT is the most famous story that I tell. Because that story ends in the emergency.

When my parents failed to show up and my friends fill a role that has been empty for me for a long time, IT becomes reliable because everyone understands what it's like to be let down at some point by a parent or another loved one. So making sure that your stories are not related in terms of the content, like, oh, this happened to me, so maybe that happened to you, but instead thinking about what is the story really about, and is that thing that IT is really about reliable to other human beings. And in the last word i'll say, which i've set a bunch of times already, here is entertaining.

No one wants to listen to you unless you going to be entertaining. And that can be funny, that can be suspenseful. Sometimes entertaining is just, i'm going to tell you something you've never heard before. It's gna blow your mind.

Vulnerability, relate ability and being entertaining essential ingredients. Matt, thank you for sharing.

Thank you. Is my honor.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of thinking fast, talk smart, the podcast. To learn more about storytelling.

please listen to episode fifty with polar moya, an episode forty seven with Stephen s. nios. This episode was produced by Jenny luna, Michael rally and me, matt Abrahams. Our music is from floyd wonder, with special thanks to podium podcast company. Please find us on youtube and whereever you get your podcasts, be sure to subscribe and rate us also follow us on linked in and instagram and check out faster, smarter doi o for deep die videos, english language learning content and .

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