 Over the past few years, Storytelling has emerged as a critical communication skill. Stories help us establish emotional connections with our audience, community, customers, and contributors. These connections can build over time and create brand loyalty that goes beyond purely ‘business’ transactions.
Story, however, is much more than a tool for communication. It also is one of the most effective, efficient, and powerful tools we have to build effective teams. Here are four ways that incorporating storytelling as a core practice can deepen engagement and increase effectiveness in teams:
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 There’s a crippling misconception floating out there in the world that tells us that the only good stories are based on Big, Dramatic Events. A major humanitarian crisis. Or a story of individual tragedy that, through heroic action, becomes a tale of almost superhuman triumph. While it’s true that those stories have power, sometimes the stories that resonate most strongly occur in small moments of reflection or realization.
What makes an event or moment story-worthy? Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch. Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety, and contentment. Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second the amazing plenitude of being here. –John O’Donohue
A few years ago, I found that my life had become curiously flat. I had everything I needed to survive–food, shelter, creature comforts–and moved through my days in a haze. Each day looked more or less the same. Get up. Breakfast. Work. Sit at a desk. Eat snacks. Go home. Sleep. Sometimes I spent time with friends. Not a bad life. A domesticated life. A luxurious life, in fact. But the familiarity of the day to day routine, repeated endlessly, dulled my senses. Food became bland and I took to eating absurdly spicy dishes just to break through the haze. I’d find myself blinking at the end of each week wondering where so many hours had gone, unable to remember much of what had happened over the preceding days. I became a ghost drifting through the faint contours of my own life. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
September 2020
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