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About this lesson
Certain classic elements can help bring your story to life and communicate your message more clearly.
Quick reference
Extra Ingredients for a Spicy Story
Want to take your storytelling to the next level? These elements can add depth, tension, and impact to your message — especially in business and professional presentations.
Add a Villain
- Not every story needs a cartoon-style bad guy — but having a challenging or antagonistic character creates tension.
- A “villain” might be a difficult client, a stubborn colleague, or even a flawed process.
- Just be careful: if you're talking about a real person, change their name to avoid conflicts.
Show a Transformation
- Strong stories often show how someone — especially you or a key character — was transformed in the process.
- The character may gain insight, confidence, or new skills.
- Even subtle personal changes can add emotional weight to your story.
Include Setbacks and Struggles
- If your story is too clean (“Problem → Solution”), it may fall flat.
- Real setbacks or failures make your story more engaging and relatable.
- Audiences love hearing about how you overcame obstacles, not just that you succeeded.
Talk About How You Felt
- Emotion is essential — don’t skip it.
- Share how you felt during the challenges, the setbacks, and the outcome.
- This makes your story more human and easier to connect with.
A Personal Confession from the Instructor
- TJ admits he doesn’t love stories — he’d rather just give people the facts.
- But facts alone don’t stick. He’s learned over time that stories are the only thing people actually remember.
- You can’t just hand over data and expect it to have impact — stories engage both the mind and the memory.
Why Stories Work
- Storytelling forces your audience to actively visualize what you’re saying.
- When you tell a story, your audience is running a movie in their mind, using their own mental “footage” to connect with what you’re describing.
- This shared effort makes the story — and the message — more likely to be understood, remembered, and acted on.
- 00:04 Here are a few more elements you could put in stories.
- 00:06 You don't have to for every story in a business or professional presentation, but the more these elements you have, the more compelling the story is.
- 00:16 Certainly you see these elements in great Hollywood blockbusters and in wildly popular novels.
- 00:23 So with your characters, one of them should be a villain.
- 00:28 Now, you don't have to overdo things and exaggerate if it's a client or a colleague.
- 00:35 If you do, be sure to change the names.
- 00:37 But you do want to describe what makes this person a problem.
- 00:41 Why are they a source of conflict?
- 00:45 If they are doing bad things, then flesh that out.
- 00:49 You also need to talk about how the central characters were transformed through this journey.
- 00:54 Now, that doesn't happen in every single story related to what you do in your business.
- 01:00 But if you can talk about any transformation you had, even better.
- 01:05 And the more you can talk about how you felt along every aspect of the way, even better.
- 01:12 Also, if you have some setbacks along the way, if it's just as simple as here was a problem, here's the solution.
- 01:20 It's not as powerful as if you talk about a series of problems and setbacks and then the ultimate success.
- 01:29 So don't put so much pressure on yourself that you have to have every single one of these elements in every story.
- 01:36 But when you can add these additional elements, it will make your story stronger, more believable, more interesting, and more memorable.
- 01:46 I have a confession to make.
- 01:49 I probably shouldn't tell you this, but you're this deep into the course already.
- 01:53 Now of course you always can get a money back guarantee.
- 01:56 But here's the confession.
- 01:59 I don't really like stories that much.
- 02:01 I wish we didn't have to tell stories.
- 02:04 It'd be much faster, cleaner, simpler to just give people the facts in a presentation, or take everything on a memory stick or an SD card and just stick it into people's brains to convey all the data.
- 02:19 Here's the thing about stories though.
- 02:21 I have found that there's absolutely nothing as effective at triggering the memory process in human beings.
- 02:33 You can tell people what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.
- 02:37 Doesn't really work.
- 02:38 You can get people handouts.
- 02:40 Put a whole bunch of text on a PowerPoint screen.
- 02:43 Doesn't really work if you're outside the classroom.
- 02:47 Stories actually work.
- 02:50 I test audiences all over the world and I can tell you the only thing anyone ever remembers the stories.
- 02:57 They don't remember the random fact, the random concept bullet points on a slide.
- 03:03 So this is why stories are so effective.
- 03:06 I'm being a little bit facetious earlier.
- 03:09 I do like a good story, but I do recognize it's not the single most efficient way in terms of time of conveying lots of data.
- 03:19 That is true.
- 03:20 But as a speaker outside of the academic world, it's not about how much data you convey.
- 03:27 It's about what actually sticks.
- 03:30 What can you get your audience to not only understand, but to remember so they can act on it?
- 03:38 That's the real power of story is it allows people to remember it because here's what's going on.
- 03:46 If you are doing a typical speech where you're just putting out fact after fact data point, people may be listening to you.
- 03:54 They may be understanding.
- 03:56 Some of them may be even be writing it down, although that's not that common, but you're doing all the work.
- 04:03 They're just sitting there passively.
- 04:05 The second you tell a story, you're now forcing everyone in your audience to do half the work.
- 04:13 They have to go into their database of videos and essentially run a little movie alongside.
- 04:20 Because if we talk about, you know, an old grumpy man in the office who's been there for 20 years and all he ever says is negative things, that's going to put images in your mind.
- 04:31 You're going to be running a little movie reel in it.
- 04:34 So the speaker has now manipulated, and I would say in an ethical way, there's nothing wrong or unethical about it, but the speaker has manipulated the audience into doing half the work of running a little movie reel in their brain.
- 04:52 This helps the understanding and the retention of the story, but also the concept.
- 05:00 And that's why stories are so important.
- 05:03 And that's why, ultimately, I do love stories.
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