Archive for March, 2010

Last week I facilitated a half-day workshop on presentation skills to forty non-profit professionals who have been trained in the area of trauma informed care for children, adults and families.

The workshop was sponsored by my clients, The Traumatic Stress Institute, a division of Klingberg Family Centers.

All forty of these amazing individuals had been trained in Risking Connection, a philosophy that supports the transformation to trauma-informed care and advocates for relationships and connections as the best treatment for healing traumatized children and adults.

In this workshop, we elected to focus on a specific skill with the field of presentation and public speaking – story telling. This blog post is designed to motivate and equip you to:

“Never make a point without telling a story. Never tell a story without making a point.”

Why tell stories?

Stories remain one of the most powerful forms of communication. They not only are effective in capturing and holding the attention of children, but can mesmerize adults as well.

The purpose of telling stories during your presentations is to engage, to entertain and to teach. All of these attributes make story telling a dynamic technique for professionals who desire to be high engagement presenters.

Mastering the art of story telling can increase your presentation persuasion power and make you a more engaging speaker. Stories are also a sure fire way of opening your presentation.

Brain researcher John Medina, author of Brain Rules, suggests that story telling in presentations is a very effective way to “wake up” your audience and re-engage them. His brain scan studies show that the human brain fatigues every ten minutes or so. We must do something at minute 9 and 59 seconds, or we lose them. Medina recommends story telling and use of metaphors. (p.s. buying Medina’s book is a no-brainer. I highly recommend it!)

What’s makes an effective story?

Your story must be clear, it must be compelling and it must be concise. Your stories should also be relevant to the context and audience in which you are telling the stories. Lastly, your story telling effectiveness will be influenced by your story content and your delivery of the story. Effective stories can be told in the shortest amount of time possible. Don’t drone on with your story or your audience will be wondering “where is she going with this?”

How to shape your stories
Here is a simple formula that you can practice to tell effective stories as part of your high engagement presentations. It’s called the Incident-Point-Benefit story telling technique.

The great part about this story-telling template is that you can create many different points and benefits from the same story, depending upon your audience and what you are trying to achieve.

Each time you tell your story, you can draw a different point and different benefit, depending upon what you are trying to achieve in your presentation.

Caution: never tell a story that you are still hurting from. If you find yourself feeling angry, bitter, sad to the point of tears, then you are not ready to share this story in a public presentation. Save it for later.  Being overly emotional during story telling can negatively affect your audience and alter your outcome.

Resources to help improve your presentation and public speaking skill set

• Download the free workbook Power of Personal Narrative
• Download the 3-part story telling template. Use this template to write out your signature stories.
• Click here to access more free resources to help you improve your presentation

Need more?

This story-telling training module is now available as part of our half-day training workshops series - ideal for working professionals who are time-starved but want to advance themselves professionals. Here are the other modules now available to you in this series:

• Workshop #1:  Success by Design: How to Effectively Plan and Organize Your Presentation Content
• Workshop #2:  The Power of Personal Narrative: Story Telling for Greater Presentation Impact
• Workshop #3:  Improve Your Presentation Visuals: PowerPoint Do’s and Don’ts
• Workshop #4:  Masterful Delivery: vocal power and body language intelligence for presenters

If you can spare a full day or two days to advance your presentation skill set, check out our Level 1 and Level 2 training workshops to mastering the art of high engagement presentations.

We also offer 1:1 executive presentation delivery coaching to help you prepare for a “high stakes” presentation. When your upcoming presentation really matters to your career or business, your best investment is to engage an expert to help you prepare, practice and polish.

Contact Kathy McAfee at (860) 408-0033 or leave a comment below and we’ll be in touch with you shortly to discuss your specific needs and challenges.