Summary
Notes
Transcript
Raise your hand if I am familiar to you. Oh my gosh. Now you have to change the lecture. There is a great deal of pressure. Whenever I work with YPO, I often think of you guys as the most demanding yet rewarding audience on the planet, partially because you're like, okay, great, what else? I'm going to give you a session on storytelling. If you've seen any of your storytelling before, you're going to recognize some of the elements.
Dominique said, "We're going to spend more time together." I want to take a class. I've heard it's the best class at Stanford. It's improvisation. Will you take the improv class with me? I said, OK.
What I did was I watched carefully. I thought of all the possible things I could do, I picked something, I planned it, I rehearsed it in my head, and then when it was my turn to go, I pretended that I was being spontaneous and was surprising myself with what was going on in my head. It worked in a sense. I was successful. I enjoyed it, but again, I did not actually improvise. I was still planning ahead. I was just doing it faster and faster.
Does this sound familiar? Junior year. I didn't do improv again. You're only allowed to take it once. I was trying to find what I should do here at Stanford. I declared the major symbolic systems. which would have been really smart. It was computer science, philosophy, psychology. I bailed on that because it looked like it was too far. I switched to psychology. But that didn't feel right. I wasn't sure what to do. Amen. I woke up In a hospital bed. With my Mom holding my hand.
Maya. My friends were in the room with me. Dominique was there. My head. It was killing me. I kept falling asleep and waking up. At some point I I realized that they've been telling me I was in a car accident. that I'd get my head, that I was in a coma for five and a half days, A piece of my skull was still missing. That's why my head hurt so much. And then when I got out of bed, I had to wear a hockey helmet. The skull is still in a freezer.
She said, "Dan!" Would you be my TA? This is incredible. Before I could answer, the guy next to me, whose name was Dan, stood up and said, "Sure!" He gave him the role book, he took roles, he was a law student. Via. The next class He dropped the class. On Wednesday. She looked at me, she said, "Dan, would you be my TA?" I said, "Yes."That was fate, I was the TA for that class. That's how I actually got into improv.
Not from doing it the first time,Second time. And having a little bit more removed from my My worry, my concern, my fear about looking silly. I had a different sense about what fear was. My sense about what was dangerous and shifted. If I got up and improv and I didn't know what to say and I made a fool of myself, it wouldn't be as bad as having a severe traumatic brain injury. or aseptic meningitis in the hospital.
I'm having a spinal tap. So I was able to improvise a little bit more. This event? Was Objectively a terrible event. What I put my parents through, I would never wish on any. But for me personally, That car accident was the best thing that Has what happened I genuinely, truly need this.
There's not a moment since that dayBut I haven't thought how lucky I am that I not only came through it, but it gave me all the opportunities and the new things that I could do. Fact is, I'm standing right here telling you this story as a direct result of having been through that experience.
Now I want to open with this story today because one of the things that I've learned about stories is that you have the choice of what your story means. You don't have the choice of the things that happened, but you get to pick what the meaning is. And that is the ultimate power. You get to pick where the story starts and where the story ends.
Dominique is not my wife.
She's a dear, dear friend who I've been in touch with ever since. She lives nearby. And in fact, when I was a performer and a dean of the School of Improv, she was on the board of the BATS School of Improv in San Francisco. And so we were board members together. And our lives have been closely intertwined ever since. We are not a romantic partner.
When my wife, Michelle, coaches storytellers to tell their true personal stories, the work is transformative. Because she's getting them to understand what that story really means to them. And when you understand that and share it in front of a live audience, it is a powerful exchange.
A, raise your hand. Partner B, raise your hand. All right, A's gonna go first. And what I'm gonna encourage you to do is tell the story of your voice. Story of your voice. What?
When you think about your voice, What comes up about it? What is your relationship to your voice?
Our stories were very, we found our stories to be similar.
You found them to be similar. This is a great moment. Remember, this is one of the things that helps us connect to a story when we see ourselves in the storyteller. Really valuable. What else? Extreme opposite. This is the other thing that connects us in stories is when we find things that are totally unique. We find people with completely different experiences. This is the range of possibility. We are looking for this as listeners. We are looking for things we can relate to and new discoveries.
For me, it was the emotion. You could see it in her eyes when she was talking about her voice. You could notice the emotion, the emotional aspect of things, and it connects. Great. Did she name the emotions or did you just felt it?
When we are telling a true story, We have emotions. If we're telling a true story from something that happened to us, the emotions are there. I don't want to hide them and suppress them. I want them to be there because that's what comes through. It's been said that people will never remember what you say.
Beautiful. Thank you. What else? With a really short time prep, You're having to pull from whatever comes to your mind, and it's very easy to be vulnerable and just say that.
It's one of the tricks of this workshop is to give you very little time to prep. It's not necessarily ideal for high stakes story situations, but it's nice to realize that we can get into our stories much faster by going this route.
You feel what-there are different kinds of empathy. But what we're really trying to have here is you're in the storyteller's shoes.
You feel the experience when you're in the story.
Call out some reasons. To break the ice.
To break the ice. Great. What else? Helps build trust. Helps build trust. Emotions can be better than facts. Emotions can be better than facts. What else? Memorable. It's more memorable. What else? It motivates.
It motivates. You can enroll people. You can enroll people easier. Data only doesn't do it.
Here's a quick example. This is a project that I was involved in many years ago. I had forgotten about until I started teaching this workshop. They called it the Significant Objects Project. What they did in 2009, they took 200 different trinkets that were purchased for an average price of $1.25. This is like a drink tray, a little toy, horse, plastic horse, a pencil case. And then they invited authors to write fictional stories about the objects.
And they sold for an average price of nearly $40.
Stories are valuable.
tapping into your actual true memories and sharing them sharing true things that you remember without without worrying about the effect without worrying about how how it lands, but just tapping into true memories. The name of this game is Portkey.
You touch the object and it transports you instantly somewhere else. So that's the idea of this game. I'm going to start by giving you an object.
And then-Paring knife. Somebody in the group is going to take that object, they're going to think of a paring knife, and they're going to say, oh, paring knives... Takes me to that's the phrase takes me to and then let yourself be transported to a memory that you have of a paring knife Cutting fruit.
And then they take that word or object and they say, oh, slice takes me to getting pizza at 2 a.m. in New York. This is the exercise. And so for several minutes, you're going to play portkey with the group. You're going to tell your brief memory that is evoked, and then you're going to give a word to someone else. And they're going to say, that thing takes me to. Thank you. Try to be in the memory. Try to remember it.
The feeling in the room, I can sense, is completely engaged. Is interested in what people are saying. I'm going to find out what it was about the stories that made them engaging, but I just want to check in with you. What do you think made that work? Why was that interesting? You can't think about what you're going to say because you have no idea what the words mean. Love it. That's fantastic. And so you're fully listening. Great.
The stronger ones are the ones with emotions, colors, feelings.
So the example you gave, so the head blotter came out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, or...
Yeah. The descriptive details help make them engaging. What else?
What makes stories engaging? Sorry, what is it that makes us interested? Why are they memorable? Why are we drawn in? Yeah. Honesty. Unexpected terms. Yeah. Lovely.
When they get personal and you get a little vulnerable, yeah. You know, I'll... I was listening to a podcast on the way in this morning and it's from a A colleague from Harvard in the business school out there, Leslie John, she writes about revealing, like when we share too much.
And I often say, you want to share something, but don't share too much, because if you share too much, then it can do damage to the relationship.
And her research seems to show there is great value in sharing too much. Maybe not right in the moment, maybe the value will come later, We actually love that there's something about oversharing. It's kind of another way to think about this for me.
They were-They were-insights about the situation. There might be some self-deprecating moments or interesting observations. And I absolutely recommend Jennifer Ocker and Naomi Bagdonis' work on humor as a leadership mode, their book Humor Seriously. I think it's critical. Everyone has a sense of humor. You can develop your own personal style without having to imitate someone else's.
I've got the prompt up on the board. Unexpected is a really key element of storytelling. And so I want you to tell a true story. about a time that something didn't go the way that you thought it would. It's a two-minute story. It's a two-minute story. It can be any of the story where you thought it was going to go one way, and it turns out it went the other way. I am going to give you this advice for crafting this story. You don't have time to write it out and plan it all out. I do want you to see if you can tell the story in a way that you don't set up that it's not going to go the way you thought.
While you're listening, I want you to pay really close attention and listen not just to what happened in the story, but what's the message, what's the meaning in this story. What do you get from this story? And you have to be open to it from the beginning without forcing it in. Listen and say, gosh, what's the message? What do I get? What do I learn from this story? That's how I want the listener to listen. So we're going to do, we'll do it in round one. A, we'll tell their story for two minutes, and then B, we'll reflect on what the message was.
That is your fault. If you have a meaning that you want the listener to get, you have some responsibility there. So I'm going to call that out again at some point. But I just want to say this. If you use stories in the context where you're trying to drive a particular message, it's important to practice, test out your story, and see if that's the message that you're getting. Try it with sample audience members. Try it with the people in this room. This is a great cohort to call up and say, hey, can I tell you a story?
How do you deal with this? Without you being nice and saying, I think in a... I think you could offer it humbly.
You know what I mean? You check and see. Like, here's a meeting that I took from that. Does that resonate with your experience from that story? You can also just be checking with them. That may be a way that you could offer it. Yeah. Maybe another way to is to first ask them what the means is to them. All right. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a great way to think about it.
Great. Anticipation seems to hit one of the key elements, one of the dramatic techniques that I think people underutilize, which is suspense. You know something's coming, but you don't know how it's going to go.
A lesson. We can learn something from the story. I like the lesson to come at the end rather than the beginning. If you give the lesson at the top of the story, A lot of listeners are going to sort of close off and say, all right, well, we'll see if that's the message. But if you tell the story and then give the lesson at the end, this is the style of Aesop's fables.
And then the moral. This is what, Ira Glass, who does This American Life, says he realized that a story is something, something, something, and then the meaning. Something, something, something, and then the meaning. I like the lesson at the end. What else? I could hear your sense of anxiety. Anxiety. Conversation. Right. Did you get how is anxiety conveyed? Pitch the voice, perhaps, to the person talking to you. Which is like,Yeah.
Um, There are illustrators. We went over the top of the mountain and there was a huge lake in front of us. We're illustrating the geography of the imagination. And then there's comforter gestures. There's gestures that we make that are sort of soothing ourselves. It turns out, like if you talk to police, one of my colleagues has worked with police that do interrogations, they're looking for the types of gestures that a suspect is making while they're answering questions.
If they're doing comforter gestures, it means that they are uncomfortable about the thing that they're saying right now. And so comforter gestures are not illustrating the story.
Yeah, the repeated gestures, those end up being, those are distracting.
I don't use it as often as she does, but it's... When she gets people as an exercise to tell the story in the present tense, I'm 17 years old. I arrived on campus as a freshman. Step into the Wilbur dorm for the first time.
If you tell it as an exercise, you'll see more things. You'll be able to pull out more stuff. You'll have more presence. You may shift later to telling it in the past tense when you actually tell it, but it's a great way to work through and get more stuff. The challenge is, the reason I find it tricky is sometimes when people tell it in the present tense, they toggle back and forth between present and past, and then that can take listeners out of the story.
And so for one minute, I want one of you to complain about something. One minute, whatever you want, just go off. And the other person is just going to listen.
And then after the rant is over, they are going to reflect back the values that they heard from the speaker.
One minute, ready, go. OK, I travel a lot because of my work. And I love traveling light. But I don't know why my wife has a superpower. It doesn't matter where I go, she's always, like every time I get to the lobby, there are packages for me. So I want to complain because I never can travel with my regular carry-on because she always put me a duffel bag. Like last time I came here, seven packages.
You value the harmony at home, which is why you're so careful to make sure no one shares this back.
I think you also do value anonymity that may come with something like China. You value privacy. Is that also in there? Yeah. Anything else you guys heard is unvalued. Yeah. He values his life. Yeah. Yeah, great. You value the well-being of your wife. You also value privacy. You guys hear these things? When somebody complains about something, we have all different ways that we can respond. We can try to fix the problem. We can say, oh yeah, I hate that too. We can say what our experience is.
story in mind of something that's happened in your life for which you know there's before it and now there's after it. It is a moment of transformation for you. It doesn't have to be profound and dramatic. It just has to be true for you. that something has shifted at some point in your life. There was a shift, there was a change, there was a moment of transformation. And you're going to get three minutes to tell it.
I'll send it out to everybody. You can sign up. It's free. HiveResearch.com forward slash AI. If you go to HiveResearch.com, it's my nonprofit. And then I have an AI section. It has all the material, ground up training programs, everything just available for everybody.
It's going to be particularly valuable for the exercise I want you to do with this story this round, for the listing exercise. So I want you to think of the story right now in your mind, one that you're going to tell. I want you to imagine putting four specific details into the story. Four specific details in four different categories. Oh, you're a kid. They don't have to be in this order. They can be anywhere in the story.
But I want you to make sure that somewhere in your story,You have a visual detail, that there is some color somewhere in there. So I want you to describe something you can see. What does it look like? Think about it this way. Imagine that your job as the storyteller is to get the audience to have a movie playing in their head. Tell them what image you want them to see. Write down an image from your story.
All right. Couple of visual details. Another detail I want you to put in your story is an auditory detail. So a sound, a noise, something you could hear in your story. Think about your memory. Go back into the memory of that story. What was the noise from? Some examples could be like the screeching of brakes at the intersection. We are clearing their throat in the audience. Wrestling with memes. The bumping of elephants and the roaring of lions.
No. Yeah, great. All right, good. Auditory detail. Another detail that's going to be critical for you to put in, especially for this story and this round, is going to be a somatic detail. Describe a feeling in the body, something that you could feel in the body. temperature or texture or pressure or pain or pleasure or a feeling like an emotion. The key is not to just name the emotion, describe the physical embodiment of that emotion.
But it's not taste or smell. You can put taste and smell in your story. Those are good. It's hard to describe a smell, but they're useful. They're very closely connected to memory. It's a completely different category. It's digital. Give a number to describe something. How many? How far? How fast? How long? With a specific number. So you could describe the visual of looking up at the sky, but you could also say the exact number of steps. or the number of meters high. Or the temperature in the people are climbing the steps. or how many minutes it takes to go the entire way. or how heavy the burden is that they have to carry on the steps. A digital detail somewhere in your story.
In a moment, what you're gonna do is you are going to tell Your partner's story as if it happened to you. You are going to tell your partner's story as if it happened to you in this small group. Now, in order to do that, I actually, I need, I would love to have a volunteer who would be willing to come up and do this on stage with a little bit of coaching from me because I want to give you a sense of what I'm going for in this exercise, of how I want you to tell the story of your partner.
Amaru. For this story, it's Amaru. Amaru, great, okay, Amaru. But it's your story. Yeah. Okay, do I have to move off to the side? Come over here on the side. Okay. This is what you're going to do. You're going to say, there's a formal way to start. You're going to start... By saying your own name, you're saying my name is Sandra. And this is my story. Go off to the side. I want him out of view. I don't want her to look and glance at him and say, "Is that right? Is that right?" I just want you to tell the story.
My name is, and this is my story.
What is valuable in that exercise, either as the person telling someone else's story or hearing your story being told by someone else, or even listening to a story told by someone different than who experienced it? What do you notice?
And one of the things that we're actually doing is we're giving people a sense of how We show up as leaders in a role. That's a role. And you can be an authentic self that's different from who you are when, or who you are when you're alone, or who you are in different contexts. And acting is not about being fake. Acting is about behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances. You guys just honored each other's stories by listening carefully and imagining that you were there. And then...
This was actually just a reincorporation of the concept. You take something from the beginning of the story and you bring it back again at the end. So it was my summer camp story about doing that act and pretending to do the act. And then at the very end I did the slapping myself. But the concept is reincorporation. I'm going to share, I'm going to go back. Oh, yeah, I took them out. Here's what I, reincorporate, I'm going to give you an example story. Michelle and I have one son.
He He calls up and he says, Dad, I think I need to get a job. Okay, great, that sounds great. Here's what you do. Is there like a job board or maybe there's a resource in the, in the, no, no, no, no. I saw a listing already and you apply online. So I did and I got the job. What? Yeah, I start on Monday. at Jamba Juice. Thank you. He uh... I graduated from Cal as an undergrad rhetoric major. And just a couple months ago, he graduated with a master's degree from Cal in journalism and went to his- to his graduation in the same courtyard where he had been hiding in the trees. seven years before.
and try to put a reincorporation in there somewhere. So I'm going to invite you right now to think. I like to have a notepad. I like to sort of have something I can write with and just think a little bit. What's one I can do? Don't be precious about it. You can be pretty light-handed. But something from the beginning that comes back at the end. Take a story you already have and think, what's a seed I can plant early that will come back at the end and try it out?
Oftentimes, the idea of reincorporating helps you craft the events of life into a story. Life is just a series of reincorporations. This is the resources that I had also shared last time. It's still good. I may have added another one, which is on the very bottom. It's a podcast called Stories from the Stage. It's actually also a YouTube channel where this is the show that Michelle is one of the directors where she will coach storytellers to get up on stage and tell a true personal story in front of an audience that then gets broadcast on national television.
Um, And then again, and then again. And this summer, I'm going back for the fourth time. Life is just a series of reincorporations. Ten years ago when I did it for the first time, I thought, "Wow, I've done it. I've achieved my goal." Now what? We just keep going in cycles. Sometimes the worst thing that could ever happen to you may be the best. Oh, thanks. I'd love to stay in touch with everyone and think about this as just part of our story together. And I look forward to reincorporating either here on campus or somewhere else in the world. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. We might get the urge to clap along, but don't.