Perhaps the best part of a great story is the way we can get lost in the characters’ lives and experiences. This is the addictive “escape” that draws us back to a gripping show, makes a movie so fundamentally exciting, or makes a book an absolute page turner. Characters inspire, challenge and move us. Sometimes we judge them. Sometimes we remember their stories for a long, long time to come.
So who are the stories really about? As Steven Pressfield has talked about in his recent book, the stories are about us. We identify with and understand the characters in a story through our own lens of experience—what makes the whole thing work is that we’re literally watching or reading our own lives into the situation. This is why we’re able to experience such deep emotions in the consumption of a story. It’s our story.
This is not a bad thing; in fact, if any artist truly examines themselves, they’ll find that at the root of their very efforts is a deep yearning to communicate a certain feeling with others. The others may be complete strangers, but that doesn’t make it any less about them.
Presenters could take a cue from the artistic playbook here. This simple truth is the reason we always say that presentations are stories. Your audience wants to read their own lives into your script. Strangely, they love feeling what they’re already feeling—but through someone else’s story. It’s comforting to know we’re not alone, and it’s especially nice to have the story go from our current experience (the part we know) to the characters’ future (the part we don’t want to know). It can be hard for us to separate the part of the story that has already happened to us, that we identify with, and the part that the presenter is putting forth as a solution or next step, the “where do we go from here”.
This is why storytelling is so effective, and this is why you should work a great story into your next presentation.
Question: Where do you place your stories in the presentation: beginning, middle or end?
