Interesting conversationalists can vary their rate of speech to make the conversation more compelling and interesting. This works effectively because your speech and vocal patterns are often predictable. And we all know predictable equals boring and monotonous.
Divide your speech into chunks, and don’t be afraid to pause for effect. If you want to communicate something important, try speaking in a slow and more paced out manner.
Learn to use inflection to pack more power into your message or lend it greater meaning. For example, ending your sentence on a high note may indicate a question, whereas finishing on a flat note may signal to make a statement or issuing a command. If you want to sound more confident or authoritative about something you’ve just said, end on a flat note or avoid speaking in a singsong manner. Keep your tone low-pitched and volume low to moderate to come across as effective communicators. People who speak in a loud and boisterous manner seldom get others to listen to them. Sure, you may grab attention, but it will be for all the wrong reasons. If you want to be heard and taken seriously, keep your volume low to medium, a steady/uniform rate of speech, a low pitched tone and clear inflection. The throw of your voice is crucial when it comes to conveying the right ideas.
9. Discussions instead of debates – I once met a highly argumentative person at the social gathering. He was arguing about everything under the sun and looked like he had a bone to pick with almost every person he interacted with. Needless to say, my brief interaction with him turned out to be nightmarish and left me drained.
Rather than engaging in a healthy discussion and dialogue, some people aspire to make every conversation a debate to massage their egos or enjoy a sort of one-upmanship over others. You will seldom win people or conversations by making people feel miserable about themselves. Avoid picking on people’s comments and instead listen to them.
Admit you could be wrong to get them to drop their guard and become more receptive to your point of view. The conversation will become much easier and positive after this. No one wants to engage in a negative, draining and combative conversation.
Create a platform where both you and the other person feel comfortable about expressing opinions in a healthy, courteous and amicable manner. Arriving at a conclusion or mutual agreement on every matter isn’t mandatory. If you can’t arrive at a common agreement, disagree respectfully. Learn the knack of “agreeing to disagree” if you want to be a good conversationalist and communicator.
Chats, share opinions, discuss ideas, swap insight rather than viewing every networking event or social gathering as your battleground for pitting your stance against the other person’s.
Avoid judging or criticizing people. Don’t impose your views on others. Instead, stick to facts and figures to put across your point more scientifically. This will make you appear more objective and less biased. For example, let’s say you are discussing vegetarianism with people. Instead of saying, “You non-vegetarians do not know the value of life. Imagine, killing a living being to satiate your taste buds. How insensitive is that!”, say something like, “According to research, sticking to a vegetarian diet is healthier in the long run because you get more… and are less prone to… and animals aren’t harmed in the process (this is just an example of putting across your argument).”
The other person will be more receptive to your ideas and views when you make your arguments more rational and scientific rather than emotional. You can start off by admitting up front that you could be wrong, and you’d like to examine the facts to correct your stance if it’s incorrect. It will soften the other person’s stance too, and they will also become more open to the idea of being proved wrong. Let things be open if a common consensus cannot be accomplished. Disagree in a polite, respectful and rational manner.
While a good conversation is about building on commonality, it is also about embracing differences. You will meet with diverse interests, backgrounds, political views, experience, religions, cultures, races, beliefs, ideas, and lifestyles. Look for a common ground, but also learn to celebrate and appreciate differences. Develop tolerance, respect, and appreciation for the other person’s views or beliefs.
Concentrate on positive topics. It simply means instead of talking about past issues, regrets and controversial topics, stick to positive topics and future goals. Avoid talking about the coffee you spilled this morning, and instead talk about the inspiring book or movie you look forward to reading or watching post work. At times, it is alright to speak about negative issues. However, overall stick to positive topics. The negative topic discussion should have a clear objective. For example, you may want to bond with the other person by getting to know him or her more intimately, which may require a discussion of less than positive topics.
Always maintain a broader and forward-thinking mindset. It should be less cribbing and more solution oriented. No one enjoys being with people who complain all the time. It is draining. Focus on leaving behind an enjoyable, positive and inspiring impact on people. Stay less judgmental and biased, and more empathetic. Try to understand where people come from instead of harshly judging them according to your own beliefs, views, lifestyle, background and so on. It will help you become a better person to relate to.
Chapter 2:
Use the Power of Storytelling to Connect with People
“After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” - Philip Pullman
Stories are a wonderful medium for expressing not just your views, but also complex ideas, values, experiences, and thoughts. They impress people and establish a human connection. While facts, figures, and statistics adopt a more scientific and rational approach, stories tug at people’s heartstrings! Facts are a more clinical and mechanical way of conveying ideas, while stories are more relatable. The listener or audience can relate to people and experiences in the stories, and hence understand what the speaker is trying to communicate even more effectively.
As human and highly social creatures, we respond positively to stories. Everyone loves to hear an engaging and powerfully narrated story.
Why is storytelling an important medium of communication?
All of a sudden, stories have made their way into the world of marketing, business, and promotions. This is partly owing to the explosion of social media, where brands focus on creating engagement through connections. Stories have, since time immemorial, been a part of our society and cultural ethos. Even as children, if our parents or guardians wanted to persuade us into doing something, the stories were their best weapons.
Stories are omnipresent – they are all around the place, from books to movies to news channels to history. As a communication tool, stories are probably as old as humanity itself.
Did you know that 90 percent of buying decisions are emotionally influenced? This means engaging prospective customers or clients by establishing a human or emotional connect is integral to the process of persuading them to buy. This is exactly why you’ll find plenty of commercials and sales pitch with compelling visuals, fascinating products descriptions, photos, and often a relatable story thrown in for good measure.
Notice how the pitch of almost every internet marketer who claims to have mastered a system or promises to make people ‘millionaires’ has pictures of shiny, luxury cars or private jets, a big house, beach vacation pictures (where they are sipping on an exotic drink) and more. The pitch begins with how they started with nothing and didn’t even have enough money to buy food for the family when they lost their job. Then goes on about how they discovered or invented a system that completely transformed their life. Why do you think they share all this? It’s to make their pitch more emotion-laden, identifiable and connection-worthy. While reading it, you may say, “Hey that’s me. I can also be a millionaire like Joe or Jill. If he/she can do it, so can I.” Then you go about signing up for their program because you want a life like theirs.
The internet is filled with stories of internet marketers and bloggers. W
hat makes case studies so effective from the business point of view? It is nothing but a company’s story, which tells you how they tackled a particular challenge or what they did differently or how they used something to their advantage or the strategies they used to grow their profits. It helps other businesses and budding entrepreneurs sit up and take note, “Hey, we are sailing in the same boat, we can use these principles to grow our business too.” Get the idea?
If you want to be an effective communicator, you should be able to weave storytelling into your conversation or speech to establish a connection with your listener or audience. As a salesperson, you should be able to use the power of storytelling to impress your prospects. You can attract people like magnets once you master the art of narrating compelling stories.
Ask yourself this question. You are impressed by facts, but do you connect with them on an emotional level? Chances are if you start by reading an article containing facts and figures, you won’t even recall most of it by the time you finish reading it. Do we remember numbers and facts on our fingertips? Rarely! Now contrast this with a powerful story you read at the beginning of an article. Will you remember it by the time you finish reading it? Most likely yes! Humans remember stories more effectively than facts.
According to research, stories trigger positive emotions are more extensively shared than those stimulating negative emotions and feelings. Notice how content that generates higher emotional arousal almost always goes viral or is extensively shared. This simply means that stories that help people experience a positive feeling or emotion, such as wonder and happiness are more likely to do well than stories that make people feel angry or depressed.
Like it or not, stories are most often more powerful than anything you can say. It can make or break the point you are trying to communicate. This is because stories evoke feelings. We all know the potency of feelings and emotions in the process of communication. If I ask you to go back and think about teachers, educators, mentors, and professors who left the most positive impact on your academic and personal development, you will most likely name people who narrated a lot of stories. This is because you remember the lessons they imparted through stories more effectively than someone who stuck to plain facts and figures without reaching out for your emotional chords.
Stories add more punch to your message. For example, let us say you are talking about the power of good customer service. Instead of simply saying how important good customer service is in today’s age of social media and the internet (which everyone knows fairly well), if you narrate a story about how a family’s vacation was ruined when they were thrown out of the flight an airline because they wouldn’t give up seats they duly paid for, and how they took on the airline on social media to create negative publicity about the airline, resulting in tremendous support for the family and loss of business for the airline, you will put across your point more compellingly. Examples and stories move people.
There is a difference between telling people that some airlines will go out of the way to serve their passengers and narrating a story about how an airline turned around the aircraft to ensure a passenger slipping into coma gets quick medical attention. Doesn’t the latter convey the same message more effectively? It moves you or evokes certain feelings about great customer service. Feelings are very powerful when it comes to communicating your point or persuading people.
According to research conducted by Jerome Bruner, we are 22 times more likely to remember a piece of information/fact, if it is presented in the form of a story. That makes stories pretty powerful tools if you want people to retain information. You probably remember only those lessons from the school where the teacher weaved a powerful story around a concept, incident or idea he/she intended to teach. It’s like packing a lot of information into little packages with fancy wrappers –all condensed and easy to consume.
Think of your favorite television series and movies. What is it that you love most about them? Most likely their stories! The stories are designed to help you enjoy or relate to the characters and/or situations. You probably identify with the characters or relate to them at some level. We are aware that these characters are fake or it’s a fictional account, yet we cannot help but identify with them owing to the emotional resonance.
Have you seen the Airbnb ads as of late? The company doesn’t tell stories of its customers. They let their customers themselves share accounts of how they experienced a destination like a local rather than a visitor. This enhances the brand experience of a place like a local feel, to make Airbnb come across as a brand with a genuine human touch. This is the power of stories.
Facts may help you tell, but stories manage to sell. By acing the art and craft of storytelling, you spark people’s interest in a way of thinking or brand. This happens through connection and engagement. Draw people compellingly into the narrative with your slick storytelling skills. Have a clear purpose for narrating any story.
Which of these do you think will have a greater impact on say a person suffering from a terminal ailment? Statistics about how many people suffer from the same ailment survive or a story about someone who suffered from the same ailment and how they overcame it? You know the answer!
Whether it’s a fictional novel, movie or a friend narrating his/her experience, everyone is captivated by a good story. Have you ever wondered though about why we feel engaged and persuaded by a powerful narrative?
It isn’t tough to understand. Let’s say you are listening to a PowerPoint presentation being delivered by your project leader or manager. There are lots of bullet points throughout the presentation. This stimulates specific regions in your brain referred to as the Broca’s and Wernicke’s area. On the whole, it works on our language comprehension brain regions, where we are able to give meanings to words. That’s about it.
However, if your manager narrates stories throughout the presentation, things change drastically. It not only stimulates your language processing parts, but also other brain regions that we utilize when we are actually undergoing an experience similar to the one being narrated. So your brain processes the story as if you are actually going through it.
For example, if the person is talking about how beautiful or exotic vacation destination is, our sensory cortex gets activated, and we are able to ‘experience’ the place in our mind as if we are actually experiencing it in real. Similarly, if the person speaks about speed or motion, our motor cortex gets activated.
Why do think metaphors win conversations? Apart from the speaker’s creativity, it allows the listeners to live things through sensory experiences. If you talk about an opera singer who has “a satin voice”, you are triggering your audience’s sensory cortex. Why do you think writer’s use sentences such as “She gasped for breath”, or “His cheeks became hot and flaming red with rage.” It triggers the reader’s sensory cortex.
One of my friends began her career as a teacher at an elementary school. She spoke about how things belonging to grade 2 students went constantly missing from class. It happened on several occasions, and she realized that a student from the class was stealing other children’s things. She addressed the class on more than one occasion urging whoever was doing it to return things belonging to others as it was wrong to take what belonged to other people.
When this didn’t work, her mentor suggested that she use the power of storytelling in helping the child mend his/her ways. My friend then went on to narrate a powerful story about how stealing was morally wrong, and how it impacts the person who steals and the person whose things get stolen. The next she found all the stolen belongings kept on her table before the class began, and the errant child even confessed and apologized to her saying they would never touch things belonging to other people ever. The child grew up to be someone the teacher is very proud of today. Imagine the impact of a single story on the child’s character and persona.
What Are the Basic Elements of a Good Story?
We’ll take an in-depth look at the elements of a
good story in the next few chapters, however, let's shed some light on the fundamentals for starters. Now just because I say storytelling is a powerful form of communication doesn’t mean any story will work. There are bad and ineffective stories too that do not add any value to the message you are trying to convey. Create engaging, appealing and powerful stories is also an art and requires practice and consistent efforts. However, like most things, it isn’t impossible. Here are some basic elements of a good story that can inspire your listeners or audience.
Character – The most important element around which any story revolves is the character or characters. There are powerful and compelling characters in any good story or at least they become powerful in the end. This character helps establish a connection between you and the listener. Picking characters that resonate with your audience is the key to getting this element right. Choose a character or characters your audience or listeners can identify with or relate to on a personal level.
Remember the internet marketer’s example I shared previously in the chapter. The reason they are killing with their products and services is that people can instantly relate to their stories (whether these stories are true or false can be debated, but the idea is people buy their stories before buying their products or services). Someone who has lost their job or is struggling to make ends meet or feed their family identifies with the marketer’s struggle. They may see themselves as ambitious, driven, and harboring aspirations of a desirable lifestyle just like the internet marketer. Hence, they may relate to these marketers at a personal level through the latter’s stories.
For creating/narrating about a character your audience can easily identify with, you need to know your target audience thoroughly. You need to know their problems, desires, demographics, aspirations and more. For example, an internet marketer may realize that his/her target audience mostly comprises people who aren’t too happy with their jobs and are looking to make a full-time passive income from the internet for greater financial freedom.
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