How to keep your audience engaged at your next presentation - tell a story!

There are lessons for business to learn from storytelling rather than text heavy
powerpoints that sends your audience to sleep.

Firefighters swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalogue of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.

Similarly hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond quickly and effectively.

Stories put knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day to day existence. Being the audience for a story isn’t  passive. Inside of us, we’re getting into the act.

Neurocore tip:
Research, including high tech real time brain scans, is now showing that emotions, triggered in the limbic area of the brain – also known as the mammalian brain – lock a story in memory and that our memories are holistic. The more fully we engage the audience’s entire brain in what we say – the more we get them firing on all cylinders – the more easy our story is to remember. Words and verbal constructions tend to be stored in the left hemisphere of the brain, spatial relationships and visual images in the right hemisphere.

Use storytelliing to add emotion to a fact and embed in audience's memory
Audiences check out after ten minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling them narratives or creating events rich in emotion. In other words your brain has a tendency to tune out after 10 minutes, ignore ‘boring’ subjects and requires a lot of pictures to retain information. Tip: tell a relevant story, or video clip and embed it with emotion. If you’re presenting via a webinar you can use a tool to push a poll or a question to your audience. Plan exercises at ten minute intervals. Conventional text heavy powerpoint should be thrown out and replaced with image rich slides. The brain doesn’t see letters.

Extend your story with digital storytelling strategies
Positioning your organisation as a story telling space, is a smart move. You might have the best ideas in the room but if they are only ideas expressed, you won’t have fully harnessed the creative power of your team. When it is time to make a decision communicate it through a story. That why the idea will be completely understood and absorbed. Telling your story digitally allows you to tap into a variety of compelling mediums allowing the listener to tap into the emotions of the story either via images on Flickr, Youtube videos, blogs, podcasts and many more mediums. If you’d like to learn more sign up for our free teleclass