Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story may be written for fiction writers, but there are gems throughout this book that are just as valuable for speakers too!
For ten thousand years, humans brains have focused us on doing things that will help us stay safe, find food and shelter, and maybe, if we’re lucky, thrive. Brains are extremely efficient, practical organs. Our ancestors’ brains needed to evolve a way to sift through and interpret the information about their environments as quickly as possible. And then they needed an efficient way to teach others – our children, our communities – the same things they learned about staying safe and finding food and shelter.
Here’s what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says in Lisa Cron’s great book: “The problem [was] how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable. Storytelling was the solution – storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly.”
The brain grabbed onto story to synthesize information about how the world works so that we’d remember it and be able to easily share it.
Here’s Lisa Cron: “We think in story. It’s hardwired into our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us. When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.”
We still do this today. When your audience is sitting at your user conference, what they want, what they need, is a story about how to undertake a successful implementation of your amazing product. What were the pitfalls along the way? How did your customers get around them? And, once they did, how great are things now?
That’s what your audiences are looking for – stories to show them the way. There are lots of poseyblog posts on story and story formulas. Here are a few links to get you started:
Go tell stories!
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