Presentation Wisdom

Here’s the most recent presentation skills blog! To see the other blogs head over to the blog page!

  • Story-telling myth-busting: the big hero story

    You know the ones. The rags-to-riches story. The against-all-the-odds story. The bad-to-worse-to-victory story.

    We’re told to use them because they’re inspirational. Whoops, that turns out to be a mistake. Why? Because…

    Because pretty much be definition such a story deals with exceptional people over coming staggering odds. And, again by definition that means these people are not like me or you (probably). Unless you’ve climbed Kilimanjaro backwards in your pyjamas, using only your left hand and with your eyes close? No? Me neither.

    Nor have I won an Olympic gold medal. Or walked on the moon, or been the first women to, well, anything…

    But that’s okay, because pretty much every model of motivation that I’m aware of says that in the long term we need the intersection of three things:

    • motivation
    • opportunity to grow/learn
    • self-efficacy

    That last one is, basically, the belief that we can change. If we don’t think we can do it, we don’t even try. What that means for your storytelling is that if the hero is too “big” it’s hard for a “normal” person to identify with them. I lose my self-efficacy because my head tells me that I’m not like them.

    There’s a guy at my gym who runs free classes on a Saturday morning that I should really go to. They’re great and free. The thing is, he’s exSAS and I’m anxious I couldn’t keep up – so I don’t go! He’s too far removed from what I feel I could do. (Yeah, I know, it’s not necessarily a rational problem, but that doesn’t make it any less real.)

    I can’t count the number of presentations I’ve sat through from Olympic gold medalists who’ve told me that they had to get up at three o’clock in the morning six days a week. Or people who’ve climbed Kilimanjaro without legs. Good for them and I’m impressed… but like everyone else in the audience, I suspect, there’s not a single jot of change in my actual behaviour!

    If anything, it makes my self-opinion worse. If they can overcome that, but I can’t over come this, what a pathetic specimen I must be!

    The point is this:

    If the hero from a story is too inspiring, we don’t relate. They become something to admire, not someone to imitate

    A problem with Big Hero Stories is that they’re “externally inspirational” not “internally motivational”.

    A better size of story

    Stories that are too small aren’t effective. There’s a distinct “so what” element to them. As one of my daughters joked – if you can follow the story with “and then I found a fiver” it’s not worth telling.

    That leave stories in the middle. I call these “hope so” stories based on a tongue-in-cheek conversation about something we were hoping to pull off as a team… … Q: Are you sure we can pull this off? A: I bloody well hope so!

    I describe them as being not once-in-a-lifetime stories, but perhaps once-in-the-season-of-a-lifetime.

    You want the stories to be big enough to inspire, but not so big that they risk killing motivation. The video below is an exert of and example – it’s one I told about my daughters when they were travelling…

    … and the story finishes with them making a human chain by linking arms to stop anyone doing that cliff jump until they were allowed to do so.

    https://youtu.be/H9Y5hd2ZAyc