When I learned about this course on storytelling, which is a special course being taken by Ambassador Bruce Oreck, I instantly signed up for it. The reason? Let me explain!
Storytelling is a buzz word today in entrepreneurial world. I guess, this art started with humans learning to communicate each other, so it is as old as human civilization. Even before the first written communication was developed, peoples used to pass on learnings and traditions through stories. We still do so. Every culture have its own bundle of stories. What’s common in that? Well they all seems to explain the traditions of a culture, these traditions may be a lifesaving act in some cases explaining the existence of the community! So you see, how important was story telling. But this was there from long back, Why such a buzz about it in 21st century all of a sudden?
I would rather say, the wheel of time has rotated 360 degrees and we are again there from where we started! There was a time when the communication always involved some degree of emotions, when the communication was direct, when we knew from whom we are communicating, when the communication was tangible….at least to the hearts. Then the communication easily took form of sharing each other stories. One would narrate the story, other would feel every word because he is already in the shoes of the main character of story and the cycle get repeated. Even the professional communication was in this form only. Then comes an era of technology through which we can even communicate to unknown audience, an era of boring power point bullets and blank screen webinars! The ease and speed of these modes made it favourable for professional communication. Being direct is fine to transfer information quickly but when it comes to implanting our idea to somebody else head to get some sort of benefits, direct mode don’t work. Business today is about matching minds with the customer/client, putting your thought in somebody else’s mind and nothing can do it as effectively as an effective story can do. We are wired to like stories, we evolved with this. They say a story is an information with a soul! When somebody narrates a story the other person’s mind starts to stimulate different zones of itself to feel the impulse/pain/emotion attached to the story. In this way we can implant an idea as it is from our head to somebody else’s head. Such a magic is highly required in todays evolved business scenario.
My personal motivation to take up this course derive from my own assessment of my skills at storytelling in informal communication, mostly with friends and family. I knew this is important, I can even do a good job on it if I take a huge lot of time to write it up, as I am doing it now, but when it comes to instantly framing a story, summing up everything in structured way becomes challenging and I mostly end up with an unsustained and unsuccessful sharing of idea. In my professional world, I have always been direct and to the point, although I feel that in some of the context I could have done better if I had tried this skill. All in all this remains like a magic wand to me whose magic I am yet to see, just heard and convinced that this wand can produce a lot of magic…….here is my chance to get an hold on this wand!
A Thoughtful insight 