Add life to your presentations using storytelling。
https://youtu.be/NcVTgAxU2JA
Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here with Better LIFE Research TIPS. Storytelling and questions are the two most powerful tools loved by great speakers to engage their audience. Stories engage the audience by making them expecting the closure. Questions engage the audience by making them expecting the answer. In this video, I will show you how to use stories to add life to your research presentation. And I will talk about how to use questions in another video.
Human brain is naturally receptive to good stories. People may forget facts, forget data, but they do remember good stories. Good stories touch people’s emotions, and they also have natural logic from beginning to closure. That is why they are more memorable than facts and data. Typical structure of a story includes 3 elements. They are the 3 “s”, the setup , the struggle, and the solution. The setup provides the context of the story, and introduces the main character. Ideally, it should be somebody the audience could sympathize with.
After the setup, we want to enter the struggle as quick as we can. Because the struggle is the hook of the story that can engage the audience emotionally. Maybe something happens to the main characters, or maybe main characters want something, but they can’t get it. So they have this struggle. If we can hook our audience with the struggle, then we will be able to impress our audience with the solution at the end of the story. A good story should have a solution that is not easily predictable, but is reasonable and logic. That is how a typical story flows. We have the setup, we have the struggle, and we have the solution. So we have both emotion and logic to make the story memorable.
There is a saying, “never tell a story without a point, and never make a point without a story.” If we want the audience to remember our key points, the best practice is to package each key point we have with a relevant story. The audience will feel the story, visualize it, and remember it. Stories are not only more memorable, they are also generally more persuasive and more influential than facts and reasoning, due to their effects on people’s emotions. That is why storytelling is a common tool used by experienced politicians, salespersons, and public speakers who want to influence people.
You may think that, in a research presentation, we talk about technology and data. There are not a lot of emotions there. You might be right. But there are still some ways we can reframe our research presentation as storytelling, and use storytelling to make our presentation standout and more impressive. There are three types of stories we can tell.
The first is the story of the problem we try to solve. We can tell the history of the problem. How the problem affects people’s life. How other researchers have attempted to solve the problem. What are the challenges? What are the struggles? What are the failures we have experienced? Where we were and how we felt? And finally we find the solution, which is the key message we want to convey in the presentation. This would be a good story, Similarly, the benefits and implications of the research work could also have potential emotional effect, and thus could also be packaged into a story.
The second story we can tell is the story of our data. We should look for creative ways to put our data in a story, or let the data itself tell a story. When we present data, we should make sure we provide the context so people can understand what it means. What are the struggles of the data? And how the struggles are finally solved?
The third type of story is the stories of human beings. We may search stories relevant to our points on the web. We may also use stories from books. But better stories are the stories of our friends and family members, because they are generally more original, and most likely nobody has heard them yet. It may be OK to use a commonly known story from books or web, but we’d better be able to explain the story from a totally new angle. The best story is always the story of ourselves, either as a researcher, or as a normal human being. Telling personal stories is the best way to demonstrate authenticity. As we are talking with the audience, we are the best character that they can sympathize with, especially when we show some vulnerability on ourselves.
The most important personal story we need in a presentation is a story about “who am I?” and “Why I am here talking with you?” It should be used at the front of the talk to establish our personal credibility. Another personal story we can use is a story about our shared vision with the audience. It could be used at the end of the talk to inspire passions, especially when we want to influence the audience.
In order to be able to effectively use storytelling in our presentations and other key communications, we should form a habit to accumulate stories in our daily lives. One method is to regularly review our personal weakness, awkward moments, or failures, and summarize the lessons we learned. Another method is to often practice reciting the stories we heard, the movies we watched, or the books we read to our friends, and adding our own thoughts. A person with such a habit or training will not be afraid of making impromptu speech any longer, because they always have plenty of stories on hands from their lives.
Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. Storytelling is an essential life skill. Until next time, let’s accumulate stories for our lives and eventually make our life a better story.
