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"The mark of effective communication isn’t just that you’ve presented information to your audience. As a leader, you know you’ve succeeded when people remember and tell your story to others."

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-Andy Freed, CEO, Virtual, Inc.

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How to Be a Storyteller, Not a Presenter

In this episode of 5 Minutes with Andy, Andy Freed, CEO of Virtual, Inc., delves into one of his favorite topics—the power of storytelling in leadership and business communication.

Andy discusses:

·      The key differences between storytelling and presenting.

·      Why our brains are wired to connect with stories, not statistics.

·      How leaders can use storytelling to create memorable and impactful messages.

With practical examples and tips, Andy reveals how storytelling can transform your communication and help your message endure. Tune in to learn why great leaders are storytellers, not just presenters.

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Andy Freed (00:12 – 7:16)

Hi, my name is Andy Freed and welcome to Five Minutes with Andy. In this podcast we’ll tap into my 25 years of working with organizations of all different sizes as standards bodies, consortia and associations and helping them with strategy and making their mark on the world.

We're going to spend five minutes today just talking about one of my favorite topics, which is how to be a storyteller and not a presenter.

You know, I love technology. I love the advances that we've had in technology, but boy, if there's one thing I would love to do in business, it would be to remove Microsoft PowerPoint from everybody's laptop in the world. Not that PowerPoint doesn't have value, but the reality is often when we find ourselves listening to business presentations, we have somebody who is doing a dramatic reading of their slides and not telling a story. And there's a big difference between the two.

Storytelling has been hardwired into how we communicate from the time of cavemen. We've found cave drawings from 30,000 years ago that were the earliest examples of storytelling. The Bible ultimately is storytelling. Aesop's fables, that's storytelling. All of these things are powerful, powerful stories that individuals tell you to communicate.

Why do we tell stories? Well, it's hardwired into our brain to hear stories. You know, stories do things like increase our cortisol levels, increase our dopamine levels. You know, what does that mean? Well, cortisol is our stress hormone. You know, so we're stressed. We want to hear what's next in the story, that relieves the stress. Dopamine, you know, that's the pleasure hormone. Stories will stimulate that and want us to hear what's coming because we're related to the storyteller.

But too often what we're doing is instead of telling a story, we're presenting some slides, doing my favorite thing of business karaoke. Has anyone ever sat in a meeting where somebody is reading off the bullet points over their slides and said, this is a great use of my time. I'm really enjoying that.

By the same token, think about storytelling. Storytelling means you're going to have a beginning of a story. You're going to have some tension and then you're going to have an end. Now that means that if you're telling your story right, your story is memorable. Aesop's fables got passed along from generation to generation. Ultimately, they got translated into thousands of languages because they sustained the passage of time.

As a leader, isn't this what you're looking for whenever you communicate? Aren't you looking for people to not just be able to hear you but also, ultimately be able to communicate your story and tell it to their coworkers and tell it to folks? The mark of communication isn't just that you've communicated it out, it's that other folks are able to continue to sustain your story going forward. That's really hard on a slide presentation with 50 bullet points. But when you tell a story, sometimes that story can live on.

So, if you're wondering about the power of storytelling, let me tell you the same story two different ways. And the first way I want you to imagine that I have a whole bunch of PowerPoint slides, and imagine they're every bit as boring as other PowerPoint slides that you've heard.

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Let's talk for a moment about veterans in America.

So, veterans in America, well, we have several wars that we have had veterans from in the United States. We have World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. We have three different eras of the Gulf War, and then we have other wars. This means that we have in the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau shows that we have 17.9 million veterans. Now, 17.9 million veterans are taken care of by the Veterans Administration. The Veterans Administration has a $369 billion budget. Now, even though we have this $369 billion budget, the Veterans Administration shoots for a 20-day access standard for appointments, but it's taking 22 days for the average veteran to get an appointment with a primary care physician. As you can see here on this chart, it is two days longer than the average.

Now, if you're still awake, let me try that story another way.

Imagine it's 1865. The Civil War has just ended. You're in Washington, D.C. in June. Now Washington in June, if you've ever been there, it's hot, it's muggy like you've never believed. You can only describe the environment as soupy. Now, veterans of the Civil War, though, had to come down there because at that time, to get your veterans benefits and to get your veterans pension from the Civil War, you had to report in person to the Washington Mall. Imagine how hard that was in June of 1865 to get you there. It's hot. You have people that have lost limbs and been wounded in the war, and they all have to get to Washington. When they got there, there were long tables. These long tables had all the veterans’ records on them. Somebody had to page through the record to be able to find the record of an individual veteran, through all of these just reams of cards. You know what held those cards together? Red tape. That's where the term red tape comes from. You know what? I think we need to do better for our veterans than just red tape. And here's why.

Now, which of those do you think you'll remember? The story or the raft of statistics and PowerPoint bullets that I laid off the first time. The reality is your brain is wired to try to hear that story, to understand why is he talking about the swamps of Washington? How is this relevant? What's coming next? Where is this going? Your brain is wired to try to hear more rather than with all the statistics and all of the bullet points, your brain not being able to connect those things.

We are wired to tell stories and wired to hear stories. It's why the first thing a kid says to their parents is, tell me a story. Well, same thing goes for leaders. What do you want to do when you're trying to get a story across? Just that says it. Tell your story.

And that's my story today, and I'm sticking with it. Thanks for joining.