Kate'sVoice

I have been traveling a fair amount lately.  Today, I began working on this post and had to connect to the Internet.  As I browsed the Sheraton site, I noticed a link on the home page that encouraged you to share your story.  When you click on the link it takes you to “Good Stories,” a site with stories on Sheraton travel from around the world. Kind of cool!  It’s interactive and you get to explore the world through stories.

Storytelling is a form of communication that is common to everyone’s experience, and is becoming increasingly important as we face the large amounts of data and  information that are now available to us, such as where to stay and what to see when traveling.  Statistics on the recession are made more understandable when we hear stories of people losing their homes, or getting jobs in some innovative way.   And presentations are more interesting when the presenter is a storyteller.

In business,  creating a story out of raw information can help you see the problem better in order to understand the solution better. By collecting information to create stories, you can assure yourself that you can answer the key issues that need to be addressed to qualify your lead, to solicit a donation,  to make your point or to find the best solution.

My first introduction to the importance of storytelling in business was the book, The SpringBoard Story by Stephen Denning.  I love this book and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be inspired about the importance of a great story.

And since reading that,  I have explored this with many people, and watched as storytelling has become more and more important.  Again, storytelling makes sense out of a complex world.  However, it’s not all that easy to create a great story, and many people call something a story when it is not a story.

To paraphrase the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, stories are a conduit. They connect us to each other because your story reminds me of my own. In the simplest terms,

• A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
• In addition, it needs to have emotional content, a feeling that we can relate to, even if it is a story about business.
• It needs to have an obstacle to be overcome.

If you want to learn more about storytelling, here are three places you might look.

• An article in Fast Company on a fabulous storytelling program to boost volunteerism in the schools.
• A blog about Applied Storytelling called “A Storied Career,” in this case a post about tweets on storytelling.
• And finally, a remarkable story to inspire us all:

My father was a man of few words; my mother was a woman of many.  They had been married for nearly 50 years at the ti me of my father’s death.  The miracle of their marriage was that they were in love to that day.  When asked the secret of their successful relationship, both would answer, “Great communication.”  I became acutely aware of the problems that poor communication can create in a relationship when I went through a divorce.  The experience created an urgency in me to discover the priciples of effective conversation and coflict resolution.  I was probably trying to find a solution that would mean I would never have to go through that kind of pain again.  Of course, life isn’t like that.  There is no fix that fixes it all.  But understanding how we communicate and making it more conscious at least makes it possible to meet life with some tools that can help.

To this end, I highly recommend the work of Dennis Rivers, and his book on Co-operative Communication Skills. He gives it away free as a download and it is a great resource for anyone who works in teams, supervises others, has children, is in a relationship or argues a lot…lol  It is great!!  We’ll talk about his ideas from time to time.

At an early age, I became obsessed with the need to be understood. Not unusual for a self-focused kid, and some would say it is often the driving force of a middle child (my mom always called me the Ham in the Sandwich..with good reason!). I am sure that this obsession with being heard and understood eventually allowed me to be a performer and a public speaker and to feel very much at ease in front of others. (Are you kidding? They couldn’t keep me OFF of the stage!) It also led me to explore communication in general. This blog will often focus on what makes us better communicators. And this entry is focused on just that.

In general, the key to effective communication is clearly understanding your intention and how that intention aligns with your listener, your content, and the sound of your voice, or the clarity in whatever is your delivery method. So let’s take the first part of this formula today: Intention. Spending time every day to be clear about your intention in your communication is powerful! Here’s a process that can get you started:

• Create a life purpose statement and a work purpose statement. A purpose statement is a brief description of what you do and why you do it.
• Keep these statements in your notebook, date book, laptop, and on your desk- places where you will be able to read them throughout the day as you prepare talks, sales pitches, or discussions.
• Spend two or three minutes every morning consciously reviewing them and how they may apply to the day ahead.
• At the end of the day, spend a couple minutes reviewing them again, and see if you stayed on track.
• If not, make notes on what happened and how you might do things differently the next time.
• If you found that you were on track, plan to get more detailed with your intentions the next day.

Creating a statement of intention for each project or product you represent, and for any important conversations you plan to have will insure that you are more and more aware of what you are saying and how you are saying it! Try this for a month and let me know how it’s going. I’d love to hear from you!