Stories in Speech

We are surrounded every day by narratives that shape the world around us. In this module, we will examine how the stories we are told by others in movies, books, music, pictures, the news, and other mediums influence our perceptions.

The following text is condensed and adapted from Chapter Six, “The Power of Story: The Secret to Making Any Speech Memorable,” in Lynn Meade’s Advanced Public Speaking.

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The Power of Story: The Secret to Making Any Speech Memorable

We love stories because they are engaging, they ignite the imagination, and they have the potential to teach us something. You have likely sat around a campfire or the dinner table telling stories? That is because stories are the primary way we understand the world causing communication scholar Rhetorical scholar Walter Fisher to call us homo narrans–storytelling humans. Not only is storytelling important in conversation, but it is also important to speechmaking. It is no surprise then, that when researchers looked at 500 TED Talks, they found of the TED talks that go viral, 65% included personal stories.

Professional speakers, college students, politicians, business leaders, and teachers are all beginning to understand the benefits of telling stories in speeches. Increasingly, business leaders are encouraged to move away from the old model of sharing the vision and the mission to a new model of telling the story of the business. Academic literature points out that teachers who use stories can help students understand and recall information. For years, politicians have been coached to include a story in their speeches. They do it because it works, and it is bound in science.

In short, people don’t pay attention to boring things. The story is one way to engage and help ideas come alive.  Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham says, “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as ‘psychologically privileged,’ meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material.”

The goal of public speaking is to plant an idea into the minds of your listeners and the most effective way to accomplish that is through a story. I want to share with you three major principles about storytelling and give you concrete ways to incorporate them into your own storytelling.

1. Stories, when told properly, will ignite both the reason center and the emotion center of your audience’s brains making them not only more effective in the moment but also more memorable in long run.
2. Stories activate the little voices in the audience’s heads and help them think creatively about problems. This activation encourages audiences to act on the idea as opposed to just being passive listeners.
3. The best way to tell a story is to connect it to a message, offer concrete details, and follow a predetermined plotline.

Stories Help Ideas Stick

Stories are sticky. A well-told story “sticks” to our brains and attaches to our emotions. A speaker can tell a story in such a way that the audience “sees” the story in their mind’s eye and “feels” the emotions of the story. In some situations, an audience may become so involved in the story they “react” by making facial expressions or gasping in surprise. By “seeing the story” and physically reacting to the story, the audience is moved from a passive listener to an active participant.

Think about college teachers you have had who told stories as part of their lectures. Did it help you to listen? Did it help you to learn? Chances are it did. Researchers Kromka and Goodby put it to the test on one hundred ninety-four undergraduate students. One group listened to a lecture that included a lesson with a story, while others just heard the lesson’s key points. Students that heard the narrative had more sustained attention to the lecture and they did better on a test of short-term recall. The stories helped them remember the material, but there was an added benefit. The students who heard the narrative liked the teacher more and were more likely to take another course from the instructor in the future.

Stories Help the Audience Become Emotionally Engaged

We haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the three pillars of rhetoric (soon…) but one of the most important ways of engaging an audience is through emotion.

Emotions such as passion, vulnerability, excitement, and fear are particularly powerful.  Researchers at Ohio State have a word for that sense of being carried away into the world of a story. They call it transportation.  Their research demonstrated that people can get so immersed in a story they hardly notice the world around them. Audiences can be transported by stories as facts and stories as fiction.  Narrative transportation theory proposes that when people lose themselves, their intentions and attitudes may change to align with the characters in the story. As speakers, we can harness this power. Sometimes that means telling our own stories, sometimes, it means telling the stories of others, and other times, it means telling a hypothetical story.

Story Engages Our Senses

When telling a story, find creative and tactile descriptions to engage your audience.

You’ve probably heard of an fMRI. It’s the machine that measures blood flow to the brain. Scientists used fMRI machines to measure what happened when someone is telling a story and when someone is listening to that story. What they found is exciting. When they compared the speaker’s brain to the listener’s brains, they noticed the brains were lighting up in the same places.  When the speaker described something emotional, the audience was feeling the emotion and the emotional centers of their brains were lighting up.  Princeton researcher, Uri Hanson calls this brain synching, “neural coupling.”

Consider a study at Emory University that noticed differences in how brains respond to texture words,  “she had a rough day” versus non-texture words “she had a bad day.” The texture words activated sensory parts of the brain.

Imagine you pull up to a flashing red stoplight at an intersection. Seeing it in your mind activates the visual part of your brain. Now, imagine a loved one giving you a pat on the back. Once you imagine it,  your tactile center will light up. This is quite powerful when you think about it. When you hear a story, you don’t just hear it, but you feel it, visualize it,  and simulate it. 

Dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins are what David Philips calls the “angel’s cocktail.” He suggests speakers should intentionally create stories to activate each of these hormones. By telling a story in which you build suspense, you increase dopamine which increases focus, memory, and motivation. Telling a story in which the audience can empathize with a character increases oxytocin, the bonding hormone which is known to increase generosity and trust. Finally, making people laugh can activate feel-good endorphins which help people feel more relaxed, more creative, and more focused.

Because of neural coupling (our brain waves synching) and transportation (getting lost in a story), the audience members begin to see the world of the person in the story. Because of hormonal changes, they feel their situation and can empathize. A thoughtfully crafted story has the power to help the audience believe in a cause and care about the outcome.

Stories Inspire Action

The conventional view has always been when you speak, you try to get the listeners to pay attention to you. The way you get them to pay attention is to keep the little voice inside their heads quiet. If it stays quiet, then your message will get through. Stephen Denning in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling suggests an alternative view. He challenges speakers to tell stories to work in harmony with the voices in people’s heads. He says that you don’t want your audience to ignore their voice; you want to tell a story in a way that awakens their little voice to tell its own story. You awaken their voice and then you give it something to do. He advocates using stories as springboards to help the audience think about situations so they can begin to mentally solve problems. In this way, you are not speaking to an audience but rather you are inviting the audience to participate with you.

Story Can Change the Brain Chemistry in Listeners

Watch these two videos:

Drawbacks of Stories

While storytelling can be used positively, it can have drawbacks. A story can be more memorable than the point. If the audience remembers your story without the purpose of the story, you missed it. Make sure the story reinforces a point and that the point it is reinforcing is clear.

Because stories draw people in emotionally, there are also ethical considerations. Is it ethical to tug at an audience’s heartstrings to get them to donate money? How about giving you money? Speakers need to consider the ethical obligation to consider the impact of the story. Stories tap into emotions and create lasting memories. Stories told with the wrong motives can be manipulative.

We’ll explore further drawbacks later in this module, but for now, let’s explore a story you probably know fairly well.