‘2015 marks the 15th year of The Society for Storytelling’s National Storytelling Week. ’
It’s running from the 31st of January to the 7th of February. It’s celebrated by all ages across the UK and takes place in storytelling clubs, theatres, museums, schools, hospitals, spoken word venues, and care homes (where this event has been steadily growing each year!)
The business world has embraced storytelling too. Our brains are wired to respond to stories; they’re so much easier to take in than complex information or humdrum data, which is why it’s such an effective part of communication.
How to be interesting
We’d like to revisit some top tips we’ve shared, all about enhancing your storytelling styles. We’ll kick off with our post that explored what it’s like to meet a zombie and how we can avoid boring friends and colleagues to death…
One of the beautiful benefits of communicating through storytelling is that everything becomes so much more interesting! Along with mastering the art of storytelling, interesting individuals demonstrate their earnest attention by mastering the skill of actively listening to others; regularly making eye contact, simply smiling, being comfortable with short pauses and moments of silence, questioning, commenting, remembering and reflecting. By learning and implementing storytelling techniques that elicit emotion, you’ll be creating stimulating memories for your readers, listeners or the people that you’re engaging with face-to-face.
Storytelling in style
Moving swiftly from lifeless zombies to the grissly Gruffalo, these successful business storytelling tips are inspired by the charming monster’s tale, take listeners on a wonderful journey. Build a character, define the problem, outline the struggle, examine the lessons learned and successfully conclude your story.
Make your language wondercrump!
And finally, to that charming character, The BFG and his gloriumptious grasp of the English language! The BFG provides us with a whoopsy-whiffling reminder of how creatively we can communicate when we’re storytelling and crafting the content for our newsletters, articles and blogs. Even now that we’re old and sensible. And there’s no ‘Gizzardgulping Langwitch Police’ to stop us! We don’t need to be literary masterminds, far from it. Despite The BFG’s twitch-tickling trouble with words, he still manages to endear and inspire, and he didn’t even go to school!
What I’m saying is, it’s okay to be creative with your language, in fact, frack to bunt and a little bit jumbly is positively encouraged! Don’t be afraid to make your language Wondercrump!
Tweet us @Alivewithideas with your favourite storytelling tales… and get stuck in for #NationalStorytellingWeek