Learn How Masterful Storytelling Can Lead to Your Success

The art of storytelling has developed over the millennia. From ancient Mesopotamia to the modern world, people have communicated through stories.

Stories use facts and narrative to express something to their audience. It could be to educate, to instill a community’s culture or moral values. Sometimes it is simply to entertain.

Everybody can understand stories. They have a universal quality as they can present complex ideas in simple, easy to understand imagery.

There are many different formulas for storytelling. Today we will focus on only one, the Hero’s Journey.

Joseph Campbell popularized the concept in his book on comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Borrowing the term monomyth from James Joyce, Campbell describes his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies.

This template has become the underlying narrative in many popular stories and movies. For instance, the director George Lucas has credited Campbell for influencing the development of the Star Wars series.

I’d now like to show you the structure of the Hero’s Journey and how to incorporate it into the customer’s or buyer’s journey.

“Let me start out ahead of you guys. With my bad foot, I can’t walk that fast. I’ll wait for you in front of the main entrance to the train station.”

And with that, I started off alone on foot through the hot dusty streets of Dar es Salaam.

It was January 1980, summertime in the southern hemisphere. I was in Tanzania with about 20 political science students from my senior class at college. We were investigating how the former English colony was developing since independence.

The first two and a half weeks we met with government officials, NGOs, and the like. Now we were going to spend a week in the north visiting some of the famous game preserves.

Two days earlier, I had to go to Muhimbili Hospital to have stitches in my foot due to a stupid accident. So to get to the station on time for our 3pm train, I needed to leave ahead of the class.

I got to the main train station, sat out front and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally I went inside and asked, “When does the train to Moshi leave?”

The guy at the counter pointed over my shoulder, “There it goes.”

I turned in horror to see my train pulling out. Now what was I going to do?

I limped back to the youth hostel where we were staying and asked if I could have a room for the night.

“Why don’t you take a bus?”

Since there was a bus station across the square from the train station, I limped back across town.

“Sorry, buses to Moshi leave from the bus station on the other side of the city.”

Damn! Back to the youth hostel. This time they would let me have a room.

As I sat dejected in the courtyard with a not so cold beer, one of the hostel workers came over to me.

"Do you still want to go to Moshi tonight? There is a bus departing in an hour."

An hour later we were standing in a field which doubled as a bus station. The deal was that I would scalp a ticket for myself and the hostel worker’s friend. Whatever.

It was now around 9pm, the sun was setting, but I was on my way in an old International Harvester School Bus.

Outside the city we stopped at a military roadblock. Two soldiers armed with AK-47s boarded the bus.

As the only foreigner on the bus, I had the disturbing thought, "What if they take me off the bus? Nobody would know what happened to me."

The soldiers gave the bus the once over and left.

My traveling companion must have noticed my discomfort. “They were looking for people trying to smuggle weapons to the remnants of (deposed dictator) Idi Amin’s army in Uganda.”

We traveled through the night, but it was impossible to sleep bouncing about on the spartan bus seats.

In the pre-dawn light, we had to stop and get off the bus while the driver and co-driver changed a flat tire.

I could see Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance and was happy that my trip was almost over.

They dropped me off right in front of the youth hostel in Moshi around 7:30am. I went in and asked about my classmates.

“They haven’t arrived yet.”

“Huh?”

I turned around and spotted a traveler I had met in Dar es Salaam a few days earlier.

“The trains here are really bad. There is only one track with sidings every 10 or 20 miles. When a train reaches a siding it pulls over and waits until a train coming from the other direction passes by. Sometimes they must wait for hours. It makes for a very long trip.”

So I decided to have breakfast while I waited.

Somewhere around noon, my class finally came stumbling in. They looked like they had been up all night.

From under a palm tree on the veranda I called out to them as our African friends seemed to do on every occasion.

“My good American Friends! How nice of you to join me in scenic Moshi!”

20 people turned in unison and bags and jaws dropped to the floor.

"How did you get here?”

Overcoming obstacles and achieving certain goals is the base of the hero archetypal motif, according to the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.

"In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon ... only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain.” He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself." (1)

Jung had a great influence on Campbell during his studies in Europe in the late 1920s.

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.” (2)

As a copywriter, I have found this to be a very effective template to follow. In fact, it is prefect device for case studies, also known as customer success stories. This is where an actual customer describes how your product or service helped them overcome a particular problem.

In the Hero's Journey there are many steps or stages that the hero must go through to complete his mission. Not all appear in every story, but there are a few main one’s which are critical. These can be adaptable to the buyer’s or customer’s journey.

Here are the 5 main stages to use in your hero’s / customer’s journey.

1.??????The good guy. Like Luke Skywalker, your customer is the main character. We need to describe him or her in such a way that the customer recognizes him or herself in the character. This creates an emotional bond that draws the reader into the story.

2.??????The bad guy. This character doesn’t have to be an actual person. In fact, in business it is often abstract in nature. The structure of the market, internal procedures, etc.

One can perceive it as a phantom menace. It is the one that presents the challenges for the good guy to overcome.

3.??????The challenge. At the beginning of the journey, the hero needs to identify the challenge. Then the journey is to search for the means to overcome the challenge.

The hero may meet a guide or mentor to help along the way. In facing the challenge, the hero must overcome his or her own internal demons and the obstacles presented by the bad guy.

4.??????Enlightenment. In overcoming his challenge the hero undergoes a fundamental change, attains enlightenment or knowledge etc.

The discovery of your product allows the hero to overcome the challenges facing their company. At this point, the hero is now ready to return home and communicate what he has found.

5.??????The return or conclusion of the journey. The hero returns to his tribe or city and communicates the wisdom that he has learned. Saving the city or society from whatever troubles they were facing.

The customer utilizes your product or service to bring success to his or her company.

Are you looking for a storyteller who can create captivating success stories for your company? Let’s get together. You can contact me here on LinkedIn or at [email protected]

(1) - Carl Gustav Jung, “The Conjunction,” CW 14, par. 756

(2) - Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with A Thousand Faces"