New Research: Stories are Great for You Too.

When I say ‘you’ in that headline, I’m presuming you’re a story-teller. You tell them when you speak on stages, you tell them when you’re marketing, you tell them in your family and extended family gatherings (i.e. friends) and you use them in your leadership work to build great cultures.

As Nick Morgan , the great speaker-trainer and educator, points out in his latest blog, stories matter. As he puts it, “they’re not just a fashionable tool for communication, but a durable bridge to connection and understanding.? And they allow the person hearing the story to imagine themselves as the hero.”

James Campbell knew that when he outlined the powerful story arc that we now frequently refer to as ‘The Heroes Journey.’

And it turns out that when we hear stories, we actually imagine ourselves as the hero. Hence the reason stories work wonders in so many situations.

Steve Jobs, himself a wonderful story-teller, put it in a remarkable way when he was at Pixar — “The storyteller,” he said, “is the most powerful person in the world. The storyteller sets the vision, the values and the agenda for an entire generation yet to come.”??

But have you ever noticed how you — you the storyteller — benefit too??

And that’s because, as Nick Morgan points out, “… stories are in one sense simply data with emotions attached to them. And emotions are how we catalog our memories in our brains.”

Then Nick leads us to new research that reveals just how much stories benefit the teller of the stories, you and me.?

Like you perhaps, I’ve sensed it a lot, but never had data to confirm it.

The new research is published in The Journal of Positive Psychology (Einam et al., 2024) and it reveals that storytelling profoundly benefits the storyteller.?

And that’s because, as the study points out, when you and I think in storytelling terms, we experience greater meaning and purpose in life than those who don’t.?

When you and I frame our experiences as stories, we reflect more deeply on the meaning of our lives and where we’re heading.

In other words, our own stories really matter.

Seth Godin once linked success and ‘mattering’ too. He put it like this: “The challenge is not to be successful, the challenge is to matter.”

And that, it turns out, is the starting point for our latest Web Event, ‘Time to Rise.”

It shows you how your business can become the source of extraordinary stories — stories that link the tiniest things in our businesses to the huge task of making a real difference in our world as well.

Years ago, Nick Morgan wrote that the only reason to give a speech is to change the world.

When you join me at ‘Time to Rise’ you’ll see how your business can reflect that in a myriad of ways and become a real force for good in our world.?

And that really matters!

You can check in right here.