The Top Tool for Persuasion

Welcome to the LIFT Your Impact newsletter, where you gain insights on leadership, communication, and storytelling. And great news! You can now order my new book, Lift Your Impact, here in the UK and here in the US! For bulk orders contact our team!

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Have you ever had a great idea, but for whatever reason, you struggled to get others to listen??

Maybe your idea doesn’t seem appealing at first, but you know that it is for the greater good.?

Take kids, for example. As adults, we know how important it is to eat our vegetables, but for children, nutrition isn’t a good enough reason to willingly eat broccoli! However, if you can transform it into a train or an airplane, the veggies are suddenly a lot more appealing.?

All it took was a little bit of creative storytelling.?

Now, this doesn’t mean you should treat your audience like children, (although, we have had clients learn to loosen up their natural speaking voices through reading children’s story books!) but the principle remains the same: storytelling opens up an entire new world of persuasion.?

Here are a few tips for how to use storytelling in communication:?

1. Define Your Role

The first key element of storytelling is character.?

Understanding the role that you play will help you connect and communicate with your listener.?

Every story has a hero. Most people want to be the heroes in their own story, but if you want to persuade someone to see your point of view, you should not be the hero.?

If you’re the hero, that gives your listener two options: they can either be the villain, which will make them defensive, or the victim who needs rescuing, which will alienate them. Neither of these options will help you persuade them to see your vision.

Make your listener the hero. You should take on the role of the mentor.

The mentor, like Gandalf or Dumbledore, aids the hero on their journey, encouraging the hero and providing them with the tools that they need. If you make it clear that you want to set your listener up for success, they will be much more receptive to your message.?

2. Understand the Current Circumstances

In order to tell your hero’s story, you must demonstrate that you have a solid understanding of their current circumstances.?

No matter how successful, healthy, or wealthy your listener is, they face challenges just like everyone else.

This is not the time to focus on the past or the future. What needs to be addressed in the hero’s life right now??

You must understand this person’s unique challenges and how they impact their life, work, and relationships.?

3. Create the Future

Once you understand character and circumstances, it’s time to move on to the final step: Creating the Future.

Pain and pleasure are powerful motivators, and both can be implemented into the future that you build.?

We want to avoid pain, so how does that impact the future?

If nothing changes, how will the challenges that you listed above get worse for the hero? What could they lead to??

What can be done to prevent that negative future from happening??

Now, we can introduce pleasure. What does your hero want their life to look like in ten years? How will they feel if they’re able to make this future a reality??

If you’ve made it this far, you already have an idea worth sharing. This is where your idea comes into play. How will your idea help the hero achieve the future that they want??

Transforming your idea into a story can turn your idea into reality.?

It may be a little more complicated than making a spoonful of veggies into a train, but with a solid grasp of character, current circumstances, and the future that your listener wants to see, your ideas will make an impact.

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This, and many other tools, exercises, and stories can be found in my new book Lift Your Impact, which is available here in the UK and here in the US! Bulk purchases can be made here.