Your Story Should Convey Optimism and Possibilities That Motivate Your Audience
When you start crafting your own stories, you may be drawn towards talking about negative events that have impacted your life significantly. This isn’t a bad subject, but there’s a certain way that you need to present such a topic.
If you’re talking about something awful that happened, you can’t be negative the entire time you’re talking about it. Even though it might be something that you want to focus on, audiences typically don’t respond well to negativity over a long period of time.
Instead, you ought to have this negativity culminate into an optimistic and inspiring message. Even though that negative thing happened, you still were able to overcome it and keep moving forward.
Don’t just make the ending positive, either. People still won’t be enjoying most of your story if the bulk of it is negative. Instead, try to set up the story in the beginning with positives that lead up to the bad, and then finish with a happy message at the end.
There are a few reasons that you’re going to want to stay more positive than negative in your stories. First, people generally have enough negativity in their lives that they don’t need to hear you go on and on about something bad.
A lot of people aren’t very happy with their own lives or are currently working through tough times, so when you come to them with your own long sad story, they’re not going to want to listen to it.
Additionally, if you don’t have a positive message, there’s really no point in you telling the story at all. The point of learning storytelling is to convey a message, typically. You can’t get much of a message out of a purely negative story.
Even if nothing good happens in your story, you need to craft it in such a way that you convey positivity. You can talk about how if the audience avoids the mistakes that were made in the story, then they will be much better off.
This isn’t much of a positive statement, but it’s better than nothing. It’s also important to talk about how life improves in different ways after bad experiences. Even if you’re not fully over something, you can show the audience how you’ve begun to heal.
By providing a positive and inspiring message to your audience, you can help them work through their own tough times, as opposed to just weighing them down with even more negativity.
Now, You Can Let Storytelling Lead Your Brand to Greatness
Storytelling is a greatly effective business skill, and when used right, it can help solidify your brand in the hearts and minds of your audience. Many major brands have already figured this out and use this skill regularly.
You can see this most frequently in commercials. In a simple marketing technique, many brands will tell a short story in their commercial, usually centered on how their product is improving customers’ lives.
Even when these stories aren’t real, they still work to provide an example of how their product can help you in real life. This makes a much more convincing argument for why you should purchase it, since you end up relating or wanting to relate to the commercial.
Often times, major brands and corporations can seem very cold and unwelcoming to customers. It can appear to be all very strictly business, which can be off-putting to some people.
By telling a heartwarming story, you can get around the negative image of a large corporation, and instead provide them with a nice tale about how your product helped change lives for the better.
This isn’t just effective for general consumers, though. This skill as a whole can help when dealing with other business such as manufacturers and suppliers when working to get good deals with them.
If you’re able to be very friendly with the other businesses you work with, they’re going to probably be more receptive to your business offers than they would be if you were boring and stale with them.
You can even apply this skill in business conferences, both in one-on-one talks and in major presentations. You’ll be presenting your brand in a great light, and others will surely take note of how you represent your company.
The way you market and represent your brand is incredibly important. By utilizing storytelling effectively, you’re going to be able to make your brand seem far more appealing and kind-hearted compared to others.
Those who don’t opt into learning this skill will find themselves dealing primarily with cold facts and statistics alone, which sometimes isn’t enough to make your brand seem better than the competitors who put in more effort.
Learn storytelling in order to better promote your brand both within the industry and outwardly to customers. You can even use it to help with the recruitment process when hiring new employees to make them feel more welcome.
