If there are any two parts of a story that can make or break your entire presentation, it’s the opening and the closing. These crucial parts will almost always determine how well your story is going to stick in the minds of your audience.
The opening is going to set the tone of the entire rest of the story. If you have a boring opening, people are going to check out quickly and not pay attention very much the rest of the time.
If you have a good opening, they’ll be reeled in pretty quick.
You can create compelling openings in multiple ways, and one of the most common is to open with something surprising or odd sounding, that then gets explained and leads into the rest of the story.
This gets an audience’s attention quite well.
Getting your audience hooked at the start ensures that they’re actually going to pay attention to your story in full. If they don’t start off being interested, they usually aren’t patient and willing to wait for the story to get good.
The closing is just as important, though for different reasons.
Your conclusion in a story should be the big thing that everyone in the audience remembers, and it tends to be what sticks with them the most.
A poor closing can not only feel awkward, but you’ll also usually leave people scratching their heads wondering what exactly they were supposed to get out of your story.
This doesn’t make for a very impactful story overall.
A great closing, on the other hand, can have your audience thinking about your story for the rest of the day. If you can pull this off, you will really solidify your message in their minds, and they’ll keep remembering that story over and over again.
You can’t just have one or the other when it comes to good openings and closings. If you don’t have both, your whole speech is going to feel off.
These two aspects of storytelling complement each other.
If you only have a good opening, they’re only going to remember that, but chances are the main point of your story isn’t going to be told in the opening. If you only have a good closing, people won’t really be paying attention because they’ll be bored from the start.
By combining the two and having a solid story through and through, you’re going to have created a story that resonates deeply with your audience, and will have succeeded in your efforts to make an impact on them.
