Episode 18: Your Brain on Story

Story Fruition (00:05.614)
Well, welcome back and welcome to the beginning of our journey together in your mastering of storytelling. So let's start with what happens to the brain when storytelling kicks in. I'm at a networking event. There's about 150 entrepreneurs, investors, angel investors, even just friends that are all there to watch this competition where five presenters are going to get up.

and pitch why their business is investable. And they only have 99 seconds. And my team has coached all five teams. It's a very fun night and good times are had. We had a guest speaker and we are now gathered and we're sitting down and this is a long haul for us to see his monitor. And the monitor is now loaded up with his first graph. As he begins to speak, he lets us know that he's with

financial planning institution, and immediately starts speaking in his vernacular, dropping acronym after acronym on everything. His slides were all over the place. Every time he flipped it, it looked like the same slide, but he would just be so fascinated by what the data was telling him. I'm looking over at the audience thinking what's going on, how are they responding to this? And this is what I saw.

Story Fruition (01:31.791)
Do you, can you even see that? Well, they all look the same, so. What did he just say? I don't even know what that meant. Next thing you know, phones go up and scrolling begins. That made me sad. I don't want to see speakers fail like that.

I want them to thrive. want them to be connecting. I want them to have their audience that's leaning in and listening to them. That's what we do at StoryFruition. All of my coaches want every speaker to feel prepared and engaging and emotionally connecting to the audience. However, this is what happened in that particular presentation. And this is what happens every time we put up a slide that is a bunch of graphs. So I'm going to use this little metaphor and let's have some fun with it.

But when you throw a graph up, this is what happens. We start working out the neocortex gym. For those of you who are in data and finance and science and anything that's number crunching at all, you're buff in the neocortex because the neocortex is looking at the graph, but it is not emotional. It's just analyzing what it is to read. It's looking at this bar and this bar and it's

taking in the data, but you also oftentimes on these slides add lots of words and sentences and maybe another small graph over here or perhaps a picture as well. And the audience doesn't really know what to look at. It's really crowded. So we are trying to analyze it, but you're still talking and you're still talking while I'm trying to concentrate on what you said because you've thrown the slide up in front of me and I'm kind of obligated now, I guess, to read it.

but you're still talking and that's getting kind of annoying. And so that's where you could start losing your audience again. You're speaking in acronyms, you're showing too much data and it's a crowded slide. But let's do this. Let's cross the street to the limbic system gym. The limbic system gym is the place where there's music going on. There's color happening. This is great. Everyone wants to hang out there because it's fun.

Story Fruition (03:47.564)
And that's where your storytelling starts. So instead of talking and showing the graph, the graph really is telling you what story should you be telling that this graph represents. That's what you want to be thinking about. So as you're telling your story, maybe it's about a customer's plight, right? And that customer represents people that that graph is talking about. And those people have a problem.

And the character that you've come up with is having that problem. And you are the solution. You are the hero in this story. Woo, the limbic. Yeah, let's get buff there because now it's going to start firing up oxytocin and dopamine, endorphins. And you, because you're still telling a story, you are biochemically altering your audience's energy.

Because now we can see it. We can see a person. We can feel for them. We can hear them. If you have the characters even talk about the problem with each other, that's entertaining as you're educating. So we like to call that edutaining. If you bring in food, you immediately will start igniting smells and tastes in our imaginations. All of this is happening. And it's a lot more effective

because we're emotionally now connected. And now your story has now put heart behind the chart. And that's very, very important. Many, many, many, many, almost all people tend to put in way too much data into their presentations and do not put in enough storytelling. I can say this from my own personal experience, not only as someone who coaches

people all day long in this work, but I did it too. When I was in enterprise sales, I was in data and high tech and it was intense and we would data dump all over the audience. And it's not like we couldn't get the sale eventually, but when you add stories to it, you can speed up your sales progress because people are like leaning in and you've gotten them emotionally. They want to hear more.

Story Fruition (06:11.449)
So we call that putting heart behind the chart. So please remember that because your brain is so powerful and you as the presenter are so powerful. Do you realize that you can actually put pictures and feelings inside someone's brain based on the words you choose in a presentation? I'm so happy that you are realizing this differently today because

When you become a storyteller and presenters, you're now the game changer. So good job. So that's why we want to have stories. I tend to like to have the stories before any chart, or I sometimes often I will take the numbers that are in the chart and meld them into the narrative. It may be something like meet Lenny. He is representing 50 million people in America who have found themselves homeless. Lenny is

Found under a bridge, it's his last hope, but he still has his dog. And his dog is his only source of joy. But he can't afford anything in his life right now, and he needs our help.

That is a way stronger way for, let's say it's a nonprofit that's talking about helping homelessness to open then 75 % of Americans today are blank. You know, that's nothing. A number is just a number, but your words and your storytelling crafting is the emotional connection.

So for your homework, I want you to go through your presentations that you are doing and your team is doing. Are they data dumping? Are they skipping stories? And if they are telling stories, can you see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, and touch it? Can you really feel it? Could the story be recrafted so that it is more vivid and vibrant? The answer is yes. Of course it can be. So make sure that you, the leadership,

Story Fruition (08:16.461)
Your sales and your marketing teams are all on that same page because this is how businesses are built. This is how we sell through our ideas. We need data. We have to have data. Business is science. But when you pair the neocortex gym and cross the street with the Olympic system gym and put them together, you now have logical and reasonable mixed with emotional. And that's the formula to success when you are trying to get people

to buy your ideas, to do business with you. I hope you've enjoyed that. In our next module, we're gonna have a lot of fun. So stay tuned and thank you for showing up today.