The 5 Elements of Persuasive Storytelling

Whether you are speaking to corporate audience, entrepreneurs or teenagers, there is one common denominator you can use to convince and persuade them. Storytelling. Without a good understanding of the 5 key elements of persuasive storytelling, your stories may have an undesired effect- put them to sleep.

By writing this short article, I hope that you will not put them to sleep, but rather ‘grab and keep them alive and engaged’ all through your presentation. It is my hope that after reading these five key elements, you will improve your storytelling ability in at least one dimension. If you can do that, I will be pretty happy that I accomplished my goal of sharing this with you something that I found useful and interesting. Here are the elements:

#  1. Passion

By passion, I mean the energy, the urgency or the momentum with which you tell your story. Your audience is drawn to your passion and feeds on your energy or ‘fire’. While the audience watches you in action, they are telling themselves, they are also carried by the swing of your momentum. Your burning passion and zest that makes an audience to listen and buy into the ideas you are selling or presenting. With passion, your story comes across as full of live and action.

Your passion can be communicated through a variety of ways: your voice, gestures, pace, words, eye contact, emotions and so on.

# 2. Hero

A story with a hero grounds an experience or incident into reality. It is through your hero that the audience will have a perspective based on what he or she is going through. When your hero embraces a course of action or shuns a piece of advice, that draws the audience into either the moment of the story. If your hero has a worthwhile ambition or goal, you can be sure that the audience begins to take sides, have preferences and dislikes. That is a moment of engagement.

In order for your hero to look real and for your audience to relate to the hero, give your heros some human qualities, especially some frailties or weaknesses.

#3. Antagonist

The antagonist can either be a person, a conflict or circumstances that challenge, prevent or obscure the hero from getting what he wants. When the antagonist is effectively present in a story, there is friction, controversy and drama. The drama creates anticipation and the anticipation creates anxiety in the minds of the audience. When this happens, you can be sure that your story will be memorable.

The best way to create a memorable story is to inject a tough antagonist that does some prickly or testy things to upset the hero. When this happens there is excitement and audience experiences adrenaline rush, which causes images of the incident to be imprinted on their minds.

#4. Awareness

The awareness part of your story is crucial in that it enables the audiences to see what the hero has learned from an experience. Highlight it. Was it a positive or a negative lesson? How did the hero come to this awareness or relization? Was it through someone ‘s advice, or through his or her own discovery? By shedding light on this, the audiences can take a deep breathe and find some closure. Without awareness, there is no raison d’etre for any story at all. The awareness is the reason you tell the story in the first place.

Thus, in telling your story, ensure that you give your audience the opportunity to understand what was the point of the whole story, that way they can came to terms with themselves like the hero does.

#5. Transformation

Transformation refers to the changes that follows the realization or awareness. How did the hero and his environment change? Does the hero make a conscious effort to be different when approaching such a problem again? Another dimension of the transformation is your audience. In a sales story, a storyteller may have used the story to illustrate the benefits of moving from one place to another.

One way to improve your transformation is to explicitly call for action and let the audience know what you expect them to do. This is common in political speeches.

For more on the five elements, read The Elements of Persuasion by Richard Maxwell and Richard Dickman.

Share on Facebook

        

Storytelling: From Ancient Philosophers to Present Day Professsionals

What is the link between Pythagoras and modern day storytelling? If I were you, I ‘d be thinking, is this guy nuts? Well, until a few days ago I did not know there is a link between these distant bedfellows. So, where am I going with this?
There is no doubt that Pythagoras was and is still very famous for the Pythagoras Theorem. But did you also know that he was Empedocles’ teacher or mentor? But who is Empedocles? Aristotle once credited Empedocles as “the father of rhetoric.” I did not make that up. I am not that smart. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.
In The Elements of Persuasion, by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, the authors argue that Empedocles ‘s four elements of nature (fire, earth, water and air) are metaphorically similar to the elements of a good narrative or story. They say by understanding Empedocles elements, we can better appreciate modern narratives.
They base their argument on the fact that these elements are “ideotropic” that is capable of attracting our mind to an innner truth, in the same way plants are attracted to sun, as initially described by Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo holds the view that Empedocles elements are not only material nature, but also have psychological and thus, these elements are the carriers of our culture.
Based on this analogy, the authors make their case that Empedocles elements correlate to the elements of a compelling narrative (passion, hero, antagonist, awareness and transformation). What I draw from these authors is that if Empedocles are the carriers of nature, then, the elements of a narrative are the carriers of human culture because both are by implication ideotropic.
So what is the line up according to Maxwell and Dickman? It took me a while to get it. I hope you get sooner, and yes, I hope I did not confuse you.
Fire……. passion
Earth…… hero
Water….. water
Air…..Awareness
Space…..Transformation
Did you notice anything unusual in the line up? If you have n’t, then you were not paying enough attention. If you have, then you should find time and read Maxwell and Dickman or other books written by better minds from the ancient era.
Here is what you may have missed, there is a fifth element. It is “Space”. Though it was not stated by Empedocles, a generation later, Plato, his student did just that. Plato added the element of “Space” as the milieu in which all these elements exist. It is sometimes referred to as “Ether” which means, the field in which the other elements occur.
According to Maxwell and Dickman the element of “space” corresponds to the narrative element of “transformation”. It is what occurs or what changes when a story has been well told. Without transformation, there is perhaps, no basis for storytelling.

Share on Facebook