Make A Movie in Their Mind

After a recent keynote coaching sprint for an array of CEOs and thought leaders at our recent RegenAI event, I have come away with a short guide to memorable, transformational, story-driven speeches.

1. Build the Scene. Memory is linked to moments, and your job in creating your tone-setting/credibility-setting story is to hit two or three moments in time. Make a film with your words. DO NOT STAY AT THE 1,000 FOOT VIEW. Get on the ground. Let us feel it, smell it, touch it. That’s how we remember things, and that’s how your journey becomes ours.

2. Resist the List. The number one reason why people think storytelling is self-indulgent (yes I know this) is not because they’re great stories. It’s because speakers confuse telling A STORY with telling ALL THE STORIES. Do not do this. YOU HAVE TO COMMIT TO ONE STORY. It is of course hard to find that one key moment that represents all meaning. That’s not the job. The job is to find one emblematic moment with which you can endow the power.

3. Make Mystery. Enough with the knowing! Do not be the one who knows…be the one who seeks. The heart years for some not-knowing. A story is a problem, approached in an interesting way that makes them care. You have to make them care, and that means take them on a voyage of discovery – with three or four main steps – and drop into the place of not-knowing. The cave. A little cortisol….but not too much. If you avoid the cortisol, you’ll be forgotten. But if you give a little stress, allowing yourself to not-know, you will bring the audience down there with you into the depth of winter, before that first sprout of spring arrives.

4. Meme the Message. The word metaphor comes from the Greek metapherein, “to carry over or through.” So once you come through the cave into your key insight, and you come in for a landing landing, the key transformational message or discovery in your story, do some deep thinking to consider how that can be a metaphor that you can come back to again and again. That is the best chance to create a meme, that which your audience will put in their pockets and carry with them, long after you’ve left the room. They’ll do it not only because your message is good, but because you let them get the release of the payoff…as if they discovered it for themselves.

5. Engage the Change. Now you’ve got your main “What” but you need to show the How. How it works, this new-found idea or approach that will change how things work. Share three steps that defines your theory of change.

All of this together will be a movie in their mind…they’ll follow you through the journey, picking up little breadcrumbs of insight, seeing the world that you see, and then discovering the treasure and taking it with them. But if you get listy, or fear the depths, or lack a clear message, it will just go in one ear and out the other.