Keep the Listener In Your Story
When we go from being invested to being distracted, we all lose.
Our younger daughter came home for the holidays from her first quarter at university in Savannah. One of the many things we've looked forward to in her visit is sharing season two of a long-awaited TV series.
Season one was absolute perfection, the ideal meld of strong storytelling, meaningful characters with compelling story arcs, truly stunning visuals, a magnificent soundtrack, and an almost incomprehensibly tight vision. The first two episodes of season two were equally strong… then the characters and their arcs fell into chaos, the vision got blurry, and the storytelling got too convoluted to track. The visuals and soundtrack remained dazzling, but they weren't enough. I was pulled out of the story. Such a disappointment.
A recipe for frustration
There are many ways an audience gets pulled out of a story and all are unwelcome and unnecessary. Think of the last time you were immersed in a novel and suddenly the author threw in an unrecognizable word, awkward turn of phrase, deliberately confusing sidebar, or incorrect punctuation or syntax. Instead of reading on, you were rudely yanked from the narrative to grab dictionary.com, flip back fifty pages to remind yourself who that character was, or re-read the last passage several times in hope of figuring out what the author was getting at.
I despise when a great song suddenly rhymes love with love, or throws in a trite sentiment because the lyricist couldn't come up with anything better. In a hot second I'm no longer caught up in the track, wondering why that word, that choice, that clumsy concept. A few of my “favorites” are Here you are standing there loving me, and My life a wreck you're making, and Your butt is mine gonna tell you right. Huh? I've got hundreds of examples, all of them, every listen, a cue to think, I'm sorry, and the story I was just listening to a moment ago was??
Speakers and their Powerpoints.
This same sad phenomenon occurs when a speaker is mid-story or a marketer is trying to connect with a buyer and their effort goes south through confusion, disconnection, random complexity, or insider acronyms. One second the audience gets it, the next they're lost, distracted, questioning why any of this matters. Or working through what WOTL stands for. Clarity and structure are vital to successful #CorporateStorytelling any and every time we share our message with a colleague, team, customer, or family member.
Slides are one of the most notorious culprits for pulling an audience out of our story. Every slide is like a new guest at the cocktail party; We're speaking, our audience is listening intently, then CLICK! We momentarily lose command of the narrative while everyone checks out the competition. A good slide keeps our viewers in the same story, but a complicated, overloaded, or poorly executed slide instantly pulls them out. The speaker just keeps talking and talking and no one hears a word because they're too busy processing the mess on screen.
Communication is key
Psychologs looks at the psychology behind confusion and why our minds deliberately disconnect or disengage as an act of self-preservation. When we encounter contradictory or complex information, face ambiguous situations, or struggle to make sense of overwhelming stimuli, a disruption occurs in our mental cognitive processes. Our brain can't effectively organize or interpret the incoming information, and we pull out. For a speaker, that's disastrous.
To keep an audience in our #CorporateStorytelling we have to pay attention to word choices and maintain structure from the start of our story to the end. No leaping around or confusing the listener, which includes getting rid of anything in our content that's contradictory, overly complex, vague, or lacking value.
Bottom Line
Notice when you get unpleasantly pulled out of a story and why. Make a mental note of what error sadly interrupted your connection to that book, television show, film, song, or advertisement. Every distraction becomes a lesson in what not to do when we're the ones telling the stories.
