Starting Your Presentation with a Story

Starting your presentation with a story:

1. Increases your audience’s interest, because people are hard-wired to care about and enjoy stories.
2. Helps them bond with you–even if it’s not a personal story–because it signals to them that you won’t bore them with a traditional bullet-point centric talk.
3. Tune them into that all important radio station—WII-FM–“What’s in it for me?”–if…you choose the right story.

Even though I’ve been using stories for years in my presentations, I still obsess over which story to start off a talk, because the old adage about first impressions being so important is backed up by research. In studies where the presenter started out weak and ended up strong, they were rated worse than when they started out strong and ended off weak.

Thus, starting out strong is really important.

At a recent “Storytelling for Leaders” program I gave, I orginally was going to start off with a story I told on a webinar for training professionals about someone “dying on stage” and then switching to a story and how the audience came to life. Because bombing in a presentation is a major fear for most people, especially people who speak for a living, that was a good match for my training audience.

However, my contact at the organization I spoke at said that she didn’t want participants to think this was a “presentation skills” program, but a “How to use stories to be a more powerful communicator as a leader” program, so I didn’t want to confuse the issue by starting off with that story.

So…I started with a story that related more to a frustration any leader can relate to:

You have an important message to deliver, but people don’t seem to “get it”. In fact, you’re getting the opposite of the response that you want.

Here’s the recording of the story I opened with. Notice the scenario it depicted and how it dialed people into WII-FM–i.e. how this material could help them.

Also, notice any techniques that stand out for  you in terms of how the story was told.

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