How to tell a good story
Everyone likes to hear a good story. In this post, I will teach you how to tell a good story and become the person who makes his friends laugh.
The first good news is that even the greatest comedians of nowadays had to learn how to tell their stories funnily. That means anyone can learn it.
While there are thousands of techniques for telling a story, the most important thing you can learn is the mindsets that lead to those stories. It’s those triggers that make people beg to know what happened next, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here.
How to tell a good story?
- Capture people’s attention
- Commit to your story
- Understand what works
1. Captures people’s attention
If you want to tell a great story, first, you need people to hear you. What you need to do is capture attention even before you start.
You probably listen to your friends or family tell stories in real life, and you see that sometimes they start and stop because no one is listening to them. If they don’t stop counting, they try to make the group stop having a parallel conversation with an intense effort.
Initially, you must dedicate a few seconds to attract the attention of the group and save those stories that fail. Sometimes, these stories aren’t even boring. People just didn’t notice your intention.
Give a prologue
First, you should give a prologue to the story, for example, “let me tell you this because it was impressive.” This approach is a lot more enthusiastic and charismatic.
When you say a sentence like this to the other person, she expects to hear something unbelievable. That’s why it catches the person’s attention.
Call the person by her name
The second important thing you can use is to say the name of the person. Nothing makes people more attentive than hearing the sound of their name being called.
I’m sure this situation already happen to you. You were talking to someone, and then, out of nowhere, you heard your name from the other side of the room, and immediately you diverted your attention. Saying a person’s name is putting them in the listening mode because, for them, everything that comes next is relevant.
That’s why this is the other wonderful way to get the person’s attention at the beginning of a story.
It’s okay to sometimes repeat people’s names three times. Just make sure you have their attention. This same principle applies when you are already in the middle of the conversation.
Sometimes distractions arise, like with people coming in, parallel conversations beginning, etc. But despite all this, you should wait until you get their attention back. That’s an indispensable habit for a storyteller.
2. Commit to your story
If you want to tell a good story, you have to commit to it. Many people start well and manage to capture people’s attention but then throw it away because they are not committed to telling the story.
They, for example, make a summary instead of actually telling the story. Their voice and confidence start diminishing, conveying the impression that the story does not matter.
If you want to show commitment to your story, you must show expressive gestures and focus on the person you are talking to. That way, you communicate to the other person’s subconscious that this story is good and interesting.
What keeps people focused on you is the way you express yourself, with your voice, with your gestures, with your face. Sometimes you need to be a little creative on that.
Sometimes you can even interpret characters about another person who made part of the story you are going to tell. Can exaggerate and add sarcasm to the situation.
The good thing about doing this is that the characters let you spice up the middle of your story. You can turn moments that didn’t seem very funny into totally hilarious moments just by interpreting a character.
This is how you learn to tell longer stories but still manage to keep people focused.
3. Understand what works
For you to know how to tell a good story, you should also know more or less what works.
For example, all stand-up comedians must work on their shows and material. For that, they improve their jokes and their stories until they are as funny as possible. They go to small clubs just to try out their jokes and then apply them on bigger stages.
That’s why when you go to one of their shows, they’re so hilarious because they already know what parts of their stories work with the audience.
You can and certainly should do the same thing with your stories. Obviously, you’re not going to try them in clubs, but for example, when something you said made people laugh, remember it and use it again in other situations. Comedians do exactly the same thing.
This focus on the things that really work is not something you need to do at the end of a story. You can do it when you say something that gets a lot of laughs. If that happens, keep it up.
More important than simply laughing is the first thing we talked about, understanding if you can get people’s focus. Notice the parts where people get sucked into the stories you tell. Notice how and why you sometimes tend to lose people’s focus when you tell a story.
When you feel like you’ve told a bad story, stop for a minute and try to figure out why you got that result. Find out exactly where you lost people’s attention. If you do that, you’ll naturally start cutting out the bad parts and focusing on the parts that are liked by people.
Conclusion
These were the tips for you to tell a good story. I hope you have understood that everyone needs to practice and learn how to tell an amazing story. Even the best comedians needed to learn how to do it.
I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you!
If you want to read more about the subject, click here.
