Creating Your Story
By: Wilbert Evers
Tags: Creativity, Presentations, Authenticity, Speech, Storytelling

A Short Guide in Creating Impactful Messages

A story delivered with impact makes it sustainable, heard or loved. Whether it is a conference presentation, an important sales pitch, a touching speech at your best friend’s wedding or a short fiction novel. Without doubt, the most memorable stories or speeches have the common element of a strong central message, supported by underlying foundations, opinions, facts or feelings.

Creating your message is hard work. Listening to the great storytellers in this world and experiencing the efforts it takes to build a story or speech from scratch, I have derived five common steps which help you create your message or story with impact.

Research

It all starts with research. Start reading on the subject. Talk about it to as many people as possible. Be curious, and find different perspectives or angles. How you capture and collect your content is irrelevant: write it down in a notebook, create bookmarks in your internet browser, or save articles and hard copies in a messy file. Most important in this first phase of research is that you stay open and in your collecting mode. Define who will be your audience. What are their expectations, their dreams, their challenges? What makes them smile, and what touches them? Do not underestimate the time this research phase can take. Hence, it is important not to rush yourself through this start of your journey towards your personal story.

Reflect

As you are in the process of your research, you might re-read stuff you have collected in that phase. The next phase is all about reflection of the insights you have collected, and ideally you start this phase without having closed the research phase. In your reflection mode you start finding patterns, views or timelines. In this mode, you start to see connections. While you do this, you start building first ideas on a storyline. Reflection also means taking distance. Maybe take a pause from working on your story, pitch or presentation. Let it rest for a while, but make sure that you take a note when a new insight arrives. This often happens at unexpected moments: in front of the mirror while getting up in the morning, watching from the train window during your daily commute, or at the beach of your holiday location.

Reorganise

By now you have collected facts, thoughts, storylines and insights and you have sorted them in your mind. Before you start this next phase, take a short time to summarise for yourself what you have learned from the first two phases. What is your central message, and which are the really important opinions, feelings or dreams you have on the subject which you urge to tell your audience? Write it down. And let it rest. You are starting to see patterns now, and a story will be rising. A story with a beginning, a middle section, and an end. In this structuring mode it also helps to design different storylines or timelines. Leave yourself some space here. Have fun! If you are stuck, don’t get frustrated and let it rest again. You will see by now that breaks in the phases help make your story stronger. So don’t rush yourself, keep the end goal in mind: your convincing story!

Reduce

I find the next phase probably one of the hardest. By now you have done your research, sorted your thoughts, found a unique message or story which is concise, touching or appealing. You can start to see the virtual movie of your created story in your mind. However, this phase requires you to reduce your story to the core. What is distracting? What is maybe not so relevant? Great stories and messages tend to be very simple. And they connect with the audience. Go back again to your initial research, and listen to your story through the ears of your target audience. In this prioritisation mode you need to challenge yourself to get rid of some work done to cut your story or message to the very core. By reducing you say goodbye to work done in earlier phases. But remind yourself that your heavy work in research is never lost as it might become input for your next story or pitch. If you cut some elements to reduce your message to touch the audience with the most important message, you will do them a really big favour. It makes your story so much more crisp and clear. And it will stick with them much better.

Repeat

As you move towards the completion of your story, it might be required to repeat one or a few of the above steps. We are all human, and experiences shape ourselves. Maybe a new or big event happened in the life of your audience, in the world, with your client who you will address with your pitch? Don’t let this discourage you, but instead think of what that could mean to your almost completed story. You are almost there! In this refining mode you might find interesting turns to adapt your final production. Maybe you need to do some research on a new development, or reorganise the order of events in your story to let it stick even better? In this phase, I force myself to think about the major efforts great actors or writers overcome when delivering their master pieces in theatre or novels. Repetition, rehearsal, re-doing their work, every time, all over again.

As you have moved through the five steps, quite some time might have passed. During that time, you have grown on your story, and your story has grown on you. And that is what makes good messages great for your conference audience, readers or best friend, who is about to get married.