CHAMPION STRATEGIES – PUBLIC SPEAKING WORKSHOP – MARCH 22, 2021
How to Keep Your Audience Engaged At All Times
What do you believe is one of the most important aspects of public speaking?
Your content? Your ability to memorize every word? Your confidence on stage?
Of course those are all points to keep in mind when you’re mastering the art of public speaking, but one of the most important aspects is actually storytelling.
The majority of speakers out there in the world today seem to believe that the most effective way to deliver a great speech is to cram as much information and as many facts as they possibly can into every last minute they’re on stage.
The theory behind this method is that the speaker wants to prove to the audience how much they know by giving them as much information as possible in a short amount of time. But there’s a problem with this approach… human beings are simply not wired to absorb pure facts and data. It’s just downright boring.
Take a minute and think back to your days in university or college, or maybe even high school. Now think about all of the teachers you had who were pure lecturers. These teachers just stood at the front of the classroom and spit straight facts. How much of those lessons do you actually remember? Our guess is very few of them, unless they were incredibly important. Realistically, there’s a strong chance that most of that information is gone.
Now, still reflecting on your school years, this time think about that one particular teacher whose lessons to this day you still remember. We’re willing to bet that this teacher was a storyteller. A storyteller teacher doesn’t just deliver facts on top of facts, they tell you why that information is important by attaching a story to it. Years later, you still remember that lesson because of the story intertwined with it.
A storyteller teacher doesn’t just deliver facts on top of facts, they tell you why that information is important by attaching a story to it
Long before television, radio, the internet, books, and even written language, humans primarily communicated with each other through stories. There was a time when the only entertainment in the evening was sitting around the fire and telling each other stories about the events of the day or tales from the past. Sometimes people would even just look up at the stars and watch them move around the sky while making up stories about them. These were the primary forms of entertainment. At the same time, these were also the primary forms of passing information from one person to another, and from generation to generation.
