How to build Storytelling Skills (Storytelling 101) - Career Challenge
Everyone should have basic storytelling skills. Check out this suggested list!
Welcome to this month’s career challenge log that is all based on the project of building your storytelling skills.
Storytelling is a wonderful skill. A skill that is adaptable and usable within almost every single opportunity you have to communicate with other people. This doesn’t have to be verbally, it also includes non-verbal communication.
Storytelling does not have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be something you have to master even for you to begin to see the benefits of even reasonably good storytelling. Basic awareness of and using key storytelling principals can help elevate you in many different ways. Above all, storytelling can help you communicate what your trying to say clearly, you can use it to get your message across, and you can use it to educate and positively influence your audience as a result of that clarity and structure.
Its tough to know where to start though, so this challenge log has been created as a ‘101’ guide to provide some suggestions on tasks you can focus on early on to understanding some key principals of storytelling. It doesn’t matter if your early on in your career or if you have been working for decades, storytelling skills will be an asset!
Let’s check out the Storytelling 101 Challenge Log (below) and keep reading to take a walk through it.
The storytelling 101 challenge is designed so you can work at your own pace through 6 mini-challenges, and completing the challenge with a final project. The difference with the storytelling 101 career challenge is those mini-challenges are in a specific order, top to bottom, and labeled 1 through to 6, so you begin at 1, and move through to 6 in numerical order before you take on the final project.
The previous mini-challenges could be completed ‘in any order’ before the final project, however with this storytelling challenge it was important to create a structure of progression so that you can begin working on specific components within the mini-challenges to contribute to the final project. Once you have completed all 6 mini-challenges and reflected on those outcomes, you can be ready for the final project of the challenge.
These challenges are not meant to be completed in any time period. You can take one week, one month or one year to complete them. (Also please ensure you do read the disclaimer and the notice on the about page - completing these challenges are your choice!)
Log Overview
Now, let’s run through briefly each of the mini-challenges with some additional information:
Explore Storytelling: Explore the principals of storytelling by doing some research about it using your favorite search engine or taking a look at books on the subject, such as ‘The Science of Storytelling’ by Will Storr. This mini-challenge provides a foundation for you to just become familiar with key concepts (some of which are in this challenge) and be free to explore different perspectives. Aim to find at least 5 good sources on storytelling.
Learn from some of the best: You will likely follow people on social media networks or have colleagues/peers who you listen to when they present information or talk. Pay particular attention to these interactions and consider why you like their stories, their content and see if you can find any patterns in how they structure their content. One such storyteller I pay attention to is Simon Sinek.
Learn from some of the best part 2: Now you have considered who some of your most listened to or watched storytellers are, now consider what some of the best books, movies, or even podcasts are and complete the same tasks. What stands out? What patterns can you find in those stories? A place to start is to consider some of the early Marvel Movies.
Craft a plot and a challenge: Now it’s time to take that research and put it into practice. Every story has a plot that involves characters and those characters (or just one) normally encounter a challenge because they embark on some sort of mission to do something. The plot traditionally involves some scene setting and back stories. You would have come across these concepts in your initial research in the first mini-challenge. For this task, you should consider in the context of your career, any education you have, what would be the plot and challenge for your story?
Create a simple story arc: Now you have some base material, start crafting the dough in the shape you want. The most simple arc you can use is to create a structure containing a beginning, middle and an end in a simple curve that starts low, transitions to a high point and ends mid center or low (like a cartoon mountain).
Meaning or call to action: For an elevator pitch, you don’t need to have some deep routed action or meaning to it, but you should consider your audience and how to finish your pitch. How do you want them to feel after you have finished talking? You may even want to leave it on a question and share some aspirations for the future, or in this specific scenario, the call to action can actually be on you.
The Final Project!
Final Project: Put together these components from the mini-challenges to create your own elevator pitch! Traditionally an elevator pitch is the time it takes for an elevator ride in a relatively large building - about 60 seconds. You can of course adjust this to what you want to work with, as the principal is the same. Your not creating an hour long presentation, but your trying to craft your story about your career into a short amount of time, with structure, narrative (the plot and challenge) and the future.
You might be wondering why an elevator pitch of your career story would be a good thing to have in your back or side pocket. You never know when you may meet a prospective employer, have to introduce yourself, or join a meeting where in a break somebody asks about your background and how you got to where you are today. These are amazing opportunities to build your network and can help you stand out. You can take what you get out of this challenge and if you are happy with it, even use it in future interviews when you traditionally get asked the question ‘tell me about yourself’ at the beginning of an interview.
Summary
This blog aimed to introduce the Storytelling 101 Career Challenge Log and give readers an introduction on what they can to work on improving their storytelling skills! You can easily combine this challenge log with the speaker challenge log if you wish to use the medium of speaking, however it is not required. Hopefully you can begin to see how many of these skills are connected and by building your awareness and skills in what seems like one area, actually positively impacts yourself in many.
Watch out for the updates to the challenge log in future editions (like steps to help you level up these skills even further) and the paid version of the newsletter which will include printable logs (and iPad optimized pdfs) and additional tools like more blogs and even videos to work through some of these tasks!