Author: Mukesh Gupta

Leadership

Why do Stories Work the Way they Do

In the past few days, I have written about the importance and power of stories and how important telling stories can be for leaders. Today, let’s explore why stories work. What is it about stories that make them such great transport for ideas and help shift states. For us to understand why stories work, we need to first understand how our brain works. There are two important properties of brain that are relevant for us in understanding why stories work. Brains are pattern matching machines Every single waking moment, our brains get a deluge of information that it needs to […]

Leadership

The Most Important Stories we Tell

The most important stories we tell are those that we tell to ourselves and about ourselves. The collection of these stories then become our operating system. The operating system of a computer or our mobile phone puts the limitations that all the other applications or programs that we run on that computer need to follow and adhere to. Similarly, our stories create the limitations under which we end up operating. It doesn’t matter what these stories are. They create the boundary conditions under which we end up operating. So, we need to constantly relook at the stories we tell ourselves […]

Leadership

Metaphors and Leadership

One of the responsibilities of a leader is to simplify complexity in a way that everyone can relate and make sense. One of the best ways to do is by the use of metaphors. Metaphors are used to explaining something (new and unknown) by comparing it with something else (common and known). We generally use a lot of metaphors in our day to day conversations. Some of become cliches and enter the collective consciousness of a generation if not more. While we can continue to use such metaphors, when they make sense, the true power of metaphors are realised when […]

Leadership

Storytelling and Leadership

As leaders, one of our primary responsibility is to share ideas and our vision in a manner that those we lead can not only remember in full but also be able to spread it further as and when required. The best way to do so is through the medium of stories. Over the next few posts, we will explore the kinds of stories we need to be able to tell and on the art and science of storytelling and how we can get better at it.