Storytelling - Leaders Worth Following

August 13, 2024August 13, 2024Leadership

Three Lessons in Effective Communication from a Funny Ad

I stumbled on to an ad on my Instagram feed, that I had found very funny when it originally aired. You can watch the ad here before we go any further. When I rewatched this ad from the lens of what can I learn from it, I found it had a lot of lessons for us as leaders and as communicators: Lesson 1: Setting the context Whenever we are trying to tell a story, it is important to set the context within which the story is going to play out. The idea here is to make the context as familiar […]

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024Leadership

How to Get People to Listen to You?

This post talks about 7 things we can do to get people to listen to us and what we have to say. If we want to lead and grow in our organisation, it is important that people we lead, who lead us and our peers listen to us, our ideas and take them seriously.

April 30, 2024April 30, 2024Leadership

Navigating Perspectives: A Leader’s Guide to Effective Storytelling

Almost all good stories, whether shared by a leader or a professional storyteller, share a common attribute. They always share the perspective or the world view of a characters. Another common thread among all good stories is that they have simple storylines about complex characters or situations. As leaders, when we are sharing stories, we need to keep in mind the perspective are we telling the story (ours or the audience or someone else) from and be consistent with it. It is easier said than done and that is why we need to consistently practice this skill at every opportunity […]

April 29, 2024April 28, 2024Leadership

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 […]

April 28, 2024April 28, 2024Leadership

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 […]