Get Things To Move
(Inside The People Listening – A Secret To Great Storytelling…)
Tom O'Connor
One of the things all great storytelling must do is draw the audience into the story.
For example: “For a long time, everything was fine. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.”
As an opening line, that pulls attention and opens a loop in the reader’s mind. And as you may know, the brain hates open loops.
This is NLP 101. It’s used extensively in nested storytelling. We can use the desire of the brain to ‘close the loop’ to our advantage and play with consciousness in interesting and useful ways.
As storytellers we have to hook attention and get a response from the audience.
Why’s this so important?
No attention = no ability to influence.
No ability to influence = no ability to persuade or transform a person from thinking, feeling or acting one way to think, feel and act in a different way.
So the minimum bid, and one of the first things you will want to do as you tell your stories is - ensure you are hooking attention and inviting people into your stories.
There are many ways to do this.
But as Netflix have been learning of late, simply having someone’s attention isn’t enough.
You got to get them engaged and participating in the story. Every story must get things to move. Not just in terms of the story has to have movement (this happened which led to that which created this funny/novel/concerning situation etc.) but things have to happen in the story which MOVE your audience.
Let’s watch a segment from Advanced Storytelling where Michael elaborates on this distinction more and how we can use anecdotes, stories and metaphors to illustrate principles and seed ideas and conclusions, outside of conscious awareness if we choose.
OK now that you have a better understanding of the changes in movements you are looking to create, let’s watch a demonstration:
Were you able to track how the examples Michael shared served a specific job?
How the stories he choose populated specific principles he wanted to prime and setup in his client. You see, the brain doesn’t just hate open loops, it is constantly trying to predict where is this story going?
And brilliant storytellers use this to their advantage.
(Netflix would do well to remember this. The viewer doesn’t want to be left in a state of “I don’t’ understand.” for too long, otherwise they will checkout in droves.)
Once you learn the patterns behind great storytelling and how you can begin to incorporate proven techniques and principles in your work too, there’s really no limit in what is possible.
We can use these distinctions we’ve been learning here and many other natural mechanisms in how human brains operate to create specific results in our friends, colleagues, clients and loved ones.
To create truly profound levels of change, transformation and influence and never again have to ‘tell’ someone a solution or suggestion only for it to be rejected and bounce off of them. Your work becomes far, far more elegant.
It’s ideas like the one I’ve been sharing here that are a big part of the magic behind advanced storytelling and why so many NLPers struggle to track masters like Michael, Richard Bandler and other great storytellers.
They never have learned how one can create (and make use of) inferences, priming ideas and responses and nesting content inside of stories or how to leverage a whole feast of possibilities that are available for pulling people into narratives.
(Which unsurprisingly works far, far better than telling them what they should think…)
This is just the beginning. There’s so much more. In fact, the skills of Advanced Storytelling as so useful and so important I invested several weeks working closely with Michael to get him to spill the beans on the real secrets and skills of Advanced Storytelling.
And tomorrow I’m going to reopen access for a small group of people to join us to learn these skills.
Stay tuned for an email from me then.
To your success,
Tom
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