At this week’s club meeting, our scheduled Jokemaster didn’t show up. I took on the role myself, but asked the VP-E if I could borrow his computer for a moment to look up the joke I had in mind — I just couldn’t remember the details offhand.
But there’s one simple change I made to what had been a typical e-mail joke. Rather than talking about something that happened to someone else, I put myself in as the butt of the joke. I told the joke as a story, as if it were something that had happened to me personally. The joke was extremely effective. Our VP-E asked if it had really happened to me, despite my having borrowed his computer to look it up!
What’s the lesson we can learn from this?
There are many ways to transmit information. I’ve sat through more boring meetings in my life than I care to think about. Unfortunately, I expect to sit through quite a lot more during my career. While it’s not always appropriate, embedding the information you want to share into a story makes that information more relevant, easier for your audience to absorb, and more interesting.
But if you don’t just embed it in a story, but rather make it a story about you, about someone your audience has (hopefully) developed some connection with and therefore cares about, suddenly the previously interesting story becomes interesting and relevant. It’s a lot more important, and is now more likely to stay with your audience a lot longer, because you (and therefore they) have a personal connection to it.
Now obviously, the joke I was telling was not a true story (at least not in my case — maybe it really did happen to someone at some point). If you’re telling a story about yourself, adapting someone else’s story to yourself, or even just making up a story, you will usually want to be up front with your audience at some point. After all, having developed that personal relevance, you’ll lose all that you’ve gained (and more!) really fast if your audience thinks you’re dishonest! But by the time you’re telling your audience that it didn’t actually happen to you (if, that is, it didn’t) you’ll have already achieved the purpose for which you included the story.
(And by the way, the story I told here really did happen. To me.)
Daniel Bernstein, CC, ALB
President, Modi’in Toastmasters
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