Story Telling
Story telling is, in my opinion and experience, a really useful ability for sarging and for sales and for influencing people.
I was at a bookshop tonight in Bangkok and noticed an interesting book about using story telling to improve your powers of influence.
The back cover summarises the structure of good story telling:
1. PASSION to make your listeners care about the outcome2. A HERO to drive the action
3. An ANTAGONIST to challenge the hero
4. A moment of AWARENESS where the hero realizes how to overcome his or her obstacles
5. TRANSFORMATION wherein the hero accomplishes his or her desired goal
The structure makes sense to me. Flicking through the book, I saw they talk about the importance of tonality and facial expression. I’ve found that I can talk about nothing and as long as I have the passion about what I’m saying, I can usually draw the person in.
What about the hero part of it? Is the hero usually US? Or is that bragging too directly? I don’t think so. It is possible to make ourselves the hero without letting the person know we are bragging. I think it is more useful to think of us a the protagonist who is revealed as a hero at the end of the story. The story format allows us to show qualities in our character which are admirable, rather than having to brag directly and say how good we are. Also if the person can imagine the qualities we have herself (rather than us telling the person directly we have the quality), it tends to be more influential because they think it is their own idea.
Who is the antagonist? Is it an ex-GF who we booted out - shows we are choosy about girls. Is it an AMOG we had to deal with? I suppose the antagonist helps us to define the qualities we want to show we have. Any more ideas on the nature of the antagonist? I suppose it doesn’t have to be a person, it could be a challenge we faced.
And the moment of awareness - is this when we put 2 and 2 together and got 5? Something to show we can think outside the box or shows we are creative. My experience tells me that when you can throw a curve ball here and reveal something that the listener wasn’t expecting, you can gain a lot of attraction and pump buying temperature. The moment of awareness could let you stack stories i.e. ‘and just then I remembered something that happened to me when I was at high school … there was this guy in our class … ‘ Stacking stories helps hook people too and can help develop a trance like focus.
The transformation is what? When the listener of the story sees you in a new light. You pull everything together and describe how other people saw you in a new way, thus prompting your listener to see you in that way too.
Of course you could use this story telling approach to social proof a wing man.
Many of the successful times I have influenced people, especially when I’ve hooked girls solidly, I’ve told stories and had them riveted. When combined with elements of pattern language, I find the power of stories is increased greatly.
The book is called The Elements of Persuasion.
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