Anyone who reads my articles knows what a fan of storytelling I am. I use it in personal and professional assessments to boost my clients’ self-confidence and in job interview training to improve their self-marketing. But successful storytelling is not just about technique, it’s also about attitude.
Have you ever observed people after they have attended a seminar on non-violent communication? They then often communicate with ready-made, non-violent sentences, but still come across as subliminally aggressive. Why is that? Because non-violent communication is not primarily a technique, but above all an attitude. This is far more difficult to recognise in storytelling.
Self-confident people use storytelling automatically. It is a challenge for self-critical people. Telling personal stories is stressful for them and many even find it uncomfortable to deal with their strengths. Nevertheless, everyone can learn, to tell stories. I realised that this is also about attitude when I worked with a client.
Attitude always prevails
Sofia (name changed) was a manager and came to me for a personal and professional assessment. One of the goals of our work together was to improve her self-marketing. Our conversations revealed that she had an aversion to it and was almost allergic to it. For years, she had suffered from colleagues at work who played themselves to the fore in a boastful manner and were therefore successful.
When practising storytelling, Sofia told impressive stories but always came off badly. Unconsciously, she used communication techniques that I often observe in coachees: she minimised her challenges. And because she spoke in the «we» form, sometimes even in the «you» form, she was not visible in her stories. She faded out personal decisions by constantly talking about «having to». Her negative attitude towards self-marketing was thus reflected in the way she told her stories.
Man is an ingenious being
I explained the unconscious concealment techniques to her and asked her to prepare two stories for the next meeting. At the next meeting she told me another impressive story. All the concealment techniques from the last time had disappeared and yet her story lacked any effect. I was helpless.
And suddenly I realised how she managed to take all the spice out of her story: She told everything important but packed it into subordinate sentences. And instead, she told the unimportant, explanatory stories in main sentences. In doing so, she turned the rules of grammar on their head. How does that sound? Something like this: «I came into the kitchen, washed the dirty knife, and put it neatly back in the drawer after stabbing the neighbour with it.»
Of course, that wasn’t my client’s story;-) But I was impressed by the ingenious strategy with which her attitude asserted itself in communication without her realising it and tried to outsmart her coach.
#storytelling #selfmarketing #personalbranding
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