Storytelling can be one of the most powerful ways to communicate and influence others. Knowing how to communicate through stories whether in relationships, parenting or in business can help generate more success. 

Mike Brian, author, speaker, and pioneer in the evolution of presentations, powerful storytelling and executive personal branding shared his secrets to be a successful communicator at a recent Davis Chamber luncheon called “Using Power Stories to Educate, Inspire and Change Behavior.” 

Power stories are designed to get people to alter behavior, to create some kind of movement, he said. “The hardest thing in the world to do is to convince someone to change a behavior they don’t want to.”

Brian was involved in creating the warning signs above I-15. Some were humorous like “get your head out of your apps.” “That one went national,” he said.

 “There is a population of people that drive and think they’re experts at it,” he said. “They think they can juggle and text, they can do all these things. Guess who are the worst offenders? Men between 18-40. They’re the hardest to work with because they don’t want to hear a single thing. We would go after them with scary stories and things like that. These people would just say, ‘that’ll never happen to me.’”

Those people were idiots, said Brian. “We did a focus group for three years and during the focus group I told our moderator to ask them ‘who would you do it for?’ They won’t do it for themselves because they don’t believe they’re in trouble.”

 Who would they do it for? “Do you know what their answer was – their child,” he said. “So you saw an ad campaign with a little girl putting sticky notes for her dad around the house as he got ready to go to work like ‘don’t forget your lunch’ and ‘feed the dog.’ On the mirror she put one that said ‘Dad, wear your seat belt. We want you to come home.’”

That altered behavior, he said. “So there are triggers that make people change their behaviors.”

Humans are unique creatures, said Brian. “We communicate through stories. Dogs don’t do that. We have these things that are very unique to us. We share things emotionally and they connect us. Storytelling literally is a bond that happens between us that helps us connect to each other.”

 Brian told the story of the guy who created match.com, a dating site. “They did a research project about match.com and went to a university,” he said. “They gave all the statistics about the company and how they grew into such a big company.”

Well in the middle of the presentation they told a story about how the guy that started it decided the only way it was testable is if it had a profile, said Brian. “So he had the company employees come and he said ‘everybody in this room needs to make a profile.’ And so everybody goes and makes a profile and they’re watching it and watching it. Four months later, his girlfriend matched with someone else in the company and left him from his own website – but it worked.”

Four weeks later they came back and interviewed a handful of the students during the presentation and 63% of them could remember the statistics from the story, only 5% of them could tell them anything else. Stories carry weight. They have a structure to bond that information to you.”

 True successful storytelling is more than entertaining, said Brian.”Employing ‘power’ techniques transform stories into motivational messages that can produce dramatic and permanent change.”