Are you out there?

How do we connect with and trust each other in our video-intermediated worlds? We can use stories - you know - those massively powerful neurobiological activators.

My favorite story expert, Jay Golden, tells us that our brains are pre-wired to recognize and respond to story patterns. When we hear the start of a good story, dopamine triggers our curiosity and sense of suspense. When we’re not sure what’s coming next, cortisol focuses our attention. A burst of oxytocin comes with the satisfaction of a happy ending.

Lisa Cron, in her fantastic book, Wired for Story, says, “When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.”

What does our brain want? What causes our brains to drop into stories?

According to Lisa Cron, “Story takes a general situation, idea or premise and personifies it via the very specific.” According to Jay Golden, it’s about sensory detail - a great story tells us what the hero was doing and feeling.

Here is an example of a very boring story no one will care about:
Data managers need to make sense of unstructured data to derive important business insights. The right tools bring great results.

Here is the same story, with specifics, with humanity:
Hubert’s company just bought two others - mainly to get lots of valuable customer data. Hubert’s team is supposed to make sense of data in 24 different languages, on dozens of different platforms. It’s 11 p.m., Hubert is staring at his monitor, waving his arms every twenty minutes to make the lights in his office go back on, feeling utterly hopeless. He was in a meeting for 12 hours today and no one could agree on anything. He thinks his eyeballs might be on fire.

But suddenly Hubert remembers - he saw something about amazing new data management software. Could it be true? He reads the article. He sends an e-mail. He feels hope for the first time. He goes home and actually sleeps.

Three months later, Hubert and his team have the best data program in his industry. He’s promoted to Chief Data Officer. He’s on the keynote circuit. Hubert feels like a new person!

A great story is personal, about a person’s fears and triumphs - yours or your customers’. One caveat - before you decide to tell a personal story, prepare it and vet it. You want to be relatable and human, you don’t want to overshare or make anyone uncomfortable. For example, a story at your all hands about how the airline lost your luggage but you still won a major new client at a breakfast meeting while wearing a Batman t-shirt is great. A story about food poisoning and throwing up on the person next to you on the airplane, not so much. See the difference?

Stories may be the most powerful connection tool available. They allow us to show our humanity, to admire the humanity of others, to inspire our teams.

If there’s anything we’ve learned in the pandemic, it’s that all of us are humans with personal lives - we see babies on laps, lunches being eaten, maybe even laundry in the background. We are merging our personal and professional selves. We can do that deliberately, on purpose, in an inspiring way, when we use stories.

Here’s the end of that famous E.M. Forster quote from Howard’s End: “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”