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Career Tips - Issue # 10 (Feb. 2005) FREE bimonthly newsletter dedicated to your career development. It will take about 10 minutes to digest this newsletter. Go Storytelling Once upon a time, transparencies were used for making presentations. Then came a giant: PowerPoint! Everybody got hooked to it. It was easy and quick. Just feed in data, charts, figures and bulleted information and an impressive presentation was ready. Presentation and PowerPoint became synonymous. Life went on until people start to notice something worrying:With all the efforts poured in to create dazzling PP presentations, they ultimately failed to make a desired impact on the audience. Soon it dawned on the presenters that presentations were not about PowerPoint. Presentations were about persuasion. And that realisation led people to a new technique of making presentations. This technique, however, is as old as the human race itself: storytelling! Would you believe it? More and more people in the business world are now learning what is considered to be an unbusiness like activity: telling stories. Stories engage people at the emotional level whereas PowerPoint engages them only at the intellectual level. Studies show people don't act based on reason alone. You need an emotional hook. According to Robert McKee, the world's most respected screenwriting teacher, people can engage and persuade their audience at a totally different level if they learn to tell good stories (Harvard Business Review, June 2003). No wonder, many corporate giants, including Microsoft (originator of PowerPoint), now routinely send their executives to McKee for learning the art of story telling. >>CAREER TIP: Next time, when you attend a typical PowerPoint presentation, observe how disconnected, lost and burdened you feel with the information presented. Also, when you read a good novel, watch an engaging movie or a TV serial, notice how you get glued to the story. In fact, if you have been reading Career Tips for sometime and remember some of what you've read, it's probably because of the stories involved. Instead of telling a potential customer that your services are superior, if you tell a story about how in a previous case you/your organisation went out of the way to resolve a problem for your customer, the impression would be different. You can use the idea of story telling not only in your presentations but also in other situations. For example, don't tell an interviewer "I am a team player." Instead, tell a story of how your colleague had to suddenly go on emergency leave, how the project he was doing was too critical to be left unattended, how the client was pressing for results, how the deadline was approaching and how you voluntarily took over your colleague's duties and got everything under control. Look for good examples and stories. They are everywhere. Keep them in your pocket for situations where reason alone won't work. Remember, only true stories work. Fiction backfires! That's a bitter reality. The Power of Imagination When was the last time you did something for the first time? Try the following: Take a blank page and draw a circle on it. May be, use a cup or something cylindrical. Then draw a cross (two perpendicular lines) through it. You will have four quadrants. Next, take a small ring or a key and tie it with a string about four-five inches long. Set up is ready! Now, hold the end of the string, with the ring or key hanging like a pendulum about an inch above the cross (i.e., near the centre of the circle). Next, ignoring the ring and sting, simply think around the circle, i.e., follow the circumference with your eyes (anticlockwise or clockwise). What will happen? You will find that, after a while, the little pendulum will automatically start to move around, following the direction of your thinking. It will do it in small circles first and then in bigger circles. Remember, you're not consciously moving your hand at all. Next, reverse the direction of your imaginary walk (say from anticlockwise to clockwise). The pendulum will also change the direction – automatically! And if you think across the cross, up and down or left and right, the pendulum will again follow your thinking. I know you won't believe that such a thing is possible. I also didn't until I tried it out. So better try it to believe it. You may wonder how the pendulum can follow the direction of your thinking. Is there anything mysterious or magical to it? Actually, there isn't. This simple yet eye-opening experiment shows that our imagination and actions are connected. Imagination can make you act (involuntarily) in ways you want to. >>CAREER TIP: For a change, don't start your day by checking e-mails, making a cup of coffee or reading a newspaper. Instead, sit quietly for a few moments and imagine yourself doing what you would like to do during the day. It could be making a convincing presentation to a client. It could be handling peacefully a person you find irritating. It could be making a solid case for extra manpower in front of your boss. It could be giving a great performance at an interview. Once you've planted the thought, simply go about doing your work in a normal manner. When the moment will come, you will act the way you had imagined. After you've had few successes with the above idea, you will realise the possibilities are limitless. Will be back after two weeks. Atul Mathur FORWARD IT: Would you like to share what you've just read with any of your friends? Click below to send a link to your friends. To SUBSCRIBE to this newsletter, send a blank e-mail to:subscribe Career Tips ***Copyright 2005 Atul Mathur*** |
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