POWERFUL STORYTELLING
HACKS
THAT CHANGE HEARTS & MINDS EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 11TH WORLD WILDERNESS CONGRESS SPEAKER MANUAL
YOUR STORY
HELPS KEEP EARTH WILD
You were chosen to speak at the 11th World Wilderness Congress (WILD11) because you and your story are powerful and will motivate others to take more ambitious actions to defend life on Earth.
Thank you! Because that’s what inspiring people, like you, and exciting stories, like yours, accomplish: they mobilize change. For over 40 years, the World Wilderness Congress has brought leaders together from around the world and all walks of life to mobilize an international community that keeps Earth wild. It has accomplished this largely through the power of story. The following pages weave together decades worth of storytelling observations and experiences to provide you with expert advice that will help you maximize the inspirational impact of your experience and expertise. My aim is to augment your extensive experience in giving world-class conservation presentations with tools that can help you reach a larger audience, expand conservation’s potential, and make your moment at WILD11 truly unforgettable. Thank you for helping to keep Earth wild, and for sharing your story at the 11th World Wilderness Congress. With warmth and gratitude,
Amy Lewis Vice President, Policy & Communications, The WILD Foundation
Powerful Storyteling Hacks that Change Hearts & M i n d s i s e x c l u s i v e c o n t e n t p r o d u c e d f o r t h e 1 1 th World Wilderness Congress speaker cohort by the WILD Foundation, wild.org. All rights reserved Š 2020.
CONTENTS MY STORY
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PART 1: WHY STORY - The Science - The Philosophy
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PART 2: THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 - The Second Person (Relevant) - Questions (Trust) - Metaphors (Clarity) - Shock and Laughter (Interest) - Stories (Empathy, Drama, & Purpose) PART 3: TELLING THE BEST STORY - What is a Story - Identifying the Story - Telling the Story
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MY STORY
WHEN BEING SMART ISN’T ENOUGH
“I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.” ~ Lena Waithe
I discovered my passion for wild
nature in April of 1989. I was nine years old when I found it on the glossy pages of a Zoobook, a monthly wildlife magazine for children. The April issue, dedicated to bats, was not my first Zoobook. In the months prior I had cynically skimmed through others featuring far more charismatic creatures – tigers,
dolphins, and gorillas – sensing that some adult somewhere harbored an agenda and was deploying these particular celebrities of the animal kingdom for the sole purpose of transforming me into some kind of environmentalist. My undomesticated soul would not be swayed by such obvious adult machinations. 2
But the bat issue was somehow different. On reflection, I think it was due to the bats themselves, and their reassuring homeliness. There was something authentic about them as they unconsciously lived their lives and, in so doing, benefited all the world by planting rainforests, pollinating crops, and devouring mosquitoes. For the first time, I fell in love with an entire order of mammals. And I vowed to defend them from the threats that besieged their survival. With the fervor of the newly converted I launched my first environmental campaign. Save the bats! And yet . . . no matter how many facts I recited or photos I shared portraying the utility and beauty of the order Chiroptera, it seemed I could rarely move others to donate even a few dollars to groups dedicated to the study and protection of this keystone species. Quickly, I became frustrated and confused. How could bats ever have a future if facts alone could not move people to take action?
It was this experience that propelled me on a life-long pursuit of answers to some of the toughest conservation and environmental communication challenges. It is my privilege to be able to share with you the observations and discoveries accrued over the last few decades. What experience started you on the path of your expertise?
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PART ONE
WHY STORY Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. ~ Neil Gaiman
PART ONE
WHY STORY Stories makes sense of the world in a way mere facts cannot – that is because they create a shared experience with your audience that improves both your credibility and relatability at a deeply intuitive and emotional level.
That’s because stories show, instead of tell, creating an illusion for the audience that they are actually witnessing the events you described and experiencing first-hand the lessons you learned. This makes storytelling an express lane to integrated understanding. The next section summarizes the science behind storytelling and why we are biologically programmed to respond powerfully to stories.
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WHY STORY
THE SCIENCE It is no accident that civilizations form around common narratives and origin stories. Stories are the foundation of our identity and the cornerstones of stable communities at all scales because we are biologically hard-wired to respond to stories. This programming emerges in two forms:
MIRROR NEURONS
STRESS RESPONSE 6
WHY STORY: THE SCIENCE
STRESS RESPONSE Every story (if it follows the classical story map, see What Is a Story p. 24), includes a dramatic arc. This dramatic arc taps into our instinctual millionsyear-old stress response system. The outcome of this process is what scientists call the “negativity bias.� Humans are hard-wired to focus on what seems threatening or stressful. It is how our ancestors survived long enough to procreate in a wild and unpredictable world. It is how we will survive the climate and extinction emergencies. By using drama to leverage the stress response, stories reliably capture attention long enough to relay important information.
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DRAGONS ARE OPPORTUNITIES Oh, and just because stories leverage our built-in negativity bias that doesn’t mean that a story is negative or makes us feel hopeless. Over the years, I have heard many people caution against using negative information at all in stories out of the mistaken belief that negative information alone will leave the audience feeling disempowered. While stories with tragic conclusions can result in feelings of apathy and despair (the exact opposite emotional state we want to engineer as conservation storytellers), that doesn’t change the fact that challenging obstacles and visceral threats are the building blocks of the dramatic arc that makes a story relevant and effective. The important takeaway is to end with a solution or demonstration of how such obstacles or threats can be overcome. Let the audience know that heroes are as real as dragons. Bonus points when you empower the audience to be the heroes!
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WHY STORY: THE SCIENCE
MIRROR NEURONS Where does empathy originate? Many scientists believe it starts with a highly specialized part of our nervous system called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons activate when we see or hear expressed emotion. They empower us to empathize with the expressive people we observe. And it turns out that they fire more rapidly when we listen to stories.
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MIRROR NEURONS &
EMPATHY
Empathy is a powerful and authentic persuasion ally. It enhances cooperation and leads to more generous behavior. And it is an essential building block in messages that mobilize. When we tell stories, we stimulate mirror neurons, which in turn, give rise to an upswelling of empathy that helps carry the audience to action. Orienting communication around the activation of mirror neurons is easy to achieve . . . when we use stories that relay PERSONAL EMOTIONAL TRUTHS.
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WHY STORY
THE PHILOSOPHY Science excels at explaining the causal relationships and structures that define our material world. But it is deliberately unequipped to illuminate purpose or meaning. The scientific method was developed specifically to uncover objective reality – and it is the best tool we have for doing so! But reality isn’t just shaped by objective structures. The subjective is as much a force in our world as the objective. Subjective beliefs have been the basis of titanic struggles and momentous outcomes throughout human history. For good and bad, the subjective helps to inform who we are and entirely determines who we want to become. Stories, unlike science, have the power to change our emotional response to the world and powerfully reinforce alterations to our priorities.
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PART TWO
THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX Every single person who sees a movie brings a whole set of unique experiences, but through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time. ~ Steven Spielberg
PART TWO
THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX There are lots of effective persuasion techniques, not all of which are stories. Here are five mighty tactics that can make you instantly more persuasive.
THE “Y” WORD
METAPHOR
CURIOSITY
SHOCK & HUMOR
STORIES 13
THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX
THE “Y” WORD Once upon a time, at a formative juncture in my development as a communicator, a well-meaning authority figure (Mrs. Rainey, my 10th grade English teacher) admonished that under no circumstance whatsoever, no matter how tempting, was I or my classmates ever to use the second person (“you”) in formal writing. And thus, for decades I labored, awkwardly at times, to expel and exclude the y-word from every piece of professional writing I produced or encountered. But no longer! The reason is that over the years I observed that the most persuasive communicators (usually marketers) never hesitated to drop the y-bomb. They crafted their words to speak more to their customers than about themselves or their products. The hard truth is that few people care about your ideas, your products, your solutions, until they understand how these things will make their lives better. 14
THE “Y” WORD
A DEMONSTRATION Read the following comparisons, and ask yourself which comes closer to moving your heart. EX. 1: MRS. RAINEY SANCTIONED
Guari Patal spends several hours a day carrying home a heavy jug of water just to ensure her five children have enough water to drink. Last year, after a prolonged drought, the town well dried up. Now, Ms. Patal must travel over 2 kilometers a day to fill a large plastic container full of water to meet her family’s daily needs.
EX. 2: ENHANCED FOR PERSUASIVE POWER
Guari Patal is a lot like you. She loves her kids, and like you, would do almost anything to protect them. Which is why Guari spends hours a day beneath the back-breaking weight of a 10-liter jug of water, just to ensure her five children don’t go thirsty.
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WHY YOU cont.
The word “you” may not improve objectivity, but it does instantly manifest relevance and a deeper audience connection with the message. Used strategically, it can also heighten empathy. And when it comes to persuasion, the science is clear: relevance and empathy almost always outperform objectivity. YOU: A WORD OF CAUTION Deploy “you” and “we” only when relatively certain the information that follows actually describes your audience. Otherwise, you risk engaging negative responses that can jolt the listener out of a more receptive state. When you aren’t sure if your story describes your audience, shift your pronouns to the first-person (“I”). If you want to engage empathy, be sure to describe your own emotional responses to first-person stories.
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THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX
CURIOSITY
Does arguing make the world a better place? Put another way, is it ever easy to admit that you’re wrong, especially within the heat of an argument? Even when you know you are wrong you may have noticed how much better it feels to change your mind on your own, without someone else compelling you to do so? When was the last time you found common ground with someone else you thought disagreed with you? How did that feel? How did it feel to know that you helped contribute to a shared conclusion? If you could bypass argument altogether and build consensus from the ground up, would you? As you may have observed, questions (especially ones that can be answered with a resounding “yes!”) can be powerful consensus magnets. That is because questions automatically place your audience in two emotional states that improve receptivity to new ideas: trust and mutual respect.
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CURIOSITY cont.
1.
Questions build trust by wrapping the questioner in an aura of curiosity, reducing the perception that she is trying to push an agenda.
2.
Questions produce common purpose. When you invite others to uncover a mystery, your audience is more likely to agree with you about the conclusions you seemingly draw together.
As a political science instructor, I would tell my students on the first day of class that sometimes the greatest contributions to science aren’t new answers. Sometimes, they are new questions that have, up until that moment, never before been asked. The same applies to the art of consensus-building. Wouldn’t you agree? 18
THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX
METAPHOR
“The Big Bang” (Fred Hoyle), “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree” (Albert Einstein), “Dying is a wild night and a new road” (Emily Dickinson), “All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind” (Khalil Gibran). Metaphors are verbal fishing nets that catch really big, unwieldy ideas in a single cast. Where explanations demand a lot of attention from your audience, metaphors are a gift. They offer the listener a refreshment, a respite from thinking too hard, bundling a lot of depth and clarity into a single, tidy sentence. In the words of one of my favorite science fiction writers, Orson Scott Card, “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
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THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX
SHOCK & HUMOR If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve grown older, it is that no matter how wellintentioned, competent, and skilled you are, pleasing everyone is impossible. On the other hand, pissing everyone off is a piece of cake. Fortunately, there’s a silver lining to most communication breakdowns, and that silver lining is made up of the surprising, self-deprecating, and utterly hilarious life lessons such errors impart.
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PERMISSION TO BE HUMAN Shock and humor work because they are stimulants. They wake up your audience with an appeal that is both innate and irresistible. The more self-deprecating the humor, the better. Why? Because self-deprecation also stimulates empathy. Oftentimes, your audience will identify with your embarrassment because they themselves have also experienced something similar. Your ability to expose yourself and laugh at the same time is reassuring permission for them to do the same.
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THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX
STORIES
The single most powerful tool in the persuasion toolbox is story, because stories have the power to manufacture multiple emotional states that enhance receptivity to new information. The rest of this guidebook will discuss stories, what they are, how to identify them, and what you can do to maximize their impact.
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PART THREE
TELLING THE BEST STORY Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution – more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. ~ Lisa Cron
PART THREE: TELLING THE BEST STORY
WHAT IS STORY
In the early 1990s, at the same time I was being taught to purge the second-
person from all formal writing, my tenth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Rainey, was also instructing me in something far more useful (though I didn’t know it at the time): the essential elements of a story. Because I was 14 and had far better things to do than to initiate myself into the ancient art of storytelling, I swiftly forgot all about them. It’s funny how the mind works. The first lesson, the one about the second-person, which I would later learn to disregard in many situations, I fervently carried with me for decades, even as it took me years to recognize and value the time-honored formulas of legendary storytellers. 24
WHAT IS STORY
THE 2 ELEMENTS What I didn’t know at the time, was that when it came to storytelling Mrs. Rainey was relaying knowledge that has been utilized, with good effect, for thousands of years across all cultures. Because ultimately, good storytelling is as simple as it powerful. Every story worth its salt need contain only two elements that will drive all the other juicy bits that make stories so compelling to the human psyche. Every story needs: 1) a protagonist who desires something, and 2) at least one obstacle to achieving that desire.
THE OBSTACLE
THE PROTAGONIST 25
WHAT IS STORY cont. That’s it! A protagonist and an obstacle. Every other delicious story element we love flows from these two! The drama becomes innate: how far will the protagonist go to overcome the obstacle? Likewise, the triumph or the tragedy is also built-in. If the protagonist is a sympathetic figure and achieves her heart desire, it is a triumph. If not, it’s a tragedy. But what if the protagonist isn’t sympathetic? What if he’s an anti-hero? Doesn’t matter. Because humans are addicted to drama (see Stress Response, p. 7), we are compelled to read even if the hero is flawed. Engineer your stories around these two elements – the protagonist who wants something and the obstacle to achieving this goal – and you are guaranteed to succeed! CLASSICAL STORY EXAMPLE You can find a conservation example of this technique in The Kayapo Identity (https://vimeo.com/389784296).
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PART THREE: TELLING THE BEST STORY
IDENTIFYING THE STORY If story structure is simple, finding real and compelling stories that follow that structure is
anything but. Especially in conservation. For starters, protagonists that stimulate the best audience responses tend to have faces, human faces. And conservation typically emphasizes the importance of the non-human world.
I’m sure you can think of dozens of other obstacles that make identifying good stories difficult. On the next page are a few tips that can help stimulate good ideas, even when obvious protagonists are in short supply.
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1. Make yourself, your board, your founder, or your team, and the obstacles you jointly face, the story. (The Lesson of the Snake, https://www.wild.org/who-we-are/history/) Competing desires of two men, Ian Player and Magqubu nTombela, co-founders of the WILD Foundation, clash in a battle of the wills that quickly evaporates in the greater need to survive a potentially deadly situation . Eventually, their motivations transform a third time as they find common ground and work to change the world for the better, together.
2. Identify a real individual who can serve as an archetype that expresses a challenge shared by many. (Survival Revolution, https://vimeo.com/364395076) The initial speaker, Julie Cajune, an elder of the Confederated Salish-Kootenai People, channels a desire many of us share: the desire to heal ourselves and our planet. Other speakers then begin to innumerate the challenges that must be overcome, and the opportunities to do so. At the end, the viewer is invited to join in the dramatic arc of the story and help determine the outcome.
3. Craft a composite protagonist out of overlapping shared desires that the audience can easily understand. (Survival Revolution: Breath, https://vimeo.com/374764034) The individuals featured at the beginning of the video, especially the running woman, become composites of an Every Person with an existential urge we all share: breath. The conclusion is indeterminate, but the viewer is provided with conceptual tools that can be used to secure the desired result. Again, the viewer is invited to join in determining the outcome.
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PART THREE: TELLING THE BEST STORY
TELLING THE STORY
Oftentimes, a good story tells itself, taking on a life of its own as both you and your audience
become engrossed in the characters and drama relayed. That being said, we can enhance our delivery with conscious practice, and by taking the following steps: EYE CONTACT
The power of eye contact, even with just one person, helps the entire audience feel more connected to you. That is because we relate with one another at a deep, emotional level only as individuals, not as groups. When you connect with just one person in the audience, the audience will instantly and intuitively feel more connection with you.
STRATEGIC PAUSES
Even well-packaged metaphors and engaging humor requires a couple of seconds to process and integrate. Pauses allows your audience to cognitively catchup with you and the ideas you are presenting. Utilize pauses to imprint important bits of information.
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CONVERSATIONAL
Lectures are a very efficient communication vehicle, but when it comes to persuasion, they aren’t effective at all. Practice a conversational tone and style to engage audience curiosity and create an environment more receptive to idea uptake.
CONCLUSION
A WILDER, MORE MEANINGFUL WORLD
It is my sincere hope that the observations and takeaways included in this manual assist you on your way to maximum
impact as an elite conservation communicator! While I have provided you with several proven tactics for successful storytelling, there is one still left to share – the vital ingredient that makes, or breaks, all public communications.
Passion. Passion thrills. Enthusiasm is infectious. When the audience observes that you care, they can’t help but wonder why. Their interest piques, and their hearts and minds open. When you care, you encourage others to do the same. Back in the introduction of this manual, I mentioned that you are helping to keep Earth wild, and by doing so, saving life on Earth. I didn’t mean that lightly. You and your passion are force-multipliers for good. And though the conservation ranks are sometimes as rag tag and improvisational as they come, you – we – are doing what we can to get the job done. Your work powers the defense of life on Earth.
What more could we accomplish together with the power of story on our side?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Lewis has spent the last 15 years researching the building blocks of collective action. She has brought this knowledge to bear in her own work as an award-winning nonprofit leader and as a scholar of environmental policy. Her research explores the relationship between democratic decision-making and policies that benefit the environment. Amy employs her knowledge and skills at the WILD Foundation, aligning her personal goals with WILD’s mission to activate an international ethic of care for wildlife and wild places. She is a member of an international team spearheading the historic effort to protect half the planet by 2030 to address the dual emergencies of climate breakdown and mass extinction.
All rights reserved Š 2020.
