How to Tell a Story in Your Professional Speaking Presentation

How to Tell a Story in Your Professional SpeakingPresentationTelling stories is a fun way to humanize yourtopic. The story brings the \"real-life\" elementinto your topic making it more relatable to youraudience. Telling stories are also a great wayto change the pace of your presentation. Hereare some tips to help you incorporate storytelling into your presentations.- Stories serve many purposes in yourpresentation. They can by used to highlight andclarify a specific point you want to address inyour presentation. Stories can also reemphasize

those points in your message to stress theirimportance.- Stories should be relevant to your topic. Thestories should also match the audience's needsand wants in terms of intelligence levels,experiences, and other demographic data such asage and occupation. The stories should berelatable to your audience and easy tounderstand.- Telling a story can change the pace of yourmessage. Stories can serve as a mental break foryour audience so they can process the informationthey've been given.- Humorous stories are great presentation openersand can set the tone of your message. Tell aboutproblems and errors that you've made. Audienceslike self-effacing humor because they can seethemselves making the same mistakes or having thesame issues.

- Get rid of unnecessary details of your story inyour presentation. You can potentially loseyour audience with all those details and if theyserve no purpose, then get rid of them.- Use short humorous stories in your presentation.If your story is too long or you take too long ingetting to the punch line, your audience couldtune you out.- Tell where your story happened. Give youraudience concrete information to think about anddraw their own mental image in their mind.- Use things that your audience is well associatedwith in your story. Your audience should befamiliar with all the details of your story tothey can remain hooked into it, however, only beas detailed as is common knowledge. Specificknowledge or \"insider information\" will not berelatable to most people since only a few people

know about it.- Let your words work for you. Emphasizeadjectives and verbs so that they are moreinteresting to your audience.- Rehearse your story telling. Every word countsand leaving out details can impact whether thestory relates to your audience or not.- Get the emotions involved in your storytelling.Hook your audience into your story by playing ontheir emotions.Storytelling is not a difficult element to add toyour professional speaking presentation. Bypracticing, you will be able to add more storiesto your presentation to liven it up and change thepace. You will find that your audience willbecome more engaged in what you're saying becausethey can mentally relate better to yourinformation. As you tell your stories, they

will have mental images playing in their minds.They will also see themselves in the stories youtell and have it relate better to them. Start byadding one short story and then grow your storytelling abilities from there.