The science and secret of the storytelling superpower
[Applause]
okay
so 1973 i’m sitting in a beanbag chair
in the basement of our split entry home
in fruit heights utah
eating a bag of doritos and watching an
episode of gilligan’s island
when all of a sudden i hear the front
door open and shut
and the next thing i know my dad doug
brian is standing right next to me
now that that might not seem like that
shocking of an event to most you but you
need to understand
my dad was a mechanical engineer and he
was starting his own business for as
long
as i can remember so if the sun was out
that guy was at work we looked down at
me and he said
michael you want to go grab some dinner
with me
i was stunned i’ve never been anywhere
alone with my dad let alone to dinner
so i jumped to my feet and i scrambled
out that screen door and jumped in the
passenger seat
of our green 1963 dodge d-100 truck
we actually called this truck the fodge
because it had a dodge hood
and a ford tailgate this thing was a
legend in our neighborhood
so we went to my dad’s favorite
restaurant it’s a little pizza place
called robentino’s
but what he really loved there was this
huge rockford blue cheese salad
now i don’t know about the rest of you
but to a 10 year old that’s like eating
a bowl of throw up
but i was having the time in my life
dinner alone with my hero
now after dinner was over we started
heading to the truck and when we were in
the parking lot he put his arm around my
shoulder and he said
so michael tell me about bigfoot
now in the 1970s bigfoot was kind of a
big deal
he was showing up all over the country
making his way on the news nearly every
night getting in sitcoms and movies
but what i didn’t know is that my mother
had had several other mothers in the
neighborhood call her and complain
that their kids would no longer go
outside and play because michael
bryant told them and convinced them that
he saw bigfoot in his backyard
well my dad asked me so i decided i’d
tell him the story
i said well dad a few weeks ago i was
feeding the dog
and i put the lid on the food can and i
was walking back across the grass
and i saw him out of the corner of my
eye he was standing in a grove of trees
at the edge of our yard
and i was home alone and i was really
scared so i didn’t want him to attack me
so i pretended i didn’t see him
and i slowly walked across the grass
until i got into the house
i grabbed my bb gun and i hid under my
bed until mom got home
he didn’t say a word to me the rest of
the way home
we pulled in our driveway he put on the
emergency brake turned off the truck
and then wham he hit both of his hands
on the dash and screamed
oh my gosh there he is and he pointed
out into the darkness
well i whipped over to see what he was
looking at when i looked back
that guy disappeared through the front
door and the screen door
slammed shut well i panicked i locked my
door
scrambled to the driver’s side locked
his door and i grabbed onto the steering
wheel and right then i looked up
and my bedroom light turned on and there
was my poor dear mother
with her hands cupped like this on the
window the look of terror on her face
five seconds later my dad jumped off a
boulder between two bushes on the corner
of our house
and landed on the hood of the truck
when i came to
[Music]
i realized that i had both of my arms
locked down on the horn of the truck and
they were both my mom and dad banging on
the window trying to get me to stop
this might have been the first sleepless
night of my young life
you know the next morning really early
my dad came in and he sat on the edge of
my bed
he looked down at me and he said well
michael did you learn anything last
night
and i sat right up and i said yes i did
you saw him back there too didn’t you
this was the moment that i learned that
i might actually have the makings of a
superpower
not a supernatural power like superman
or wonder woman
more of a super human power like batman
or iron man
now i didn’t have the kind of money they
did but i didn’t let that stop me
i spent the next 30 years studying
researching and
cultivating the storyteller superpower i
work with fortune 100 company executives
and mom paw entrepreneurs
helping them find and craft and deliver
their stories with more
impact and greater success and over that
time
i conducted a bunch of research trying
to figure out
why do stories work so well and paul
zack
he published an article of a research
project that he did explaining this the
human brain releases chemicals
three specific ones when we hear a story
the first one is cortisol
and cortisol is designed to get your
attention it wakes you up
and gets you engaged in what’s going on
and focuses you
the second chemical is dopamine and
that’s the arousal drug
that gets our emotions involved the
third chemical is oxytocin
and when oxytocin is released these
three chemicals working together
ignite and fuel your imagination so
think about it
when i told you my story could you see
me sitting down in that basement
bag of doritos watching tv could you
envision my dad doug bryant standing
over the top of me
or the green fudge truck or the huge
ropeford blue cheese salad or my dad
flying through the air and landing on
the hood of the truck
you see i gave you enough specifics
details
to build a framework a structure but you
drew upon your own experiences in your
own background
to fill in all the blanks and color the
scenes
and by so doing you made my bigfoot
story
your bigfoot story another really
interesting article
was by jerome bruner he published an
article
expressing that messages delivered
within a story
are recalled 22 times more often than
facts and figures alone
and when it comes to behavior nearly 80
percent of the human decision-making
process
is emotions you know a few years ago a
company went to a university
conducted a presentation where they
talked to the students about
match.com and they told them about how
successful they were with charts and
graphs and
really amazing figures and they told one
story during this
presentation about gary creman he’s the
founder of match.com
and in this story he asked all of his
staff if they would create a profile
after all
match.com wouldn’t work without a
profile so everybody made a profile and
a few weeks later he realized how
powerful
his website was going to be when one of
his employees his girlfriend
found a new match on match.com
the researchers came back after a couple
months and they surveyed all the
students
and they found that only five percent of
the students could recall any of the
statistics from their presentation
while 63 percent of them remembered the
story and the details that were
delivered within the story
so now i figured like i understood why
stories work
i got that what i was really perplexed
with
is how do stories work how come some
stories are great and some stories
aren’t
and it happened for me sitting in a dark
theater in 1993 with a hoodie on
watching sleepless in seattle how many
of you have seen this movie
okay it’s not exactly my genre but it
was my wife’s turn to pick so i was
being a good sport and there i was
i vowed i wasn’t going to get involved
in this movie first of all i had
much bigger fish to fry so i’m sitting
there in the dark
all of a sudden halfway through this
movie i was in
hook line and sinker and i slapped
myself awake and said what how did that
happen
and that’s when i saw it the movie split
into three different pieces
the music and sound effects the action
the characters and the cinematography
and the storyline
well i went back the next three nights
this time without my hoodie
but i had a pad of paper and a pen and i
drew
the pattern of each of those elements
individually on a timeline
and there it was i laid them on top of
each other
and i could see a pattern and then i
couldn’t unsee it
every movie musicals plays books
music even really good comedians use
these patterns to tell their jokes
and i call these patterns cadence and
this
is the cadence of bigfoot now
i know some of you are sitting out there
thinking oh great well i’m never going
to be able to do that
well i’m going to show you how to do it
tonight and you’re going to be able to
do it
tomorrow so the first thing you have to
do
is document the story in a short story
you’re looking for these 10 basic
elements okay these are 10 things that
will help you guide your way through the
story but you have to document them
i use what i call a story grid it’s a
simple spreadsheet in excel or whatever
and i ca i create that sheet to capture
them so that i can record them
when you’re doing this you’re looking
for something that will help you
identify do i even have a story
there’s two elements that you need to
find the first one
is the climax or an apex of the story
without that you don’t really have a
story something amazing something
fantastic
or something terrible the second thing
you’re looking for
is going to be the lesson and the lesson
of that story is something that will
help you
teach something so in my story my dad
landing on the hood of that truck was a
climax of the story the lesson i was
teaching
is that storytelling is a superpower
then what you do
is you pull those elements once you have
them all crafted
and you put them on this document this
is called a cadence chart
now let me walk through this really
quickly first thing i do
before i put the ten elements on is i
give the story a name so up in the top
corner
i put the name something that you’ll
always remember like
bigfoot in the backyard okay the next
thing you do is put the category down in
the bottom corner
who or when would i use this story on
the other side
i put the lesson something that i
learned or something i can teach from
that story
right above that is where i put the
timeline
this is a percentage of time okay
stories are longer and shorter so
it’s better to use a percentage right
above that is where i put the emotional
status the feelings i want to generate
with the audience while i’m presenting
to them
in any given point throughout the
presentation right above that is a
little red line called
the emotional baseline this is the axis
that you use
to move the rhythm of your presentation
on the cadence
above that line is where i put the
details the little specifics
the things that will help you tell the
story and help people get their
imagination involved
then at the top of the graph along the
top i put those
other a elements right along the top and
then i drop
this cadence line on and it works every
single
time you know a few years after bigfoot
happened
my mom’s 44th birthday she just made a
birthday cake as mothers do to celebrate
and we were heading over to my sister’s
house to celebrate her birthday
and we were over there working on my
sister’s brand new house they were just
putting the shingles on the roof and
finishing up
right as we pulled in the wind gust
knocked a few bags off the top of that
roof
they slid down and swept my dad off the
two-story home
and we lost him but you met him tonight
you met him he lives on in those stories
in my life
in the life of my wife and my kids and
my grandkids
even though none of them ever met him
including remy
my grandson that was born at 11 o’clock
this morning down in arizona
stories are the bond of humanity
stories connect us throughout our lives
and i believe forever
so tonight i challenge you find
one story document it write it down
cultivate it and share it and then do it
again
and then do it again start tonight
and develop yourself so that you can
become
a storytelling superhero because you
and your stories can make a difference
in the world
but you have to share them good night
you