The power of the metaphor

So much that can be said about using metaphors to reach people with your communication. Here's a wonderful talk to introduce the subject, and gives you a sense of how you can influence people with the words you choose. Just the beginning!

Shaking in your boots?

I wish I didn't have to do this, I really do, but I sometimes spend a significant part of the time available for courses in talking about ways to control nerves. There are lots and lots of methods, which I might go into later. But right now I'm a bit preoccupied with the cause. If the principle behind being nervous has to do with being "on show" and being judged, then we shouldn't really get over our nerves with more and more practice, but we do don't we, usually. I mean I'm just as much judged tomorrow as 15 years ago; because the audience is not the same, the subject is not the same. I'm the only one who's been part of the phenomenon for 15 years, for them it's maybe the first time they listen to me speak. They're judging away at maximum levels.

We clearly do get more comfortable with the situation after a time and after practice. We get used to it quite simply.  If we can do this on the longer term, why isn't it easier in the shorter term? [It is of course, but no-one can be bothered to practice enough.] Is it really better to wait 10 years to be more comfortable than to spend a few days practicing NOW?

Just wondering...

Storytelling part 1

Tom Waits on Letterman. Just a taster of a great storyteller. He doesn't need many words, and no-one could ever copy this style. There's lots more (inteviews with Letterman) and loads of his music on YouTube.

Why not join me out here in the Webosphere?

I've had a week of total saturation in social media this week. Sometimes it gets like that, I don't know where it all came from really, but everyone was talking about it. Then of course, I did go to a seminar that was really interesting and there was another one today that I didn't go to but heard about. But I was also at a networking meeting in Stockholm where the subject didn't really need to come up, but it did, again and again.

But one thing that strikes me - everyone may be talking about it but VERY few of them are doing it. It's a shame because I don't think I have ever had such an intensive period in my life of learning new things, of insights into the way society is changing and understanding of motivation and social forces as I have since I started seriously exploring my way out into the social web. I was also one of those that said that I didn't have time, for a long time. I've been on LinkedIn since 2004, but no-one else was, so that didn't cost much time. Facebook I reserve only for family. Likewise most of my FlickR photos. But then Twitter came along and eventually I had a spare moment....That's a while ago now and my first attempt got aborted quite fast because it lacked purpose or strategy. But I have a seriously kinesthetic learning style, I can't take much in if I don't do it myself. I have to push all the buttons and try it out to see what it can be used for. I mean, just because it says "what's happening?" by the text box, doesn't mean you HAVE to write about what's happening...  does it...?

I was secretly itching to write a blog for about 4 years, embarrassing to admit that I didn't start earlier than february this year, but you might be interested to know if you haven't started "yet" that it took less than an hour to set it up, fiddle with the layout and write a post to test it. The slow bit is deciding what and why. Oh yes, and another useful factor is a speech recognition software that really works! Dragon Naturally Speaking, highly recommended.

So anyway, there is a vast amount of advice out there in the form of articles and blog posts, more that you will ever have time to read. So if you're curious, what are you waiting for? Press a few buttons, poke a few things, see what happens. And listen. Classic Web 2.0 intro advice:1)  listen, 2) contribute (comment on other people's material), then 3) create.

Sensory overload

Have you ever experienced this: you're giving a presentation at a conference or workshop and you've been sitting in the audience for a while waiting your turn. Your stomach is full of demented butterflies and you're thinking how nice it will be when this is all over.

And then it's your turn! Someone introduces you. You make your way to the front, and suddenly you're standing there, facing back into the room where you were sitting just a short while ago. You're confronted by a sea of faces and you see the room for the first time from this, completely different, angle. There might be some people in the audience that you recognise, you may see someone that you wish wasn't there, maybe a person who is more expert on the subject than you. I think that many people, however, when confronted with a large audience in that kind of situation, don't have such an easy time distinguishing individuals. At that particular moment you're subject to serious sensory overload. Your brain is really busy taking in all the new impressions and sights which are suddenly so unfamiliar from this angle, even if you've been sitting in the room for some hours already. It looks completely different doesn't it?

So is it really surprising that many people say that the first couple of minutes are really the hardest. They have to work very hard to remember what they were going to say and quite often completely forget it. Some people write it all down word by word in order not to be struck by total paralysis. A few minutes later you're into the flow of things and much more relaxed and the start is forgotten.

Why do this to yourself? There's really no need to subject yourself to the enormous sensory input PLUS the extra nervousness and stress at the very beginning of your talk. It's hard enough to focus on saying the right thing and getting off on the right foot. So here's a very simple tip. When most of the people are in their places and the room (or lecture theatre) starts to look much the way it will when you later stand there to give your talk,  take a few moments to stand at the front facing the audience in exactly the position you will take up later. Look around the room, get used to the feeling, and just let your brain absorb all the input, the sights and sounds and the experience of standing there. It couldn't be easier! And it makes a very big difference. When you stand there later everything will be familiar and you will have much more of your cognitive capacity freed up to actually concentrate on your talk.The people sitting in the audience will probably not notice you, they're too busy settling in and looking around for people they know.

PowerPoint templates to download

...can be found here: http://bit.ly/aLmokg
Not quite my taste, but you can always adjust them I guess.

Google shows how to demonstrate customer benefit

Incase you've missed it, this Google ad has given rise to masses of parodies. These days that's the ultimate sign of marketing success I guess. Anyway, pretty nice ad I think. Insightful marketing. Simplicity. Spot on.
I've tried several versions now and have the same problem with all of them; the image is the wrong size, at least on my screen: so if you can't see all the text on the right hand side, you'll probably have to go directly to YouTube and run it from there. Hope it works.

A bit more on Pathos

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Maya Angelou

Why Twitter is great

...because it forces you to be brief. I've run Elevator Pitch training many times and it occurs to me that I could just put up a Twitter window on my laptop instead and say "go ahead, write me what's good about your product."

Do it with feeling!

I'm very fond of introducing the subject of content and planning of presentations by using Ethos, Logos, Pathos as the foundation and doing an inventory of the messages/tools/approaches that each individual can use for their specific subject. It's usually a bit harder though to get suggestions without prompting when it comes to pathos: the lists for ethos and logos are long but the last one is very short.

While we're on that subject...there's this problem that started way back in the 1600s, with Descartes,  the separation of the rational self and the emotional;  the separation of the technical and social sciences, science and the humanities, to put it very briefly. In the world I inhabit many people have a long technical education and have focussed enormously on "logos",  ethos usually involves listing a lot of university credits and a whole CV (not the best way maybe). So the concept of pathos is harder. An easy thing to achieve however, is simply to show your own enthusiasm for the subject, to exude positivity, to smile. Use examples that are recognised by the audience and which stimulate emotions, sympathy, intuitive understanding and so on.

In the US  it's not only OK to express emotions when you communicate, but almost mandatory for credibility. Much the same in the UK. But in Sweden it's not OK, and can easily reduce credibility. I might well get a lot of protests on this, but everything is relative! So I sometimes feel that there's an inbuilt resistance to the concept somewhere. It needs more explaining anyway, than the other two.  There's a well-known and wonderful scene from the film "Any other Sunday" with Al Pacino that I've used a few times as an illustration of several rhetorical techniques actually, but it's a great ice-breaker however you look at it. Take a look at this, and try telling me you don't understand what pathos is :)

Motivation is a strange thing

I like this little story and article about what motivates people: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/a-story-about-motivation.html
I bought the book "Drive" on saturday. I'll probably review it when I'm finished, but no promises!

The distance between us

In workshops and lectures I talk often about where to stand and how to stand, also how and when to move. Nick Morgan describes some of this beautifuly however in the first part of this blog entry, so I'll just hand you over to him. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/three_steps_to_make_your_next.html#comments

The scary truth about memory

Let me tell you a secret

It must be a secret because not many people seem to take account of it. If you ask people one hour after you have given a talk what they remember of it, you will probably be shocked at how little they do remember. The more you say, the less that goes in, unless you work specifically to make things memorable. I've done the following test now a few times and it's very telling: After a group have given a series of presentations, let's say 5 minutes each and 6 presentations, I ask them to quickly tell me what they remember of the first presentation. First they have to remember who gave the first presentation, can take a while sometimes. Then I write up on the whiteboard all the things they remember for one presentation after the other. A pattern emerges very clearly. The commonest thing that sticks is pictures or photos, striking ones, and best of all relevant ones. The second commonest thing is surprising statistics or numbers. The main message, even though it's thought out quite carefully in these cases, quite often gets lost.

A few weeks ago I coached an executive of a company in Stockholm for an important presentation for a whole day. I hope you're reading this, S, 'cos you did a fantastic job with that slide! He made a single slide with a single statistic on it, just white on black, and turned it into a perfect example of the above principle. That's all he needed for the presentation because the number plus the animation that mutated it into new numbers (all on the same slide by the way) was both striking and memorable and it conveyed a message. You could also say that the statistic itself became a picture because it was so simple. One of my favourite examples.

Some other great examples come from the very first Masters course at SLU that I ran. Outstanding pictures and overall presentations - you're still my dream team guys!

Masses of information on PowerPoint

Here are templates to download and I just can't even begin to list everything else:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip.html

Check out the bottom

I quite often put up tips and links to stuff I've read etc on Twitter, so don't forget to look at the Twitter feed at the bottom of this blog!

Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with music

From Ted.com. Cool!

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html

A suitcase full of money

Here's a nice little warm-up for all who need to present their business idea to potential investors.

Imagine you have a suitcase containing 1 million Kronor ( 'cos I'm in Sweden). It's all your own money and you can of course do exactly what you want with it. Consider this for a few moments, I'm sure you can come up with a few ideas of what it could be used for.

OK, now imagine you're in a meeting, and you yourself are about to hear a pitch from a company who are looking for you to invest in them. The suitcase is sitting safely under the table at your feet, all your own money remember. So consider what it would take for the person who will shortly come into the room to win you over and convince you to part with your money. What would they have to say, prove or demonstrate, in order for you to feel comfortable with handing over the money? When you've figured that out you can switch perspective! That person is you. And this can be the measure of the challenge you have ahead of you if you want to finance your company, because sometimes it really is the investor's private capital. If they're investing someone else's money then the threshold could be even higher.

So this is why I love this kind of presentation challenge. You really have to get a lot of things right, and you have to first and foremost remember that you're dealing with flesh and blood and human beings. Impressions and credibility are rather important.

You've heard of an Elevator Pitch? I think I'll call this a Suitcase Pitch :)

Great speeches, a good start

I'm sorry but this is really too good to resist. I really don't mean to be nasty or anything...

Chris Brogan

For a great speaker, relaxed, credible, easy to listen to, see: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/connect/
Even more interesting if you're into social media, but the subject of being someone who people listen to is really spot on!
Check out Chris' blog, tweets, he's all over the place! For me he represents the voice of the best way to network and, not least, to use social media. Clearly the person I follow most, and I don't understand how he manages to write so much.

Here's a great link for info and stuff on social media:

http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/ted-talks-social-meida/

Yeah, the spelling mistake is part of the link!

Creativity is not outside the box!

I must admit that I'm still having trouble with this: people keep saying that you should think out of the box if you want to be creative but ever since I heard the following I've been seriously disturbed by that notion:

List as many things as you can think of that are white, write them all down for 1 minute, maybe 2.

Now think of all the white things in a fridge, and write them down.

Which was easier?

You with me????

To be creative, it seems to me that you need a box to think within. It's much harder to just dream up anything. The definition of creativity, or of new ideas, is when you take two (or more) known things and combine them in new ways. Same thing - start with something that's known. So what's this box, that everyone wants to think outside of?

Business Lab again, yippee!

Gearing up for a new series of private coaching for Uppsala Innovation Centre's Business Lab participant companies.  Coached 17 companies so far, 9 more on the way!

This is one of my favourite activities for several reasons:

1. It's entirely personalised and tailored to each company, always the best way to work
2. It keeps me on my toes to find useful and practical content for each company, on the spot as the discussion progresses. There's no preparation time!
3. We talk mostly about a specific presentation occasion that's not too far off in the future so I imagine it's easier to remember and apply a few specific things, before the ideas fade into the past

But what do you guys think, who actually have to do all the work on the presentations? What would you most like to discuss? What is the most useful content I can deliver to you? What did you think of our meeting if it's already passed?

Communication is tricky

Well, I guess this has to do with communication at the highest level, but above all I think it's one of the best ever advertisement videos ever made. Even though it's a bit old now.

Find-of-the-day on the net

Creative ideas are everywhere! Check out http://www.tabbloid.com/

Social Media helpful stuff

Just found what looks like a very interesting site with tips and information on how to use social media: maybe you need this, like me!
Check here: http://bit.ly/c4bO9O

Clay Shirky Rocks!

If you're interested in the effect social media are having on society, in how things happen these days, in what's going on on the web (2,0) and what the future might bring. (I'm completely fascinated by all this). Then check out Clay Shirky; books, talks and everything else. Just Google. Very practical name, that, there can't really be more than one of them... It also struck me a while ago that his talks contain some great surprising statistics for talks. Maybe I'll have to explain that last comment a bit later on.

Övertyga inte Övertala

Convince don't persuade! It sounds much better in Swedish. This must be the absolute shortest way of describing the purpose behind all the courses or training I run.  I think the word "övertala" is quite telling: att tala över for those that understand Swedish.
Even better to focus on the fact that you cannot change people's minds, only the CONTENT of their minds. You can lead them to another idea or decision if you do it skillfully.

ATTENTION: do I have your attention?

Have you seen those heavy eyelids and expressionless faces? Have you despaired on those occasions when someone shuts their eyes and apparently goes to sleep, rather than listen to what you're saying? What would it take to win back people's attention at times like this? The answer is probably: quite  a lot! It's gone a bit too far when you see these signs. So let's not get there in the first place shall we?

What do you think is the average attention span of someone listening to a presentation? The answer probably varies considerably. Here we're really talking generalisations. It depends on a lot of things.

In his book "Flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  states from the latest neuroscience at the time (1992)  that we can manage at most 7 bits of information, such as different sounds, visual stimuli or recognisable emotions, and the quickest we can discriminate between one bit of information and the next is about 0,05 of a second. So it should be possible to process about 126 bits of information, as defined above, per second. To understand what a person is saying requires understanding about 40 bits of information per second, he writes.

If you're interested in more information, check out TED.com using key words around neuroscience and communication. Check out some of the books I recommend here. Google on "attention span" and you'll find all sorts of stuff, and probably be none the wiser! There are bits and pieces of interesting information everywhere.

So just imagine that you are standing holding a presentation in front of a slide packed with words and figures and maybe pictures too. Not a nice image, eh? Most people, in fact, overload the audience most of the time. Just because it's familiar to you doesn't mean you can race through everything approximately as fast as you can say it all. You leave the audience behind really quickly.

Another way to understand the phenomenon is to think about how long you yourself can hold your focus in different situations. For the purposes of presentations I've heard several times that 2-3 minutes is about the best you can hope for. However you look at it, you have to work at keeping people's attention. The key word is VARIATION.

Vary everything. Go from pictures to text, vary the tone (and all other aspects) of your voice and how you stand, as well as where you stand. For each new section or slide move to a new position to clearly mark the shift. Put in exercises, ask questions, do live demos etc etc. Your imagination is all that's stopping you.

Obama again

President Obama's speeches are a wonderful contemporary source of material for analysing rhetoric. I've done the Chicago victory speech to death in a number of courses, almost repeating it in my sleep now. So here is an interesting comment on Obama's latest rhetorical offering from my hero Nick Morgan: http://bit.ly/d7ixiP

Myths and Misconceptions

Well there are lots of these, but let's just take one of the commonest. You may have heard some numbers referring to the percentage of our communication that is contributed by body language (usually said to be around 70%), voice (about 6-7%) and the actual words (about 6%). Approximately so. This is all based on a misunderstanding or mis-quoting. Back in the early 1970s Albert Mehrabian published work on the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages but focussing on communication of feelings and attitudes,  i.e. whether the listener liked or disliked the person who was communicating. When the verbal and non-verbal information were incongruent, the non-verbal was most likely to guide the listeners judgement of the person talking.
Some refs:

• Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Wadsworth, Belmont, California.
• Mehrabian, A. (1981). Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes (2nd ed.). Wadsworth, Belmont, California.
• Mehrabian, A. (1972). Nonverbal communication. Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, Illinois.

There's a great summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian#Misinterpretation_of_Mehrabian.27s_rule

So the numbers are not so useful! But what is important is the fact that we DO trust body-language more than words. I don't listen to what you say, I watch what you do. And signalling different things with words and body is at least going to stress listeners (I've read that this is the commonest cause of stress in communication or work situations. Maybe). Don't stand in front of an audience shaking in your boots and say "It's really great to be here today".

The Main Message is Mainly Missing

How often do you spend time before planning a presentation to really think through why you are going to talk. What is your purpose, what is your goal? Do you have one :) ? Even if you're a student or your boss just told you to talk about something, you still have the purpose of showing that you know what you're talking about, or are generally competent... don´t you?

What many text books call your "Main Message", is only one item, not fifteen. Easily stated in one short sentence. It should shine through on every slide you show and every topic you take up. You don't have to literally say what it is. A good example is companies presenting for investors where they must show they are competent and trustworthy. But if it's not mentioned directly, then it should be the subliminal message throughout the presentation. It takes a bit of work, and it stops you from starting your slide production immediately, but it's always worth thinking seriously about, if only to figure out what you can leave out or include when time is short. This is the essence, or the main theme that holds your presentation together. So sit down a moment and ask yourself: Why am I giving this talk?, What do I want to achieve? What's my point exactly? What's the bottom line? If the audience only remember one thing, what should that be? Just keep asking the question WHY? until you get to the bottom of it.

What neuroscience tells us

We think we gesture as a result of an idea, a thought or an impulse. Wrong. The unconscious brain is faster at moving our body than our conscious thoughts. That's why planned gestures don't work. People can sense that they're not genuine. Real ones come at the same time or before a statement. False ones are too slow. The body has the first word and the last. We believe the body language first and foremost, whatever the words (later) say.

Your slide show is not your presentation. YOU are your presentation

'Nuff said.

(you can try explaining this principle to the next person who asks for your Ppt presentation in advance of a conference. But don't blame me if it doesn't work!).

Books and stuff: Cognitive Neuroscience

There are some lessons on how our brains work that have been emerging from neuroscience over the last 10 or more years that are extremely useful for understanding communication. There are easy-to-digest books like Malcom Gladwells "Blink" (intuition, a subject for another day) and many less easy to digest (but OK if you have a scientific background in something relevant. Still gives me headaches tho'). Antonio Damasios book "Looking for Spinoza" I think is one of the more accessible of his books. I'm just working my way through another of them, Descarte's Error, and having a hard time. I read a fair bit of neuroscience at University but focussed on other things after that. Problem is that he's far too good at the English language and his sentences get very long and abstract. Almost poetical, but it doesn't help much. (that's another interesting aspect of communication: blocking out your listeners/readers with complex language).

 "How the mind works" by Stephen Pinker is very well written, as all his work, but quite heavy in parts too. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/index.html
His book "The language instinct" is one of my all time favourites.

One of the very very best though, that's not only focussed on cognition, and that's extremely easy to read is "Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are". By Steven R. Quartz, Terrence J. Sejnowski.

Short reviews of these and more books are on my LinkedIn profile.

Lix and Gunning fog, and what on earth is she talking about?

A natural result of working with very highly educated people, in high-tech areas and in an academic environment such as Uppsala, is that I now spend a whole load of time in simplifying arguments and speeches and presentations. Ironic isn't it? I usually say that when you get beyond the point where your professional pride has taken a real beating from hearing the simple language you're using, then you're just starting to get there. You can almost never simplify your words too much - now there's a statement to chew over.

Consider this: readability, ease of comprehension, and simple digestability of language can be measured in various ways. Swedish can be tested according to a "Läsbarhets index" Lix (http://www.lix.se/) and English by various means. Here are some web sites:

http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp
http://www.read-able.com/
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt1/EditCentral.html

Take the Lix index for example: a bureaucratic, academic, complex and generally difficult language style will have a score above 50, childrens books under 25, and normal text or the average novel would be about 30-40.
If you take Obama's speeches, for example the victory speech in Chicago, and test chunks and put in pauses as line breaks, then you get an average around 20-25. Now, if anyone ever needs to reach people, to persuade and convince, then he does. One way to interpret this is to understand that convincing people does not depend on big words! It might help your self-esteem, but it certainly isn't helping anyone else. It's something else that does the work for you, not scientific terms or grammar worthy of a classical novel. Shakespeare didn't use big words. So, what's that something else? Ahhh, that takes a bit longer to describe.

Have fun pasting other people's text into the test sites :) You might suddenly understand why you never really could grasp what that person has been saying.

Sometimes an image needs no words: SJ look and learn

A little thought

Actors spend weeks rehearsing for performances. They practice every single aspect of their communication with the audience because there's a lot at stake when people pay good money for expensive theatre tickets. But CEOS of companies to which investors have pumped in millions, step regularly out in front of share holders, board members or potential new investors and do the "winging it" thing. They're taking a risk. Not all of them can carry it off.

"All the better to see you with...", and more thoughts on openings

I was at a workshop 3 years ago with Lena Endre and learnt some wonderful useful things about stage presence and controlling nerves, and this story was just one of the memorable parts.

Ingmar Bergman was to give a lecture to a large lecture theater full of students. The room was packed to bursting and everyone eagerly awaited his entry. Finally he came in, walked slowly around to the front of the long table that lecturers normally shelter behind, and sat himself up on it with legs dangling. Said not a word. He looked around the whole room slowly and finally, after a long silence, he pointed to a person far back in the right hand corner of the room and asked if they could please move a little to their left as they were not so easy to see from the front. Then he started his lecture.

Can you imagine what it felt like to be in that lecture theater? Think about it a moment. You KNOW that he can see you and that he is aware of you. No-one is invisible or anonymous. Many people experience that they are invisible to the majority of speakers because the speaker shows no signs of seeing them. They can do what they like, sitting in the audience; write SMSs, sleep, look out the window. There are several ways to ensure the audience's attention, but without at least eye contact you won't get anywhere. And not just any kind of eye contact will work. But that's another subject.
So, along with all the other things that will give you the best chance of being listened to, there's one simple thing in this story that is particularly powerful. That is, silence! When you go to the front of the room to start a talk, don't start speaking until you've got to where you're going to stand. Face the audience and count off a few seconds. Wait for silence and attention. Think self confidence and stand there like you expect their full attention, not like you're preparing to run for it any moment! As a speaker, you have an automatic mandate at the very beginning of a talk, a power and control that you can very easily throw away. So use it, at least for a moment or two.

Look no further

You don't have to buy any more books on presentation technique, or search the web for information! It's all gonna be here! Well, quite a lot of it... 


I spend a great deal of my time, and have done so for years, in hunting for good books and surfing around for interesting titbits that tell me things that are not obvious. I go to a fair number of seminars and courses on all possible aspects of presentations every year and each one gives at least one useful insight. So I'm going to try my utmost to post the best of these and maybe develop a few more on the way. Help me gather the best of internet sites, books, other blogs and your own ideas.

Feel it or forget it

You know many people could dispense entirely with all the advice that's ever given on good presentation technique if they could just muster up some passion. Tell a story. With passion. Easy! Body language, voice, eye contact, all just falls into place.

Body language is all in your head

There's such a lot talked about body language for presenters, and quite frankly, most of it is rather superficial. Sure, if you're not doing it right it can be enough to think about where and how you stand and what you can do with your hands. What's more interesting I think, is how you can improve when you're fairly used to giving presentations and not doing much that's directly bad. This is where the fun starts!

Step 1 is what you have inside your head because your body is telling the whole world what you're thinking, your attitudes and feelings, and you may be the only one who isn't aware of this - scary isn't it :)

Reading Henrik Fexeus' book on mind reading is a good intro to this subject. "Konsten att Läsa Tankar". Reading about mirror neurones is another, for the scientifically inclined: see this book for example
All this tells us why your attitude is so important, why the speaker's own enthusiasm is their best tool for reaching the audience and indirectly why storytelling works so well.