What question do you dread receiving the most? “How much longer,” when you’re driving? “What made you leave your last job,” in an interview? Perhaps it’s “Where do you wanna eat,” when your girlfriend said she wanted to go out, but now she can’t decide where? I know, I’ve been on your side of all three of those. My personal least favorite, until very recently, was “tell me a story about yourself.” As I’ve just turned 21, and am now landing real jobs and taking real business classes, I know I’m about to be meeting a lot of people who I need to leave with a good impression. From business people to college professors, to friends and relationships, I will be having conversations with many people. “Why not,” I asked myself, “make them engaging and interesting conversations?” Very quickly, I learned a hard truth that you might also have learned: I didn’t have any interesting stories to tell.
Of course, I didn’t want to make anything up or lie to the person, as I’m sure you don’t, but at the same time, I’m not sure I had many interesting details to add; and if you know any liars, you know the lies are in the details. Then one day, while watching a certain businessman-turned-politician give a speech at a rally, I realized that maybe it’s not that my stories weren’t good – maybe I just wasn’t good at telling them. In fact, when I asked my closest friends, they made fun of me for “just realizing this now.” Thanks, guys.
So I decided that I needed to learn how to tell a story, not necessarily what story to tell. But instead of searching for a guide, I thought, why not actually teach myself how to tell good stories? The stories would be more real, more authentic. With that, I researched some short stories and studied the way the plots and characters evolved. I listened to and studied speeches by very successful public speakers from business people to politicians to philanderers, telling their experiences and sending a message to their listeners. And, looking over my notes, I worked to make myself a formula; one that I thought would make my stories – but more importantly, my storytelling – more interesting. And since applying this formula to my stories, my conversations and relationships have been much better remembered.
And that’s what I’m sharing with you today. Take a look at the formula I laid out for myself to make my work-related stories more engaging, and compare your best work story to it. Better yet, apply the characters and setting into the formula, and see how it compares to the original. Maybe if you like the new version better, you can apply this formula to more of your story telling, and, like it’s worked for me, it’ll make the social aspect of your career much more pleasant, and perhaps even profitable.
Introduce the setting. Where were you? When was it? What were you doing? How long had you been in the position? You want to make sure your listener, an interviewer for instance, knows what your history is like as an employee, and what you were like at the other job (or in the other organization, what have you).
Introduce the goal. What did you need/want to accomplish in the longer term? What did you need to do, get, or prove in order to accomplish that goal? Your employer knows now that you are goal-oriented, future thinking, and you know what you need to get done. Now he or she is getting interested in you.
Introduce the obstacle(s). What was in your way of achieving your goal? What (or whom) did you have to battle or learn in order to succeed? Now your listener is interested in both yourself and the story. So, tell him/her a good one!
What did you do to overtake the obstacles? So you’ve identified your issue, but how did you get around it? What did you do, learn, or create in order to fix or get around the obstacles? This will tell your listener that you’re a problem solver, you make plans or think of solutions and put them to work.
Make it interesting and memorable. What are details that the listener will want to hear? What are things that can be related to what your listener already knows or has interest in? You might want to look into the person you’re speaking with, or even about their company. Most importantly, make it something that your listener will remember you mentioning, and that he or she will relate to you another time.
Keep it short. Your story shouldn’t be longer than just a few minutes, especially in a job interview setting. The interviewer wants to know about you, but s/he doesn’t have time for your life story. Therefore, my suggestion is to stick to the interesting details. They don’t care how long the drive was unless it matters to the plot, you know?
You win! This one is important. The story you told should end with you being the hero. You identified the problem, you solved it, and you achieved your goal. That is the story that your job interviewer wants to hear, and that is the story that will get you remembered. Your work solved a problem of some sort, and put you on the winning end of it.
What you learned. Always end with a sentence or two defining what you were able to take away from your experience. The lessons learned serve two purposes: to show the interviewer that you learn from your experiences and struggles, and to leave the listener with a lesson that s/he can possibly use in the future.
And that’s pretty much it! There’s not much more to it. Obviously, in other conversations and social situations, you may find that some of the little nuances will not fit. But the overall plotline – setting, goal, obstacle, happy ending, lesson learned – is the formula to telling the story well. Always remember to keep your listener engaged. Don’t be afraid to ask a question or two in the story, maybe your listener is unfamiliar with the content. Either way, this method has proven itself to work for me, so I hope it will help you too! We all have our stories; we just have to learn how to tell them.
