Have you ever wondered why you can so effortlessly remember your favorite movie or TV show and any facts related to it? For example, if you watched Dunkirk you can almost certainly remember the dramatic events of 1940, when hundreds of British ships, from small fishing boats to bigger seacrafts, sailed across the English Channel to save almost 350,000 troops from being attacked by the German Wehrmacht.
But for some reason, you can't remember the 5 reasons for globalization you learned at university today?
Well, a big reason why you paid much more attention to the actions during the movie than the listing of facts during your lecture is that the movie appealed to something much more powerful than your academic interests, your emotions.
You almost definitely imagined what it would be like if you had been in the shoes of the soldiers in the movie, standing on a beach in Normandy, the freezing water wetting your clothes, the cold wind blowing in your face. It's something that probably most of us can relate to, so you were able to empathize with these poor soldiers, you could imagine their stress. It is this emotional element that made you pay more attention, that made you remember the facts around the evacuation of the allied troops in 1940 much more easily than 5 bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation.
It's what Aristotle called the Pathos principle, the secret power of Hollywood and Netflix, and big brands like Nike, Red Bull, and BMW, who have mastered to make you feel like an athlete, adrenaline junky, or race driver, and as a result, have become some of the most well-known companies in the world.
But how do they do it? How do they manage to appeal to our emotions so effectively withouth us sometimes even realising?
Well, following in the footsteps of Shakespeare, all effective communicators have mastered that one skill that is the key to making people listen, persuading them to change their attitude, belief, or behavior, and becoming truly memorable: storytelling.
By telling us beautifully crafted stories, we are sucked into the storyteller's universe and build an emotional bond with them that engrain their ideas and opinions into our minds, making them very memorable and making us vulnerable to be persuaded by them.
So what's their trick?
Clear the stage for the 3-act storytelling technique.
Every good story can be split up into 3 parts, or acts, to use theatre lingo, in which the first act of a story is called the setup.
The purpose of the setup is to explain the current situation, it introduces the different characters and builds the basis for all events that happen later in the story.
It's when Steve Jobs explains at his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address how he and his co-founder Steve Wozniak ("Woz") worked tirelessly in the garage of his parents at the age of 20 to turn Apple into a $2bn company with 4000 employees and all of a sudden was fired... from his own company.
Overall, the first act of your story must be intriguing. It must hook the audience in and make them hungry to find out what happens next.
To make the first act of your story intriguing and also increase the chances of building an emotional bond with the listener straight from the start, make sure your setup incorporates a few key elements:
However, the most crucial part of your setup comes right at the end of act 1, the catalyst. The catalyst is a sudden turn of events, that changes the direction of the plot completely and should surprise the listener and get them on the edge of their seat wondering what happens next.
That's Steve Jobs getting fired from his own company. It's the Titanic hitting the iceberg. It's Hagrid telling Harry Potter he's a wizard.
After that point, the whole story really gets into motion and the plot starts to accelerate. Enter Act 2.
The second act should be all about the struggle that the protagonist, a company, or you faced within the story being told.
This state of tension and conflict is what really creates the emotional arousal within your audience and locks in the listener, especially if the type of conflict is one that the audience can relate to.
Just like in the setup, make sure that the plot stays authentic, real, and relatable to the audience, to maximize the chances of keeping people's attention. Really highlight the stress points in a way that relates to them.
Take, for example, Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happiness trying to make ends meet for himself and his son, being forced to live in public shelters after being evicted from his flat, taking an unpaid internship at a prestigious brokerage firm with slim chances to progress into a paid position but learning all night to be able to outshine the competition, even turning up to the eventual interview without a proper suit. It doesn't get any more real than that, a single parent in a realistic scenario facing a struggle that thousands of others are actually facing as well on a daily basis in the real world. Even if you are not forced to sleep on the streets, you are very likely to empathize with the struggle of juggling the stress of work and everyday life.
The second act of your story should also include a situation where all seems lost.
When the Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia tell the story of the intense early days of starting their company they look back on such a painful situation. Convinced of their idea, they worked tirelessly, draining all their energy, sleep, and money into building their idea... but without success. Left unemployed and out of money, Chesky and Gebbia were forced to eat cereal without milk because even that was too expensive, leading to Chesky losing 20 pounds in weight over the course of one year.
A situation like this represents the peak of Act 2 at which point the audience should be saying "God this is too much!" or something like "I am so stressed out even just watching this!".
If that happens, you know you have locked them in your audience. Full of hormones and emotions they are not going to forget you or your story so easily now
Let's relieve them of their stress in Act 3.
Act 3 is all about the resolution of the conflict and showing how the struggle through the hardship was worth it by leading to a disproportionate positive outcome.
It's Steve Jobs rekindling his love for what he's doing and founding two new companies, NeXT and Pixar. (NeXT ended up being bought out by Apple to use its software to power Apple Macs and Pixar went on to become the world's largest animation studio and later be acquired by Disney).
It's Marty McFly burning the Almanach to save his dad from being shot. It's Will Smith being offered a paid position in The Pursuit of Happiness to finally end his unemployment and hardship him and his son had to go through. It's the co-founders of Airbnb being admitted into the prestigious Y-combinator program which gave them access to invaluable resources that helped them turn their idea into a $100bn company.
The key to a great resolution is to incorporate some elements of surprise. There should be a turn of events, where the audience says "Wow I didn't see that coming." Doing so keeps the story intriguing and interesting right until the end. The goal is again to get the audience to empathize with the characters and to turn that feeling of stress into relief. They should feel happy for the protagonist to have overcome the conflict and be at peace.
Ending the story on a high note after you have built that emotional bond with your audience will ensure that you create a positive association with yourself.
Ready to tell your own story?
My Story
My name is Stefan, and just like you, I had (and still have) this little voice in my head telling me that I'm not good enough.... continue reading
More blog posts
What everyone ought to know about boosting your self-esteem.
(Do not carry on with your self-affirmations if you truly want to feel confident again.)
Discover what the real 'currencies of self-esteem' are and how to amass them like weeds.
