Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results. The best stories give rise to unanswered questions.

This is the moment to use an Hourglass. It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible. When you know the audience is hanging on your every word, let them hang. Drag out the wait as long as possible.

Steve connects with the audience before he even speaks, because through his nervousness, he shows them that he is just like them. They are rooting for him before he ever says a word.

The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.

it’s always good to get your audience to laugh in the first thirty seconds of a story. A laugh at the beginning does these three things: 1. It signals to the audience: “I’m a good storyteller. I know what I’m doing. You can relax.” 2. In a small, less formal situation, this early laugh will serve as a stop sign for potential interruptions. It serve

Did you see what I did there? I opened that section in the present tense again, trying like hell to suck you back into the time and space of the train, but then I shifted to the past tense when I slipped into backstory about the day I taught Charlie how to pee on the tree. I did this deliberately, for two reasons: 1. I didn’t want to compromise the

You can also inoculate yourself against the power of certain sentences by saying them over and over again before performing. By turning meaningful moments into repetitive sentences, you can sometimes strip some of the emotion from them. Often an audience’s presence will inject some (or all) of the emotion right back into the sentence, but usually t

Don’t switch Elephants. Simply change the color. Changing the Elephant’s color provides an audience with one of the greatest surprises that a storyteller has to offer. My wife has often said that this is my preferred model for storytelling, and she’s right. I’m always most excited about a story when I can change the color of the Elephant. “The laug

Make ’em laugh before you make ’em cry.