Why storytelling is the language of thought

Years ago, not long after I started Emphasis, I found myself in conversation with a young training manager for one of the UK’s biggest companies. We were meeting to discuss his organisation’s training programme and I was curious to understand what he was focusing on.

‘There’s the usual stuff – meeting skills, presentation skills, report-writing,’ he explained. Then, with disarming honesty, he added: ‘Oh, and everyone’s talking about emotional intelligence at the moment. So we thought we’d better have some of that too.’

Now, he certainly wasn’t wrong: everyone was talking about emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman’s seminal book on the topic had recently become a number-one bestseller. And now training courses on it were popping up everywhere.

His candour intrigued me, though, because it clearly betrayed a less lofty goal: to follow the crowd.

Storytelling fad?

He won’t have been the first to want to keep up with the corporate Joneses. Training fads come and go. (Though, to be clear, emotional intelligence is still as important as it ever was.) The organisers of a learning managers’ conference I once attended even felt compelled to include a talk on the importance of blockchain just as Bitcoin was taking off.

Which leads me to a subject that’s definitely become fashionable in learning circles in recent years.

Type ‘storytelling in the workplace’ into Amazon’s search box and you’ll find no fewer than TWENTY books dedicated to it exclusively. The number of books mentioning that phrase has been growing exponentially for years and shows no sign of stopping.

Yet you can be forgiven if you’re still wondering what fables and fairytales have to do with your everyday, professional life. I did too for years. Even the word ‘storytelling’ sounded like personal development woo-woo to me.

I only started to change my mind when I realised that we’re not talking about the ‘once-upon-a-time’ kind of story here. And then the penny really dropped.

Language of thought

It happened while I was deep into research for my book, which will be about writing for how human brains read. That was when I discovered that our minds run on story.

Yours does. Your boss’s does. So do the minds of your colleagues, customers, friends and loved ones. Stories are how we all make sense of the world.

In fact, if you have an inner monologue – as most of us do – you’re probably constructing one right now. It’s probably centred on whether this really is a topic that’s worth your precious time. Bear with me: I think it is.

Because stories are the universal language of thought. They are how our brains make sense of the world around us. We base most of the decisions we make on the stories we tell ourselves.

The people in your life will automatically construct a narrative from the messages, emails and documents that you send them. They can’t help it. It’s like they’re all plugged into their own personal audiobook.

The trouble is that these stories often work against us when we write.

For example, the mental narrative of the person reading a document might be, ‘Tom is trying hard to make a case to me but I don’t buy it.’ Or perhaps it’s, ‘The wall of text in this report looks like hard work to get through. Most of these reports aren’t relevant, so I can probably skip this one.’

The key to success with whatever you write is to control the story your readers are listening to in their heads when they’re reading it.

This is not as difficult as it sounds. In fact, it might be as simple as just telling them a different story.

Brain sync

As I’ve explained before, it’s very risky to let the facts speak for themselves. Send someone a bunch of data without telling them why it’s relevant and the fate of your project or contract is in the lap of the gods.

Add a narrative, however, and something amazing can happen: you’ll literally start synchronising your brain with theirs.

Neuroscience researchers have shown that, when we’re exposed to a story, our brain activity starts to match that of whoever wrote it.

The big question, of course, is how to do that in a professional setting. The good news is that it may be a lot easier than you think.

Use ‘microstories’

In fact, it may just be a case of writing as if you were recounting to a colleague what you’ve been up to recently.

So don’t write, ‘Here are the sales figures for June.’ That’s just presenting the facts and leaving the reader to make up their own story.

Instead, write, ‘I’ve been looking at the sales figures for June.’ This uses what I call a microstory.

A microstory is a short bit of text that reframes the sentence as a narrative. It works because the reader can’t process two stories at once. So they stop listening to their own ‘audiobook’ and start paying attention to yours.

As simple as it sounds, this may be all it takes to transform how your reports, emails and presentations land.

Building the story

You can take this idea a step further by building several microstories into a longer narrative:

I’ve been looking at the sales figures for June, trying to work out why they were so low. Even though we got more enquiries last month than we had all year, we still didn’t hit our revenue targets. But then I discovered something …

Aren’t you now just a little bit curious to find out what happened next? What did the writer discover? If you were reading a report or email like that, you’d probably feel compelled to continue reading. And as you did so, your thinking would naturally start to align with the writer’s.

This is way more effective – and far safer – than letting the facts do the talking.

That’s why I started this article with a story, too. Did it work?

The neuroscientist Uri Hasson describes his research on how stories synchronise brains in this engaging talk.

Learn how to apply these techniques to your communication with our Storytelling in business course.