Your Favourite Tip: Norman Swan - Everyone’s a storyteller, here’s how to be the best

Sending an email to a colleague? You’re telling them a story. Talking to your boss during your performance review? You’re crafting a narrative? Pitching to a prospective client? Yep, you’re spinning a yarn. 

Whenever you communicate with someone else, you’re telling a story. And given how often we need to communicate with others to do modern knowledge work, we’d all better learn how to be more engaging and effective storytellers. 

For How I Work listener Dee, there’s no better teacher for that than Dr Norman Swan, the celebrated journalist, author, and host of Coronacast.

Find out why we all need to be better storytellers, and how we can get there.  

Connect with Norman on Twitter or LinkedIn

You can find the full interview here: More naps, less coffee: Norman Swan’s tips for the good life

***

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CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Production Support from Deadset Studios

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
But I think the mistake that some people make, and
it's not just young kids coming in and learning it's
something to do, is that you feel you're on a
mission to explain. And if you feel you're on a
mission to explain, you're going to feel before you start.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Over and over again. By now just how important soft
skills are for the modern knowledge worker, you've also probably
thought to yourself, why are they called soft skills when
they're actually really hard to do well? As our work
becomes more personalized, nuanced, and complex, we all need to
build a set of peripheral skills abilities that supplement the

(00:41):
core of our job descriptions. And one of the most
important of those skills is the ability to communicate effectively.
Whether you're in technology, finance, education, or anything in between,
communication ties it all together. It doesn't matter how good
you are frenching the numbers or designing a workflow if

(01:02):
you can't effectively share it with other people. So how
can you improve your communication skills? My name is doctor
Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of
behavioral science consultancy invent Him, and this is how I

(01:23):
work A show about how to help you do your
best work. Welcome to your Favorite Tips across ten byte
size episodes, I'll be sharing tips from some of the
world's best thinkers that you, the listeners, have found the
most useful. We're covering everything from creating better to do
lists to setting more effective boundaries around your time, and

(01:47):
you'll be hearing from people like best selling author Sally Hepworth,
Corona Cast host and journalist Norman Swan, and Google's executive
productivity advisor Laura may Martin. Today's favorite tip comes from
d and she writes one I keep going back to
is Norman's One's tips on how to communicate better by

(02:08):
taking people on a narrative journey, not trying to explain
everything to them upfront. So here is ABC journalist and
broadcaster Norman's One talking about how he became so effective
at communicating complex health information in simple terms.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
So one of the joys of doing what I do
do is it's exactly what you say, I mean. I
really love it. That's what I love storytelling, and so
that's what journalism is is discipline storytelling. And when you're
telling a story, you've got to work out what the
narrative is, how to engage people in that narrative, how

(02:50):
to stop their minds drifting to something else so that
they're always there. And I liken it to grabbing somebody
by the neck, sitting them down, nothing else to think
about knowing, and what's the air and flow of the
energy of a communication piece as well as the content
of that. So when I first joined the ABC, that's

(03:13):
what you know. I already had that love of storytelling,
and then you had to apply to communicating complex information
more complex information. And I had a colleague then who
unfortunately got very young with Peter Hunt, who we worked
closely together. He was an environmental journalist. I was health
and was more health side, and we used to work

(03:36):
together and do that tesk together. He had something that
he wanted to communicate it till he wanted to communicate,
and we workshop how we did it, and we'd read
each other's scripts and give people and give each other feedback.
And we did that for some years. And I think
that once you've been doing that sort of thing for
some years, you kind of get what works and what
doesn't work. And now one of the pleasures I get

(03:58):
is actually working with young incoming broadcasters and working on
their scripts and showing them ways of changing the story,
how you might create a metaphor an image, something to
grab onto and get that rhythm right and pass that on.
But it's just years and years of doing it, practicing

(04:19):
and getting feedback, and years and years of failure as
well and learning from your failures.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
So when you are editing, say a less experienced person
script for example, what are some of the things that
you're looking for or some of the pieces of advice
that you find yourself giving often well.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
I think the mistake that some people make, and it's
not just young kids coming in and learning, it's people.
Something to doing well is that you feel you're on
a mission to explain. And if you feel you're on
a mission to explain, you're going to fail before you start.
That's why I'm talking about storytelling now. Storytelling episodic. It

(05:02):
has a beginning, the middle, and an end, but it
also has episodes within it. And you don't tell the
whole story up front. You've got to give people a
reason to move on. So the common things that I
find people do is they give away the story at
the beginning. All you've got to do at the beginning
is give people a reason to listen because it's going
to be a payoff, and make sure they do get

(05:23):
a payoff. It's explaining too much at one time rather
than parsing out the information so that I'm going to
give you a little bit. You give a little bit, No,
consolidate that little bit of information. Then I'll take you
to the next place. And I'm taking you by the
hand through the story. And you've got to trust me
that I will take you by the hand and I
will not lose you during the story.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
I think it's always good to be reminded of the
power of storytelling because it's so easy to just default
to facts and figures, especially at work. So maybe this way,
if you're preparing a presentation or perhaps for a meeting
where you have to communicate something important, challenge yourself to
find a story that brings your message to life in
an engaging and compelling way. As the listener of How

(06:09):
I Work, you've hopefully picked up a few tips on
this show to help you work better, But do you
want more? And maybe in a book form, because let's
face it, books are the most awesome thing on the planet. Well,
now you can. In my new book, time Wise, I
uncover a wealth of proven strategies that anyone can use

(06:29):
to improve their productivity, work, and lifestyle. Time Wise brings
together all of the gems that I've learned from conversations
with the world's greatest thinkers, including Adam Grant, Dan Pink,
Mia Friedman, and Turia Pitt and many many others. Time
Wise is launching on July five, but you can pre
order it now from Amantha dot com. And if you

(06:52):
pre order time Wise, I have a couple of bonuses
for you. First, You'll receive an ebook that details my
top twenty faith rite apps and software for being time
Wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading, cooking ideas and more.
You will also get a complimentary spot in a webinar
that I'm running on June twenty nine, where I will
be sharing the tactics from time Wise that I use

(07:15):
most often, and also some bonus ones that are not
in the book that I use and love. Hop onto
Amantha dot com to pre order now. How I Work
is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios,
and thank you to Matt Nimba who does the audio
mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much

(07:36):
better than it would have otherwise, see you next time.