I’ll admit it. I cry at movies sometimes. I’m comfortable with it and not ashamed in the least. Movies are stories and stories have been used to elicit emotions (either by design or accident) since the beginning of man. Some of the most fantastic stories are tremendously moving. This emotion can be manifested as a ‘feel good’ or a ‘tear jerker’, it can be uplifting or depressing, revolutionary, or merely entertaining. The most important thing to keep upper most in your mind as you think about stories, is that they are an opening, a hole, so to speak, that you can fill with a message, your message.
Stories tailored for business and sales need to consider the emotional state of mind that they will put your prospect our client in. In persuasion, we’re really simply using stories to control these emotional states. The value of stories is in the state in which it puts our audience.
When I tell stories I want to both make a point and put my prospect into a profound emotional state, carry them away, so to speak and open to accepting my message.
Ideally, we should have an arsenal of compelling, persuasive, powerful stories at our ready for any given situation. Think about ‘respect’, for example. For our affluent and perhaps elderly client