Episode 193: Aesop was Right 2500 Years Ago – Why I Tell so Many Stories
Stories create connections by sharing personal experiences and vulnerabilities, helping others see their own paths through self-discovery. They are more memorable and engaging than mere lessons, as they evoke emotions and foster empathy. Effective storytelling should include personal failures, be relevant, concise, and provide a clear summary to ensure impact. Ultimately, storytelling builds trust and rapport, which are crucial for meaningful relationships in both personal and professional settings.
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett. Thank you so much for taking 20 minutes or so of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall.
Today's conversation subject is one that actually came from a good friend who asked me a question that I really didn't have a defined answer for but made me think. If you have had the displeasure of spending any time with me, I'm a storyteller. I tell stories about myself, about my family, about my kids, about my wife, about my experiences. I've had unbelievable experiences, really not because of anything I've ever done but because I've been around some really incredible people and particularly mentors who gave me opportunities that allowed me to most often fail and learn.
But I like to tell stories, and the question came from a colleague: Where did that come from? Where did that start? Because you do it all the time, and they insinuated that I do it relatively well in terms of connecting different thoughts and experiences. This caused me to think a little bit because it comes more naturally for me and it really stemmed way back in time. So today we want to talk about storytelling in terms of case statements and things of that nature, but also about when you're dealing with people and situations, when you are a leader, when people are attempting to resonate with you or you're trying to resonate with them—that idea of rapport and how you build trust and relationships and how maybe I use stories to help do that.
In this contemplation and thought process of trying to figure out where stories come from, at least the way I like to use them, I had to go all the way back to one of my favorite books, which probably says a lot about me and what I read as a kid. I loved Aesop's Fables, and if you're not familiar with them, Aesop's Fables is a centuries-old book of about 735 stories. When I tell you if you're like, "I don't know who this Aesop is," I'm going to tell you a couple of stories and you'll go, "Oh, I know those." Aesop lived five or six hundred years before the AD era, so in ancient Greek, Cretan times. He was actually a slave, he was blind and mute, but I always loved these stories because I think they made connections to larger perspectives.
So what are some of these Aesop's Fables? Well, one of them is "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" with the adage that if you tend to complain too much about not true things, eventually you get eaten by them. Or the fact of how sometimes slow and steady is better than fast and quick, as seen in "The Tortoise and the Hare." Or one of my all-time favorites, "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing," always be aware of who's around you and what they really are doing and what they mean. Those are just three examples of Aesop's 735 fables, and I loved them as a kid, partly because I think they told wider perspectives, angles, lessons, and connected to different scenarios early on in my childhood.
The thing about telling stories—and I've gathered this from my children as well—is I'm not sure if I'm a good one, but I tell a lot of them. Kids love them. It goes back to what I think Robert Fulghum said in his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: If we could center ourselves more on how kids kind of work their life, I think as adults we'd be better off. And stories in this context are loved. If you tell your child an important lesson about manners—which is something I spend more time right now with our 11-year-old and our 7-year-old talking about—I tell them stories of when I've been in situations where my manners made me feel comfortable. They're not onerous as much as they are comforting when you're in situations where someone else might be uncomfortable, whether it's how you respond and respect someone, like using "please" and "thank you" or "yes sir" and "no sir," "yes ma'am" and "no ma'am." To table manners when you're at a dinner and all of a sudden there are like six forks and you’re wondering what to do with them. Having that knowledge and how to use them is a safety blanket for me. I tell them stories of when I've been in these situations so that when we're at the dinner table, it's just not me harping on "hey, chew with your mouth closed." There's a reason for that. What are the stories that go along with them?
All of this is connected to the concept of metaphors and similes, really more metaphors than similes, but you get the kind of connection. Metaphors are used to create meaning and understanding between situations. Or another way to put it is that they bridge a gap between someone else's experience and yours, or what someone else is going through and what you've gone through or what someone else has gone through and the lesson you're trying to help them with. It connects across one thing to another. And to me, that's what stories have always been.
So I want to break this up into two parts. Number one is why stories are so important in more detail and kind of the six or seven things that I think of when I tell stories, why I do that. And then the second part is what you should think about when you tell stories and how you use them more effectively. And this will be our 20-minute classroom.
The first thing I think about when I tell stories, when somebody is talking with me, most of the time it's one or the other: either there's something really great going on in their life or there's a challenge. Now because of my professional nature as a consultant, often it's a challenge. And that doesn't mean it's negative; it just means there's an unknown. They're trying to figure something out. And so I like to use stories to help do the first thing, which is to create a sense of empathy. But for me, for them, that others have been in these situations—that it's critical to understand that you're not alone and that not only have others been in this, they have found ways through them and been successful. Empathy is a powerful tool in storytelling because it connects someone's emotional core to something outside of themselves.
Next, sometimes challenges are more internalized, like "I'm going through this," or "We're going through this." Sometimes the thought process metaphor forced through the trees is the concept of getting someone to get out of their own way. And the easiest way I've always found to do that is to be emphatic with them, to let them know they're not alone. And that even though I may not be able to solve the problem, I'm in the problem with them. I will help them. So this first thing, one of six or seven here, is to create empathy.
The second thing is it creates familiarity. When you tell a story of some particular experience in your life that mirrors maybe something generically they are going through or the outcome you're maybe looking for, this process is one in which you're trying to create a connection. And in doing so, this familiarity creates a relevancy. We'll talk about this here in a second about the value of telling about your own failures, what you learn from them. This familiarity, in creating a sense of relevancy, creates a connection, which is number three. The best people that I have ever believed in that have given me the most, who have enabled me to be whatever it is that I am, came through a sense of connection and trust. Whether it's beyond that of being a child and trusting your mom and dad—because I think that comes with DNA and basics of life—when you're an adult, you don't have to trust your parents. I do trust my mom implicitly and trusted my dad implicitly. One thing about my wife in that relationship, this idea of connectiveness is critically important. So part of this creating a connection through familiarity is about the person, but I think it's also equally important about the experience. Having an understanding that you've been through this, helping someone else understand that you've been through something similar, or you know of someone who’s been through something similar.
And to steal from someone I have an immense matter of respect for—and I don't do this very well—but the idea of coaching, I find it more engaging, which is bad for a lot of conversations. So I have to work at pulling it back just to tell people what they should do. That's not life. That's not good ability to build rapport. But most times the best things that happen when we have challenges are when we solve them ourselves.
And by telling the story and creating that connection about the experience, I can tell them something that I did or that I experienced or I know someone else experienced and kind of the general outcomes, positive, negative, what was learned. That connection may allow them to see their own path.
In the end of the day, to me, stories in this idea of connection aren't about me telling someone what to do as much as it is, clearing the mist so they can see their own path. Now it's about self-discovery. And that's what this connection really is all about. So it's not only about the person and the trust, but the experience in giving them kind of a clear lane to see what might be possible.
Number five is that stories are more interesting. I watch my kids at night with their mother, my beautiful wife. And she reads to them and we tell stories and they're in the wrong. Well how much better is that in terms of storytelling than just staring at the television? We know from all kinds of science and by the way, this is all kind of, I pulled it all together, but there's scientific support for all of this. I found that very interesting kind of thought about it. And then I was kind of researching real quickly like, oh my gosh, things I think about actually their science behind this. Only we look at great school kids and it's the stories that capture them. It reminds me of what I tell my son now. And I'm beginning to tell my daughter. She's a little bit younger and not quite ready for this. And I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I tell Jay all the time, people will forget what you say. They'll never forget how you made them feel. And that's because they associate that feeling with the story because it's more interesting. So our memories are not about just about what somebody said. They're about the story that went along with it and how it made us feel. That's because it's more interesting and connects in terms of our memories. It also shows active what I call participation that, particularly in my consulting world, that I've been in those shoes and I failed and I got lucky and I had great mentors and I think someone, a sense of, not expertise because that's not fair. Wisdom is way too much for me. But similar experiences, having been down that road before, I think is an incredible way of building a sense of active participation in the conversation in the journey. Not to solve it, you know, they're not walking alone. Stories about what I've been through, what I've heard others have been through, what I've seen can help people go, oh, he's been down this road as well or knows of this road. It creates a sense of connection back to that previous thought.
I think the most powerful thing about stories when done correctly is it shows vulnerability, which I think is critical in building deeper relationships. I use this all the time when I was a gift officer, I would tell stories about, you know, not just the positives, but the loss, the negative, the failure. The negative and the failure are all about vulnerability and saying, geez, I got it wrong and my son laughs at me now because he can repeat it. But I make more mistakes every day than most people doing a month and I believe that. What are we doing to show that we have been down this road and we didn't get it right? But by the way, I can help you not take the same road I did. The other part of that is loss. I talk about loss and recently, if you've listened to this podcast, if you know me in the last, a little bit more than a year when we lost dad is, I find it a way of saying, I'm in the same boat as many others, not a better boat, not a worse boat. I'm not handling it better. I'm not handling it worse. I just have been through this experience and maybe I experienced something that could be helpful to someone else. When your cell phone mobility is a powerful way of ensuring that you're building rapport and stories can help you do that.
The last one is that it's easier to remember the stories than it is the lesson. The lesson almost can come out of the story without actually memorizing the actual words that we're used. That's what ASOP is brilliant at is, if you think about the boy who cried wolf, do you know the exact words of ASOP's fable? I don't. I've read it. I can't even tell you how many times. But I know the messaging. I know the meaning because it's a story. Stories have ways of producing longer term recall of what's important and what the lesson and what might be learned from it. And so in using those stories, people can remember the important piece without having to memorize the verbiage.
So those are reasons why stories to me doing just two or three minutes worth of reading from a scientific perspective matter. The last piece is, this is the second part of our tactical, how to use them. So here are five tips when you're wanting to try to tell stories, to make connections, to create the right messaging, to use the concept of metaphors in a meaningful way. What can you do? Five tips to make them more effective.
The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, failure is a better story than success. It creates that vulnerability. It talks about learned lessons. I use this a lot with my kids. Like I made this mistake. At the end of the day you get to make your own decisions. I'm going to tell you how I failed and why it was painful. You choose what you want to do. I think that's true in business and in coaching and consulting and in life. If you can help someone take a different road than you did and maybe your road wasn't as successful, I find great value in that. But more importantly, I find great joy in that. Not in the actual failure, but in helping somebody else. Definition of philanthropy. Making the world a better place. This is a very individualistic way of doing it. One is being vulnerable enough to display or tell stories of failure and use them appropriately.
Number two, the more personal your stories are, the better. Number one, because they're about you. Number two, they're more readily, mentally available. You don't have to memorize. You just remember the experience and what you learn from it. Number three is that it brings you down to the level of the person with whom maybe you're just needing an example of what they're going through. And I don't mean down per se as much as level setting that you're in this with them. But any time you can make someone feel as if they're not alone, I think it's a powerful avenue for success. And stories can do that very quickly. I've been down this road. I may not completely understand but I empathize because I've had this experience which brings me to the third thing, relevance is key. For someone to say I understand what it means to lose your father. And then you say, then in the next sentence, they say, you know, my dad lives down the street. I'm like, you've just destroyed any story or relevance to what you're trying to do. So while personal is better, relevance has to be an equal part in that. It has to be like situations like similar, such, you know, circumstances, challenges issues. It has to be connected because if it's not what you're going to end up with is alienation or they ignore you. So keeping it relevant is important.
Keeping it short, shorter is better than longer. I try to keep this podcast at about 20 minutes. This is where we're at right now, which means I'm coming to the end because our attention spans aren't very long. And the longer your story, the less it is about them. Keeping it short into the point can be very powerful and then balancing that relevance in personal. Add it into that short particular conversation or example or story or whatever can be helpful.
The last is that summary at the end. My failure, here's what I learned. I'm hoping it might be helpful to you. Helping them a quick synopsis, sentence or two to capsule, capsule, capsuleize the not only your experience, but their experience that connection that metaphor in doing so. Maybe you help them with the possible outcome suggestion thought if nothing else that they're not alone.
So failure is better than success. At times as it's place that personal is better than not that shorter is better than longer that relevance is a key and that you want to summarize stories have a way of creating connection. And at the end of the day, I think that's what I love most about the work I do whether it was as an active chief development officer with my teams with donors with this connection with organizational leaders strategy things of that nature. All the way to how I consult it's those relationships that matter and stories to me help build that sense of trust and connection that hopefully allow me to be helpful to others and maybe helpful to myself as well. And I'm hoping today all of this story helps you. Don't forget to check out the blogs at the website healthlanthapy.com. Two a week or so. Just 90 second reads things to kind of get you to think things I see things I read. Maybe not long enough for podcasts, but something to think about. And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's podcast at howlettflanthapy.com. Full answer P and nonprofit work charity work I think has never been more important. Particularly the formalization of what we do, the professional nature of how we've grown is so needed. I've become more and more adept at talking about fleeing through being the chasm of the whole between capitalism and government that there's this whole where people fall through. It's a lot of time to not just people, but things, things you believe in. Philanthropy extends up and raises them up. What I appreciate most is trying to find those people who want to close that chasm brings me into my all-time favorite sayings I say in every podcast. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. At the end of the day, that's what philanthropy is truly all about. Love of mankind.
People, you, philanthropists, donors, board members, leaders wanting to be people who make things happen for the things in the people in our community who are wondering what happened. And dog on it, that is worthwhile every day in terms of getting up and feeling good about what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish, allowing you to grow, telling your story, building your story that can make a difference for others.
Thanks again for joining me for this 20 or so minutes, the classroom today about stories. Next time we'll see and I'll look forward to seeing you right there on the next edition of A Round With Randal.
Don't forget, make it a great day.