The Power Of Storytelling: How To Move People

The ability to tell a story well can literally transform your life.

It can land you a job in a crowded applicant pool, make you stand out on a first

date, or be the difference between your business succeeding and failing.

Today, I have a very special breakdown on storytelling

not just because storytelling is so important to charisma into life but

because I am actually in the breakdown as the interviewer

and the person that I'm interviewing is, without exaggeration, one of the people that I most admire on this planet.

His name is Scott Harrison and as the founder of Charity: Water, he's helped raise

over 100 million dollars by telling stories for a good cause. In his own words...

We can't imagine 660 million anything or quantity of anything let alone people without clean water.

There's no connection so what we've been intentionally doing, over 11 years now,

is telling stories of individual people — one of the 663 million names, faces, hopes, dreams—

So in this video, you are going to learn three of the most important principles

that will help you to tell more engaging stories in any environment.

And I need to warn you beforehand, these stories that are told in this video are heavy and they contain really sad but important messages

which is necessary when you're talking about the truth of why Charity: Water exists.

I'm also going to let the clips run a bit longer so that you can hear a bigger part of the story uninterrupted

and then I'll comment later. Here we go.

As things had it, I happened to be in a five-dollar-a-night hotel room in Ethiopia,

I was with a few donors — a small group — I was sitting in the kitchen of this hotel

and the hotel owner walks out recognizes me because we've been doing work in this region for a while

and just sits down and, unprompted, starts telling me a story

about a woman who lived in his village in a remote area of about 3,000 people

and he said all the women used to walk for water

for eight hours a day and they would have these heavy clay pots that they would carry on their back and he said,

"One day, one of the women in my village named Letuc Eris," he had her named,

"walks back into the village and she slips and falls and she breaks her clay pots and all the water spills out into the dust,"

and he said, "she hung herself and she didn't go back for more water."

He said, "We found her body swinging from this tree in our village."

And then I remember he kind of paused to watch the story's effect on us

and he said, "The work you're doing is important. Keep it up," and he just disappeared back into the kitchen.

So obviously, this story is heartbreaking but there's more going on here than just that.

An important principle of storytelling is that when telling a story in the first person —

meaning you're talking about yourself — you want to take the listener on the same emotional journey that you experienced.

So Scott tells the story with this pause from the innkeeper at this moment

because that is what you need to absorb what he just said just as he did

in the moment when he heard it. As he continues, he also talks about his emotional

response and mentioned that he doubted the truth of this story just as the listener might.

There's a temptation though to jump ahead when you're telling stories —