More Tales for Trainers by Parkin Margaret;

Author:Parkin, Margaret;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page, Limited

Whenever you use a pause, do ensure that, from your audience’s point of view, it is worth the wait; if the outcome doesn’t match the drama that you have attempted to create, you will cause disappointment as well as losing rapport.

You can also change the mood and pace of your story by changing the pace of your voice. Make sure that you speak slowly and clearly enough for your words to be heard, but not so slowly that your audience becomes bored. If you are describing something that happened very s–l–o–w–l–y or you are reaching the end of the story, you can of course use your voice to reinforce the action of the narrative or stress the importance of the end line. Be careful, though, not to drop the volume or tone of your voice at the end or climax of the piece so that your audience is left wondering and asking each other, ‘What did she say?’ This can destroy the whole atmosphere and leave people feeling annoyed that they have sat expectantly for 10 minutes only to have missed the whole point of the story. If you’d like to hear some audio examples of my own storytelling, visit the Kogan Page website at: www.koganpage.com.

Non-verbal communication

An old adage in storytelling is ‘Show, don’t tell.’ In other words, your body and facial expression should always be congruent with the tale you are telling, unless you are very obviously being sarcastic or ironic. If it’s a happy story, look happy; if it’s sad, look sad; if it’s dramatic, look dramatic (within reason). Above all, appear confident – if you look unsure, your audience will pick this up and react to your embarrassment.

Use gestures and posture to add further impact to the key elements of your story. For example, when I come to the section of ‘The goose that laid the golden eggs’ in which ‘the farmer’s wife looked at the egg, looked at the goose and looked at the farmer’, I look to various parts of the room to reinforce each part of the sentence. When Carly Read told her story about Ann (see ‘Carly’s story’ in Part 2), the indolent worker who had ‘her evening newspaper semi-hidden in her desk drawer, which she would deftly elbow shut whenever I passed by her office’, she quite naturally imitated the action by using her elbows to close the mock drawers that she was describing – a gesture that stuck in my mind for some time after the telling. Jack Maguire (1998) gives good advice on the use of body language in storytelling:

Don’t strain yourself to create physical images or moves that don’t suggest themselves naturally … if you’re not very expressive with your face or body in everyday life, then you’re very likely to feel and look weird morphing into a mime to deliver a story.

Above all, your storytelling should look and sound like you, not a copy of someone else. You want to adopt a style that you feel comfortable with and that you and your audience can trust and enjoy.

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