Warning:  this blog post contains shocking revelations that may trigger summer camp attendees.  Read at your own risk. 

In my blog post last week I asked a trick question:  how much do your audiences remember?  Trick, because I knew the answer, and it wasn’t a treat.  The answer:  tragically little.  And lists don’t help much.  Even acronyms don’t help, because they’re just, well, lists.  You still have to remember what each of the letters in the acronym “Burblequaff” stand for, right?  (What was that second ‘f’ again?)

I gave a strategy or two for increasing retention, but today I’m going to talk about the single best method for remembering content.  And that is storytelling – as implied by the story I told in that post about the conference attendee who recalled my tale from a decade before.  That’s why I’ve been working on stories and studying the art of storytelling for a long time.  Probably longer than you’ve been alive, but that’s just a guess.

I was first captivated by stories (after Dr. Suess at my parent’s knee) by a voice on the radio.  It was a reading hour on WGBH, in Boston where I grew up.  The reader had a wonderful, rich resonant baritone and the story he was reading, The Day of the Triffids, was mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time (for an 8-year-old).  I was hooked from the moment Bill woke up in the hospital with bandaged eyes, facing a mystery about what had happened to his eyes, everyone else’s eyes, and humanity in general.

Thus, I learned of the power of storytelling at an early age.

It was reinforced when I attended summer camp at age 13.  I’m disguising the name of the camp in order to spare the feelings of my fellow camp goers.  As I discovered when I arrived at camp, the camp’s founder favored nudity and adopted the unclothed option when sitting around the campfire at night telling stories.

I was a reasonably normal boy with the standard hangups at age 13, so I was initially quite uncomfortable with the no-clothing option.  I am here to tell you that it was the power of the camp founder’s storytelling that so drew me into the make-believe world that a few minutes into the story I had stopped noticing that the founder and roughly half of the boys were naked.  I just wanted to know how the story turned out.  I was entranced, then and ever after, with the narrative arc.

So restrain yourself from parading your knowledge as a speaker, in the form of lists, or insights, or acronyms.  You could make up almost anything and the audience would believe you.  Their ability to retain information given to them that way is minimal.  Instead, tell your audience stories, with the kernel of truth or ounce of insight placed in a (thrilling) story, and your audiences will remember you and your insight forever.

I’ve written often about the power of storytelling, but it comes down to this:  it’s the way our brains are designed to remember things.