Boost Your Career: Manage Through Storytelling and Reveal the Hero Within
28 January 2015
Read by 2333 persons
Forget traditional professional development techniques. To take the reins of your personal leadership and (finally!) become the hero of your professional life, why not try storytelling? Inspired by the methods used by TV series screenwriters, and developed by coach Yaël Gabison, this method revolutionizes the way we manage and helps us succeed in our professional presentations.
Do you have trouble asserting yourself in front of an audience or captivating your audience when you have to give a presentation? What if you skipped traditional communication methods to put yourself in the shoes of a storyteller, of your story? This is what Yaël Gabison proposes. Founder of the leadership consulting firm Smartside, she has developed a corporate communication technique borrowed from novelists, film and theater authors, and series screenwriters that allows you to become the hero of your professional life. Its name? Storytelling.
Storytelling, what is it?
"Storytelling is the art of telling stories," explains Yaël Gabison. "It's the art of writing, of narrative, which we find from the earliest times with the Bible to the present day, with political speeches."
Where storytelling differs from traditional communication methods is that it combines meaning and emotion. "The professional world must be totally disconnected from emotions," emphasizes Yaël Gabison. "This is what strikes me about the corporate world: we are constantly told about personal and professional development techniques, which use a whole bunch of complicated words, but basically, they are techniques that continue to separate the world of reason from that of emotions." The proof in meetings or presentations: few speakers dare to share their own experience, their experiences with the audience, and many are content to list the figures from the past year… at the risk of making their intervention flat and soporific.
Storytelling "allows you to embody, personalize, materialize feelings, to give life to a corporate narrative, often cold and without any emotion," explains Yaël Gabison. "When you touch people with emotion, you get your ideas across twice as fast."
Become the hero of your professional life
But how can you use storytelling in presentations and boost your professional career? For Yaël Gabison, you must first not be afraid to put yourself in the heroine's shoes, to take charge of your professional life and stop enduring it. "Working on a narrative is working on a transformation, that of the hero. And the hero must be us. We live an adventure so that it transforms us, that it confronts us with moral challenges that impact our personal and professional lives. We gain skills, and at the same time, we enrich ourselves."
You should not hesitate to take an example from TV series or film screenwriters to enrich your own story. "As with Breaking Bad or Desperate Housewives, you need to work on a pitch. It is the backbone of your story, your presentation, and your guarantee of telling one and the same story throughout your presentation."
An example? "If you have to write a pitch to present the new commercial strategy of a product that will increase the brand's sales," explains Yaël Gabison, the pitch would be: "I propose to put in place a new system of collective motivation so that the whole team is united and can help each other to achieve the objective of +9% set for next year."
"Once you have the pitch for your presentation, you need to work on the narrative process of transformation, like a screenwriter: determine the initial situation, the previously which contextualizes, the disruptive element, the vicissitudes, and finally the denouement."
Charlotte Arce.
Huffingtonpost.fr
Published January 10, 2015.
Posted online January 28, 2015.
Do you have trouble asserting yourself in front of an audience or captivating your audience when you have to give a presentation? What if you skipped traditional communication methods to put yourself in the shoes of a storyteller, of your story? This is what Yaël Gabison proposes. Founder of the leadership consulting firm Smartside, she has developed a corporate communication technique borrowed from novelists, film and theater authors, and series screenwriters that allows you to become the hero of your professional life. Its name? Storytelling.
Storytelling, what is it?
"Storytelling is the art of telling stories," explains Yaël Gabison. "It's the art of writing, of narrative, which we find from the earliest times with the Bible to the present day, with political speeches."
Where storytelling differs from traditional communication methods is that it combines meaning and emotion. "The professional world must be totally disconnected from emotions," emphasizes Yaël Gabison. "This is what strikes me about the corporate world: we are constantly told about personal and professional development techniques, which use a whole bunch of complicated words, but basically, they are techniques that continue to separate the world of reason from that of emotions." The proof in meetings or presentations: few speakers dare to share their own experience, their experiences with the audience, and many are content to list the figures from the past year… at the risk of making their intervention flat and soporific.
Storytelling "allows you to embody, personalize, materialize feelings, to give life to a corporate narrative, often cold and without any emotion," explains Yaël Gabison. "When you touch people with emotion, you get your ideas across twice as fast."
Become the hero of your professional life
But how can you use storytelling in presentations and boost your professional career? For Yaël Gabison, you must first not be afraid to put yourself in the heroine's shoes, to take charge of your professional life and stop enduring it. "Working on a narrative is working on a transformation, that of the hero. And the hero must be us. We live an adventure so that it transforms us, that it confronts us with moral challenges that impact our personal and professional lives. We gain skills, and at the same time, we enrich ourselves."
You should not hesitate to take an example from TV series or film screenwriters to enrich your own story. "As with Breaking Bad or Desperate Housewives, you need to work on a pitch. It is the backbone of your story, your presentation, and your guarantee of telling one and the same story throughout your presentation."
An example? "If you have to write a pitch to present the new commercial strategy of a product that will increase the brand's sales," explains Yaël Gabison, the pitch would be: "I propose to put in place a new system of collective motivation so that the whole team is united and can help each other to achieve the objective of +9% set for next year."
"Once you have the pitch for your presentation, you need to work on the narrative process of transformation, like a screenwriter: determine the initial situation, the previously which contextualizes, the disruptive element, the vicissitudes, and finally the denouement."
Charlotte Arce.
Huffingtonpost.fr
Published January 10, 2015.
Posted online January 28, 2015.
