Kendall Haven calls us “Homo-Narratus”.
Storytelling has become an evolutionary tool in our survival and why we sit at the top of the food chain. This is why story is so powerful. It’s 100,000 years of hard wiring in every human’s body.
Now, what Kendall says, is that humans have this thing called a make sense mandate. We must make sense of things in order to do them. In order to take a risk, to buy a product, to try a new farming technique. We must make sense of it first.
If a story does not carry proper information into the listener’s brain, the listener will create their own story to make sense of it before processing it to the frontal cortex for formal decision.
Now here’s what you need to know because your customers, your clients, your donors, your children, when they have to make their own story up because there’s no story accompanying the information you’re giving them in that 80,000 page PowerPoint deck, two things are constant.
One, the listener’s story is often inaccurate and two, the listener’s story is often negative about you or whatever external input is coming in. So not only does the brain require story to make sense of things before it renders a decision on whether to buy from you, invest in you, follow you, it will make up its own story if you don’t provide one.
Join me by the campfire and let’s discuss how “Story” can work for you….
