Build a bank of stories from your own experience that you can reuse.
You have plenty of stories from your working life. They rarely come to mind when you need them, though, and almost never in the half hour before a talk. Writing them down before you need them solves this.
Say someone at a team lunch asks about your worst client meeting. You laugh and say you can't think of one. On the bus home, three come back at once.
A story bank is a running list of moments from your working life. You write each moment down with the point it could make. Then, when you build a talk, you pick a story from the list instead of hunting for one. The first version takes about twenty-five minutes, plus a few more minutes for the recording at the end.
Open a notes app or a blank page and write down ten moments from work. Don't judge them yet and don't write them up. A few words each is enough. These five prompts help most people reach ten. Note one or two moments for each:
A success: something that went better than expected, or a problem you solved. A failure: a mistake you made, a project that went wrong, or a decision you would take back. A surprise: something a customer, colleague or set of numbers told you that you didn't expect. A customer: a conversation that changed how you thought about your work. A lesson learned: something you now do differently because of what happened.
If you're early in your career, use moments from school, national service, internships or part-time jobs. A story about a hawker stall you helped at as a student can make a point about customers as well as any boardroom story can.
Arjun works with clinic data and builds dashboards for clinic managers. His first five items read: a patient who missed two appointments after Deepavali; the first dashboard he built that nobody opened; a clinic manager who showed him her handwritten booking notes; the week a data error made a clinic look twice as busy as it was; his first presentation, where he read every slide aloud.
Next, give each moment a three-line summary. Line one says what happened, in one sentence. Line two says who was involved, without names that could identify anyone. Line three says the point the story could make. People tend to skip the third line, but it's the line that makes the bank usable when time is short.
Here is Arjun's summary for the dashboard nobody opened. What happened: he spent three weeks building a dashboard for clinic managers, and the usage log showed nobody opened it after the first week. Who was involved: him and the clinic managers. The point: ask people what decision they need to make before you build anything for them.
One moment can often make two or three different points. Write down the first point that comes to mind and add others as you notice them. Some moments won't produce a point at all. Keep those anyway, because a point sometimes turns up months later.
Choose the two moments with the clearest point. If you can, pick ones that connect to the talk you have been building in this course. Write each one as a full story using the four parts from Lesson 3.1, "The shape of a short story that makes a point": a person, a situation, a turning point, and what changed. Finish with one sentence that states the point.
Keep each story under 200 words. Cut any background that doesn't lead to the turning point. Then apply the examples rule from Lesson 3.2, "Examples your audience can picture": could anyone identify the people involved, and would they mind?
Practise each story aloud, standing, three or four times. Stories change when you speak them. Some sentences that read well on the page sound stiff when you say them, and some details you cut on paper may need to come back because they make the moment clearer. When the written and spoken versions differ, go with the spoken one.
Record the stronger of your two stories on your phone. Video is better than audio, but either works. Don't read from your page. Tell the story the way you would tell it to a colleague over coffee.
Listen back once and check three things: you got to the turning point quickly, you stated the point clearly at the end, and you finished in under 90 seconds. If any of the three slipped, record it again. Most people find the second take noticeably tighter than the first.
The bank is only useful if it keeps growing, so store it somewhere you open often, such as your phone's notes app. Add to it whenever something at work makes you think "that would make a good example". Once a month, spend five minutes adding any moments from the past few weeks.
When you're done, you will have ten three-line summaries, each with a point; two full stories under 200 words, each ending with its point in one sentence; and one recording of you telling a story in under 90 seconds. Start with the list of ten, and keep the five prompts open beside you while you write.
Write ten three-line story summaries, work two of them up into full stories, and record yourself telling one.
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