You will create a reusable bank of stories from your own experience.
Someone at a team lunch asks, "What's the worst client meeting you've ever had?" You laugh and say you cannot think of one. Then, on the bus home, three come back to you at once. Stories are like that. You have plenty, but they rarely surface when you need them, and almost never in the half hour before a talk.
A story bank fixes this. It is a running list of moments from your working life, each written down with the point it could make, so that when you are building a talk you can pick a story instead of hunting for one. You will build the first version of yours in about twenty-five minutes, with a few more for a recording at the end.
Open your notes app or a blank page and write down ten moments from your work. Do not judge them yet, and do not write them up. A few words each is enough.
Five prompts help most people get to ten. Work through each and note one or two moments.
A success: something that went better than expected, or a problem you solved. A failure: a mistake you made, a project that went wrong, a decision you would take back. A surprise: something a customer, colleague or set of numbers told you that you did not 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.
Arjun's list included the 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, and his first presentation, where he read every slide aloud.
If you are early in your career, include moments from school, national service, internships or part-time jobs. A story about the hawker stall you helped at as a student can make a point about customers as well as any boardroom story.
For each moment, write three lines. The first line describes what happened, in one sentence. The second names who was involved, without names that could identify anyone. The third states the point the story could make.
Here is Arjun's for the unopened dashboard.
What happened: I spent three weeks building a dashboard for clinic managers, and the usage log showed nobody opened it after the first week. Who was involved: me and the clinic managers. The point: ask people what decision they need to make before you build anything for them.
People tend to skip the third line, yet it is the one that makes the bank usable when you are short of time. The same moment can often make two or three different points, so write down whichever comes to mind first and add others when you notice them. A few moments will not produce a point at all; keep those too, since a point sometimes turns up months later.
Pick the two moments with the clearest point, ideally ones that connect to the talk you have been building in this course. Write each one out in full 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. Then add the sentence that states the point.
Aim for under 200 words each. Cut background that does not lead to the turning point. Check the examples rule from lesson 3.2, Examples your audience can picture: could anyone identify the people involved, and would they mind?
Then practise each story aloud, standing, three or four times. Stories change when spoken. Some sentences that read well will sound stiff in your mouth, and a few details you cut on paper may want to come back because they make the moment clearer, in which case the spoken version should win.
Choose the stronger of the two and record yourself telling it on your phone. Video is better than audio if you can, but either works. Do not read it. Tell it the way you would to a colleague over coffee.
Listen back once and check whether you reached the turning point quickly, stated the point clearly at the end and stayed under 90 seconds. Where any of those slipped, record it again; most people find the second take noticeably tighter than the first.
The bank is only useful if it grows. Keep it somewhere you open often, such as your phone's notes app, and add to it when something happens at work that makes you think "that would make a good example". Once a month, spend five minutes on it and add whatever the past few weeks have given you.
What done looks like: 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, develop two into full stories, and record yourself telling one.
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