Develop Your Presentation Skills, 5th Edition

05

The power of storytelling

Before we were able to write these things down, it was important to be able to pass on the learning of one generation to the next and so this was done by telling true, or illustrative, stories. Often there was a moral to the tale and this was there for a reason. With no formal law and order, there needed to be some code of values by which society lived, so stories always made some kind of a point at the end.

If we examine many of the fairy tales that are still told today, the key learning from them is as important as ever. However, there is another good reason why we pass on the learning in this par­ticular format and that is because it is memorable; the learning is embedded in the narrative.

These two essential ...