Harriet Patience-Davies was always fascinated by the power of storytelling. From a young age she had her heart set on becoming a screenwriter, but later switched gears and found herself working in marketing. Eventually, she was able to leverage on her passion for storytelling as she became the UK storytelling coach for professional services company Accenture.

Late last year Harriet decided to launch her own business, Patience-Davies Consulting, which offers training and support for individuals and companies who want to improve their storytelling tactics.

Today on the podcast Harriet sits down with Shaheen Samavati to discuss the power of storytelling at length and share how anyone can become a great storyteller.

Don’t miss as Harriet shares practical advice for fine-tuning communication as well as her tips for lessening anxiety when it comes to public speaking.

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs  

• Recommended reading:
  • Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds by Carmine Gallo. “You might think ‘I don’t really need to learn from TED Talks—I’m never going to be standing in an auditorium [giving a speech like that].’ But TED Talks are a really great way of looking at presentation techniques and seeing how other people use them.”
  • TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson. “This is another great read with lots of practical advice about public speaking and storytelling.”
  • Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. “It’s a really interesting book all about how stories become sticky, and using stories to deliver messages. It’s full of great examples, exercises and studies as well. Everybody should read it.”
    
• Source of inspiration: Ethical chocolate company, Tony’s Chocolonely. “I don’t follow too many companies on LinkedIn, but I was really impressed with them recently. They make slavery-free chocolate, and the stories they tell around this narrative are so well done. They do a great job with explaining things that are quite complicated and making them easy to understand. I’m really impressed with them and their storytelling.”

• Useful resources: TED Talks. “There’s an awful lot that we can learn from TED. I’m a big, big fan. One piece of advice I always give is to hook your listeners with a killer statistic. When you are doing a short speech, you want something which gets the audience’s attention right away, and an intriguing statistic will do just that. There’s a great example of this is Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk.”

“A lot of people seem to have developed this kind of ‘work persona’ which is generally a bit less charismatic and a bit less fun than their ‘home persona.’ My advice is to try and deliver a speech the same way you would read a small child a bedtime story—do the voices, build the dramatic pauses, and have some fun with it. You’ll be a lot more engaging and a lot better at delivering the message.”

Connect with Harriet and Shaheen on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Mary Kresge.

For more insights into storytelling in marketing:

• Effectively utilize storytelling in B2B marketing
• B2B content is about storytelling
• Storytelling sells – Michael Lonnon, UK-based master of marketing

To see the full transcript, click on page number 2 below.