When you shift a synopsis to a story some really cool things happen. In this video, we’re gonna unpack what is the connection between a synopsis and a story and I’m gonna share some really practical tools and ideas to help you in a conversational context switch from speaking in synopses and summaries and speaking more in stories because stories activate people’s brains.
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I am going to be sharing about how to shift from synopsis to story in a conversational context for the purposes of improving communication and really turning on people’s brains and inviting them into whatever message you have to share. Whether that’s in a teaching context or in a meeting or at work or even in an email potentially, but a conversational back-and-forth context, not a literary context. I think there’s probably some literary comparison that we could do that was very academic between synopsis and stories, that’s not what this video is about. I started a company and I get to work with leaders and educators all over the planet to help make connection and engagement really easy. Shifting from synopsis to a story is one of the most powerful ways to do that and in this video, we’re gonna get super practical and by the end, you’re gonna have a little paradigm shift in this video and you won’t be able to speak and listen in the exact same way. But, your speaking and your listening will get a promotion b the end of this video. Let’s get into it.
I got a kick off with this story about I was working with a client at Southwestern University in Texas and the student who we’ll call Sam for anonymity’s sake, I was leading a virtual workshop keynote on conversational leadership. Pulling some ideas from me and Will’s book called “Ask Powerful Questions,” and one of the things I always do whenever I’m speaking or leading a workshop with a group is I record a personalized video beforehand and send to the group so they can have some expectations, creates a little connection before content and then by the time we arrive, they feel like we’ve already met in some capacity because we have in video form. Anyway, in this particular video I asked students, it was a workshop, it was like a career professional development conference that they were hosting or summit, and I invited students to answer a question in the comments below. It was a pretty basic question, it could have been answered in a phrase or even a sentence. This one student, Rebecca, went ahead and answered the question and also offered, “Hey, I looked at your site. I’m really looking forward to your session. I am really interested in animal behavior and a career in this and studying.” Like gave me all of these details, a little bit of a story of what she wanted. The cool thing was that the power… because she didn’t just share a synopsis, she shared a story in that comment. That story ignited a connection in my brain which is my sister happens to work with animals on movie sets out in L.A. And so, I immediately said “Ooh! You’re starting this like career professional development summit, you’re in college. There might be an opportunity there. I’m going to write you all an email intro and connect you.” That is the power of sharing a story. It’s the difference between a conversation that just gets forgotten and a conversation that actually makes a difference.
A conversation that actually matters, a conversation that changes the trajectory of where you’re going. Rewind a little bit. I might be getting a little bit ahead of myself. Let’s unpack synopsis real quick. Hey Google, what is the definition of synopsis? Synopsis is used as a noun to mean a brief summary or general survey of something similarly to pre-sea and resume. Do you want to hear synopsis used in a sentence? Sure! Here’s an example of synopsis being used in a sentence: a synopsis of the accident. Do you want to hear how synopsis is spelled? No. A.I., just so generous. Always wanting to to give more I suppose, right. Synopsis, the definition of synopsis has the word summary built right into it. Thinking about summary what I picture is when I try… when I compare these, a synopsis is like jumping on somebody’s LinkedIn profile. How many LinkedIn profiles or how many profile pages in general have you been on or seen? Dozens maybe, right. Depending on where you work, how you ended up on this video, maybe even hundreds. How many do you remember? How many are you like, “Wow! Look at this person’s synopsis.” Right? Like not very much. And yet, at a networking event or at a conference or in the beginning of a work relationship, how often do we give basically a verbal version of our LinkedIn wrap sheet of like, “Here’s all the things I’ve done. I used to work here. I did this, worked on this project. I used to be in this industry. I have kind of a unique background blah, blah, blah,” right? We go through all the stuff which is not necessarily bad, right.
That does have the potential to activate lots of connections, but it is not content that’s wired to be really memorable. In one of my favorite books by Chip and Dan Heath called “Made To Stick,” they talk about 7 character… and unpack 7 characteristics of what makes some content really sticky. And having some emotional draw and some story is a big piece of that in addition to one of I think the most important ingredients which is concrete. When you look at… so if you go to my LinkedIn actually, and you look at one of the jobs I worked at was for an organization called World and Conversation. My job was to facilitate dialogues around really contentious issues. That’s a synopsis, right. But if we’re in a network meeting and you’re saying what you used to do, would it be more interesting to hear that I worked at world in conversation facilitating dialogues or would it be more interesting to hear about this one conversation that I was in with 4 military cadets, U.S. military cadets, paired on like a Zoom on steroid video conference system with 4 civilians in Afghanistan where we talked for 90 minutes and at the end, we closed the call…
We talked about everything. We talked about from what people had for lunch that day on both sides of the coin, but we also had some pretty intense discussions because one of the people in Afghanistan that were on the call, their neighbor’s house had been blown up by an American drone twice. And then you’ve got military that’s sitting here and so there’s this… like this tension, right. It’s amazing because when the conversation ended, the military cadets looked at me and said, “I still feel really clear and focused and driven on the mission that I have, But having had that conversation and met human beings on the other side and heard their story, I’m gonna be more conscious of when I pull the trigger or not.” How… What a cool impact of a simple 90-minute chat.
2 ways to describe my job. 1, I worked at World in Conversation facilitating dialogues, another one, check out this moment of transformational impact. That is the power of shifting from a synopsis to a story. You go from communicating the mundane and the forgettable, to communicating the memorable and the unforgettable, right. And that shift is something that you want to make especially as a leader or an educator. The way to practically make this come alive I believe is to live out one of my favorite quotes that I don’t think I thought of this quote but I can’t find it anywhere on Google.
I’m gonna source it to collective wisdom, but not me. It’s this idea that specificity is the soul of narrative. Synopsis are really general, stories get really specific, right. People aren’t all of a sudden just people or group, they’re people with names, there’s a context, there’s a place, there’s some situation that people can step into your world. When people step in your world, we have a word for that in English and it’s called empathy. And when we tell stories, empathy is a whole lot easier than when we tell synopsis because then we force… our brains are forced to be abstract and to try to imagine and take a couple leaps and jumps to try to fit into that person’s world and we’re pretty bad at it, right. If you haven’t lived that exact experience, it’s pretty hard to empathize. Whereas a story is very easy to feel even though you might not have facilitated dialogues with military cadets and civilians in Afghanistan, you can imagine what that room, what that space, what that feeling might have felt like. Again, it’s the difference between scrolling through LinkedIn and having a mentor tell you about their time in the trenches. One is more memorable and more useful and more practical. If you liked this video, you’ll love this video on how to be a good storyteller where I tell you about 2 of the best storytellers I have ever met on the planet and the lessons that I learned from them.