Page 110 - How To Sell Yourself

Selling Yourself in Confrontation and Media Interviews 109 but we’re either afraid that we’ll sound boastful or we’ve simply
forgotten how much impact stories can have.
Unfortunately, most adults have lost the art of storytelling. We’ve become so busy making ends meet that we’ve simply gone stale with stories. Single-parent families and two-working-parent families don’t realize that they’re shortchanging their kids by fail- ing to put stories into the youngsters’ lives. The bottom line is that children don’t get their imaginations tickled, and adults for- get how to tell a good story effectively.
The impact of a good story
Let me share one experience I had. I did a training program for a joint meeting of the South Carolina School Boards and Ad- ministrators. Everyone in the audience was a board member, a superintendent, a principal, or an assistant of one. I spent a lot of time on storytelling. I even had the audience members share stories that they felt were strong statements about the effective- ness of the school, success stories that they never would have thought of using to answer questions about the “failure” of pub- lic schools.
After the program I was driven to the airport by one of the superintendents. The following is what he shared with me.
“Arch, never stop encouraging adults to use stories. They re- ally work. Today’s children have been put in front of a television set. Their imaginations have been ossified. Some of them have never had a story told to them. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. Most of the 5-year-olds have never heard a good story told well, so she’s banished television from her classroom and teaches in story form.
“To get the children used to learning from stories, she spends the first couple of school days telling the classic stories. This year she sat on the floor and assembled the children in four semicircu- lar rows around her with a small aisle in the middle.
“She opened the school year with, ‘Once upon a time there was a girl named Red Riding Hood.’ As she spoke, she looked around the room. All the faces in the room were registering, ‘What is this garbage?... What’s going on here?’ Then she got to Grandma and there was a glimmer of recognition. And when she said, ‘big bad wolf,’ they understood the danger.