How to Improve Your Podcast Storytelling Technique (Including a TED Talk)

Storytelling is a great method you can use to connect with your listeners. Passing down stories has always been a popular method of communication but what people don’t realize is that it is an excellent method you can use to grow your audience.

“Storytelling — is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings.” – Andrew Stanton

Words spoken by Andrew Stanton during his TED Talk, The Clues To a Great Story. Andrew Stanton is an Oscar-winning filmmaker that helped make Pixar one of the world’s leading animation studios. He has been apart of many animations, such as Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Finding Nemo (2003), and WALL-E (2008).

Key Points From His TED Talk:

Storytelling affirms who we are and telling stories can cross barriers of time and connect us to each other and makes us care about them just by hearing their stories. When you start your episode off by promising the listeners that there is something greater to come if they just give you their time and listen to the entire episode, that creates an inevitable link between you and your listener, which draws them in for more. Making this promise can start with something as small as, “Once upon a time,” or simply starting the discussion as if you’re old friends with a lifetime of memories together, not as if you’ve rehearsed the story a 1000 times over.

Remember, it’s okay to leave a few things out! The absence of those critical details will pull your listeners in, keeping them guessing and on the edge of their seats throughout the episode. Ultimately, your listeners will want to fill in the blanks and complete your sentence if you don’t do it. It’s like Andrew says in the video, “Give your listeners the equation instead of the answer so that they can figure it out all on their own.”

Life isn’t easy and you are hit with change on a daily basis. This is a key point to remember in your podcast when you are telling a story. If your story becomes static then listeners become uninterested since they won’t be able to relate to the story in any way. Make the topics and your storytelling technique as relatable and applicable to the lives of your audience, and you will have that hook you need to set your podcast apart from a sea of similar topics.

“Storytelling has guidelines not hard fast rules.” – Andrew Stanton

Listen to this TED Talk and improve the way you communicate with your listeners through the stories you tell. Andrew discusses his experiences and offers you with the guidelines you’ll need to create a great story. He will blow your socks off with the ease and heart he shares during this TED Talk!