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Book Review: Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
October 21, 2015 | Dan Beaulieu, D.B. Management GroupEstimated reading time: 2 minutes
Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact
by Annette Simmons
Publisher: Amacom, 2015
Pages: 234
Yes, it truly is all about the story.
Stories sell. Stories are what get your point across. They are the very best way to communicate with your customers, with your employees and just about everyone else you want to communicate with.
Stories well told are engaging. They are dramatic, interesting and memorable. Tell a good story to someone and they will remember it forever. After all, what would you rather do, look at charts full of facts and figures about a company or listen to that company’s story?
Years ago, the creator of the TV show Sixty Minutes wrote a book called Tell Me a Story, which of course was about the show Sixty Minutes and how it came to be so successful. The reason for the success is simple: Every Sunday evening, the program tells three or four stories in such an engaging way that for almost 40 years, viewers have been coming back for more.
In this new book by story expert Annette Simmons, you will learn how to tell a story, how to choose the right story to tell to deliver the right message and most importantly, how to tell your own stories.
Simmons demonstrates how stories bring events and characters to life, and that your entire persona can be defined by your stories. She breaks it down to how the right stories are appropriate for the right situations, complete with examples of the many types of stories. From the book:
- Who-I-Am stories
- Why-I-Am-Here stories
- Teaching stories
- Vision stories
- Value-In-Action stories
- I-Know-What-You-Are-Thinking stories
In each chapter, Simmons describes the variations of these stories, from talking about yourself, to using a book, movie or real life event.
We live in a content-based world. Content is the new currency and there is no better content than personal content in the form of our own stories. The thing I found so helpful about this book was that as I read each chapter outlining a different type of story, I was inspired to dig into my own life and find an appropriate personal story for that story category. It was a truly useful read.
So whether you are in sales and want to tell your company’s story, or you are a teacher, industry leader, coach, parent, or anyone who wants to effectively communicate with someone else, this is the very best way to not only learn how to do it or how to hone your skills if you have been a storyteller all of your life.
The time of engaging content is here. The time of content through stories is here and the time for this book is here. Pick it up and start telling your story.
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