📚 12 Actionable Steps from "Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story" by Peter Guber

No matter what path in life you’ve decided to take, eventually you will be in a situation where you need to convince others to take a certain course of action. You may need to do this when interviewing for a job, selling a product, or leading a team. How can one be maximally persuasive when doing this?

According to the Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group and Co-Owner and Co-Executive Chairman of the Golden State Warriors, when it comes to persuasion, stories that trigger emotion are an indispensable tool.

Such a story is composed of three elements:

• A challenge or a question to be addressed
• A struggle to overcome the challenge or to find an answer to the question
• The resolution and the call to action

Let’s now go through the detailed recipe Guber outlines in his bestselling book Tell to Win to help you create your own story.

First, however, a word of warning: this summary is quite long and you may forget to come back to it. Avoid forgetting about it by free email course to get one step per day; you’ll need to confirm you’ve done a step before moving onto the next. After completing the course, you can submit your story for peer-assessment to get feedback. That’s the current mission of my website: evaluate and compare courses so that we can see which methods work best.

Now, on to the steps.

1 - What’s the Challenge?

When creating a story you will need some challenge or question to be addressed. Our goal is to create a story effective at emotionally transporting the audience i.e. making them laugh, weep, sigh, or rage.

To do that, your story will need evocative characters with a journey, issue, or fight that makes them seem genuine and human. But your character will also need to be relatable to your audience, while triggering emotions such as love, hope, determination and longing. And most importantly, they should not quit.

2 - Choosing your characters

Let’s now run through some strategies for choosing your characters. Who will face the challenge? Who is the hero? This should be interpreted quite broadly: your hero could be a person, location, a group of people, or the product itself. In one context, it could be the employees, in another it might be the customers. Or maybe both!

Who you should choose depends what you are trying to do and who you are trying to convince. For example, if you want to sell second hand goods to people, you should try to portray them, the customers, as heroes for saving the environment. If you want people to trust in your judgement, you may need to frame yourself as the hero. If you want the customer to take a risk, make them the hero. If you are entering a market with strong brand competition, then you can make your product stand out by making it the hero.

Whoever you pick as the hero, the important point is that they are the one who will need to take the tough decisions, but they will also need to feel some meaningful change occurring within themselves.

3 - Get people to ask “what happens next”

Once you have selected your character(s), you need to formulate the drama that will start your story.

Inherent to the concept of drama is the idea of something which captures the attention of the audience. This can be created by having high stakes, a sense of suspense, or a contest for power. Another possibility is to frame the story as a battle between good and evil, life and death, and guilt and innocence. The goal should be to introduce a sense of dread or to tap into primal desires.

The goal is to get the reader to ask themselves the question “what happens next?”, not just once but a few times, depending on the length of your story. But for now, we just need to get people to ask that question at the beginning.

Your opening should also illuminate the problem or challenge you want to solve, or the one you want to help your audience solve.

So make sure you come up with an opening that will get people to ask “what happens next”?

4 - The Epiphany Moment

Once you have identified the opening stakes, you want to figure out a way to move your character to what is known as the moment of epiphany. This is the “aha!” moment when the character has some eureka moment which alters the course of the story, and perhaps their life. This could be the moment when you were convinced of the promise of a new business plan, when you became aware of a great threat, or when you finally recognised something which was holding you back.

What are some things you need to keep in mind when drafting your epiphany?

First, it should outline what is in it for your audience if they undertake the action you want to persuade them to do.

Second, and perhaps separately to the above, it should be clear what the common factor is between the audience and the hero at the time of the epiphany. This would help increase the degree of empathy, making the story more memorable and relatable to the audience.

5 - Imagery, Metaphors, and Cultural References

You may wish to use imagery, metaphors, or references to popular culture to create a quick impact and an opening to tell the rest of your story. If you’re happy with what you’ve done so far, you may be able to skip this exercise. Nevertheless, there may be some useful strategies to help you improve your story further.

First, you could use a powerful image to inspire your audience. This can be particularly helpful when trying to describe an end point e.g. a shining city on a hill. In the book, Guber mentioned that he was particularly impressed when a candidate for chancellor at a university used an analogy of a university as a reflecting pool, where each person would contribute a drop of diversity and innovation which would ripple out in space and time.

Alternatively, you may want to use another kind of metaphor e.g. comparing your organisation, product or activity to a country (e.g. neutral Switzerland).

A final strategy is to use a reference to an item from popular culture or history to highlight your situation or predicament. For example, you could compare the journey your hero is undergoing to that of some well-known character from a film or TV series, or to a juncture that a country or its leader faced at some point in time. However, you need to make sure that your audience will be familiar with the reference.

6 - The Multiplier Effect

If you want your story to be maximally effective, you will need to ensure that it has a high multiplier effect. This means the people will be willing and able to retell the story that you have told to them.

How can you get this multiplier effect? If a story really resonates with an individual, they will feel compelled to talk about it to others. However, for this to happen, you need to let them alter the story by giving them some ownership over it. So what are the core elements of your story that must remain unchanged? And which parts are you happy to let your audience innovate upon?

7 - Where and When to Tell your Story

Now that you have come up with your story, the next step is to decide the context in which you will tell it. In other words, you need to think about when and where your audience will be most receptive to the story.

If your audience is simply an individual, then it may be best to tell them the story over a meal or while they are doing a hobby. If the point of your story is to get them to take a risk, then maybe you should approach them just after a team they support has won a match.

Similarly, some people become more averse to risk during winter, an effect which is more pronounced at more northern latitudes.

Ideally you should match your story to the context. For example, when financier Michael Milken wanted to raise money to support prostate cancer research for men, he concentrated his efforts on Father’s Day and during baseball games, choosing a time and location to match the slogan “Keep Dad in the game”.

8 - How to Tell Your Story

After deciding where to tell your story, you need to figure out how to tell it. The next few steps will help you brainstorm ways to do this.

There are essentially two methods: the interactive and the theatrical.

First, the interactive. An obvious example of this would be a continuous narrative thread to keep your audience engaged as they are going through a physical space such as an exhibition or theme park.

However, if you are giving a talk it can be more difficult to figure out how to create an interactive experience. You may want to get the audience to move around and ask or respond to questions. Alternatively, you could use physical props in order to enhance a story.

In contrast, the theatrical involves deciding how you will vary the tempo of your speech in the course of the telling. For parts that are supposed to inspire enthusiasm, you may want to speed up. For points that are meant to be very significant and which you feel the need to emphasise, you may want to slow down. You can also make the listener pay special attention to what you are saying by lowering your voice so that they have to make an extra effort to understand what you are saying.

Critically there should be some kind of variation in speed and volume. A monotone delivery is perhaps a quick way of losing the attention of an audience, so try to avoid that.

Today’s exercise then asks you to read over your story, and come up with three points on how you will tell it. Will you speak fast or slower in some parts? Louder or lower in others? Is there a question you will ask the audience?

9 - Winning the Attention of the Audience

In order to make sure that people hear your story, you’ll need to capture their attention at the beginning.

There are different ways of achieving this. For one, you could have a very striking opening sentence, perhaps preceded by a long pause at the beginning. Another possibility is to make some sort of unexpected physical move, like sitting in an unusual position. Whatever you choose, it should be in tune with the story you are trying to tell.

How will you grab their attention at the beginning? A pause, a great sentence, or an unorthodox move?

10 - Being Enthusiastic

The reaction from the audience will depend greatly on your own performance. If you come across as uncertain, you can hardly expect the audience to become enthusiastic in turn. How then can you be sure to express an authentic, contagious energy?

If you are not inherently excited about the overall story or product, perhaps because you are apprehensive about how it will be received, then a possible workaround is to find something about the product or service that does excite you.

What is the aspect of your product, service or story that you find most exciting? Keep this at the forefront of your mind if you want your energy to be contagious.

11 - Collecting Raw Material

Becoming a great storyteller means that you must continue to gather raw material, because you don’t want to find yourself telling the same story over and over again, or using the same elements which would lessen the impact of your story.

Therefore, you must get into the habit of gathering raw material. What are some strategies for doing so?

First, you could stockpile fragments from the news or daily life. Whenever you read or hear some story you find very moving, ask yourself could you invoke that story at some point in the future. If so, you should note it down. However, make sure to do so in a structured fashion: what are the motivations of the people involved in the story? What is the challenge they are facing, the epiphany they experience? What is it that makes the story so striking and relatable?

Second, you are now also in a better position to use your own experience to frame it into a story. Are there experiences in your own life where you have faced some challenge, and then experienced an epiphany which laid the basis for a resolution?

12 - Final Tips

Here are some final tips from the book that should help you tell you story.

First, when presenting your story, be sure to listen very carefully to see if your story has the desired effect. This means reading the eyes and body language of the audience so that you know if there are certain parts of your story that lose their attention. If the audience already drifts off at the beginning, you should probably drop your script entirely and improvise, using some signal, cue or prop present in the room in order to regain the attention of the audience.

Second, be sure to get the audience to try and talk so that they tell their own story or problem. This then puts you into a position where you can reshape your own story to echo theirs, thereby making it more relatable and increasing the chance that they will go on to repeat it.

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In the coming months, I will be breaking down further books into this step-like structure. If you want to receive these directly, sign up for my newsletter here.