Paul Skah, Public Speaker & Best-Selling Author

#154: How to Leverage the Natural Forces in Your Business Storytelling

#154: How to Leverage the Natural Forces in Your Business Storytelling

There is a raw energy in narrative and evolved leaders use story to empower people a catapult them to action. But we often look just upon the surface of a tale or anecdote without appreciate the story elements, like protons, electrons and neutrons, that power it. Until today’s show.

Our guest is Paul Skah,  who specializes in the “why” behind what really makes business storytelling work, and the actions you can encourage your audience to take through story marketing. 

He knows how to engage the psychology of decision-making that nudges us to choose washing powder “A” over washing powder “B”. This knowledge helps companies sell more, or sell the same products at higher price points. His expertise even ventures into the unknown world of AI and how that will impact our storytelling in the future, which he shares with us on this episode.

Listen now to hear Paul’s fascinating, scientific approach to brand and business storytelling, and some of the ideal elements formulated in “Goldilocks” conditions to help you craft and share stories that have real power to shape your universe (and your customers’ purchase decisions).

Plus, he shares three tests that ensure you have a good story.

If you want to learn more from Paul, he’s also the author of three best-selling books (as in “Marketing Book of the Year” best-selling) and a public speaker sharing his story wisdom all over the world. Three chapters of his upcoming book, Narratology, are available for free on his website.

In This Episode, You Will Learn

• The gravitational pull of the so-called Mental Magic Circle of business storytelling
• The three narrative building blocks that create the electromagnetic field of story to attract your audiences and move them to action
• The strong and weak forces of rewards and punishments to make your stories go, well, nuclear

Key Quotes

We as consumers like to be lied to because we like to be told stories. Those stories don’t necessarily have to be true; all it takes is that we need to believe in them. – Paul Skah

When you know how a decision is made, when you know how this process works, you can optimize it on many levels. And storytelling is just one level in which you can optimize. – Paul Skah

In an essence, you are tapping into that gamified brain and the mental magic circle that you conjure up through the stories you tell. – Park Howell

I approach storytelling not only from a story perspective. What do you need to know to use it to change behaviors? – Paul Skah

The most valuable thing I did for my writing was running it through the mind of someone who is not actually a marketer. – Paul Skah

A good story has good obstacles. – Paul Skah

Story thwarts the fundamental law of interpersonal physics regarding the natural tendency of human relationships to approach a chaotic state, especially in organizations, because stories function like free energy structuring and shaping the molecules of meaning our mind requires to fight the foe we fear most: entropy.  – Park Howell

Mentioned in this Episode

• Paul Skah
• Paul Skah Twitter
• Narratology by Paul Skah
• Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian
• Big History Project
• Impact Hub
• Social Media Camp
• The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• Rework by Jason Fried

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