Over 30 years ago, I came back from a business trip to Japan with a story about a rubber duck.
I told it at a conference, and the next morning two colleagues came to find me separately, each holding a small rubber duck they had gone out and bought. That was the beginning of something I could not have predicted. For years afterwards, whenever anybody I worked with went on holiday and came across an unusual duck, they brought it back for me. People I had not seen in years would send one. A ninety-second story about a piece of yellow plastic in a Japanese bathtub embedded itself so completely that it outlived the strategy, the data, and every slide I presented that year, and it played a small but genuine part in reviving a business in real trouble.
I have been thinking about why that happened ever since, and the answer isn’t the one most people reach for.
What follows is what I have learned since, set out in one place.
Why It Matters
What a presentation looks like without one
Picture a boardroom. A long mahogany table, ten senior managers in leather chairs, and a screen descending from the ceiling like a curtain before a performance.
One by one, each manager walks to the laptop at the end of the table, sits down, turns their back to the room and reads their update aloud from the screen. There is little eye contact or sense of ownership, and no indication that the speaker feels connected to the words they are saying. When the last person finishes, the most senior person in the room is the only one with a question, which is unsurprising, since he was the only person any of it had really been addressed to.
I have told that story many times, and the response is nearly always the same. People nod, and then a few of them admit, usually afterwards and quietly, that they have done it themselves or at least experienced it. This isn’t a story about bad presenting. It is a story about a culture where nobody was trying to reach anybody. They were getting through it, everybody knew it, and nobody said so.
Speaking at people rather than to them
I first understood this properly at a school assembly, on my son’s first day.
My wife and I sat in a room full of proud and anxious parents while the Head Teacher gave his welcome speech. Ten minutes in, my four-year-old tugged my sleeve and whispered, “Daddy, this story is giving me a headache. What time does it finish?” Five minutes later I felt exactly the same. The Head Teacher was not speaking to us. He was speaking at us, delivering a script without presence, awareness, or even a hint of how it was landing with anyone in the room.
What happened next is the reason Mindful Presenter exists. As he carried on, I drifted into a vivid run of flashbacks: every management meeting, every corporate presentation, every monthly update where the same people sat in the same seats, saying the same things in the same way. The same tone, the same slides, the same corporate language draining the humanity out of every room it entered.
This was not a school problem. It was a business crisis, and I had been part of it.
The Second Voice
You will have watched this happen. Somebody who was funny and clear over coffee ten minutes earlier stands up to present, and something flattens. The voice becomes more careful, the language more formal, and few of us could say when we picked that up or who taught us. No one is being false; we simply learned early that the flatter voice is safer, and we were right. It is also the voice most presentations are delivered in.
Presenters confuse information with communication
A presentation is not a transfer of information. It is an experience somebody has to feel, follow, and understand, and a story is the most reliable way anyone has found to produce one.
Every day, in the background of our lives, we are exposed to some of the most effective storytelling on the planet. A television advert has thirty seconds, a product nobody asked about, and an audience actively trying to leave, and in that time it will deliver one idea, one emotion and a story you will carry for years.
I can still recall the original Heinz Baked Beans advert: a boy imagining wild adventures, delighted most of all by beans. The Milk Tray man risking everything for a box of chocolates. Jenny Logan dancing through her living room with a tin of Shake n Vac. Dogs Trust saying, in a single line, that hundreds of dogs are still waiting for their special someone.
You may not recognise a single one of those, and it doesn’t matter. You will have your own. Whatever decade you grew up in, thirty-second stories still sit in your head, planted by people who had no claim on your attention at all.
Decades later I remember mine, and I couldn’t tell you one thing about most of the presentations I sat through last year. The advertisers had half a minute. You have twenty.
The Question That Comes First
Before every workshop I run, I send each delegate a questionnaire. It is there to get people thinking before we meet rather than on the day, and one question on it matters more than all the others put together.
How do you want your audience to feel?
Many people stop at ‘informed’, but there’s an opportunity to go further. Try naming the feeling you want to evoke, not just roughly, but precisely. Would you like your audience to feel inspired, excited, curious, concerned, angry, or supported? Perhaps you want them to feel wonder, empathy, or a healthy sense of concern about what might happen if nothing changes.
Pick the word, because a story is only ever as good as the intention behind it.
The man who would not answer it
Years ago, shortly after launching Mindful Presenter, a managing director at a financial services firm sent back a questionnaire. It was an important opportunity for a young business, the kind of work you are glad to take on, and when I reached that question, I paused.
He had written: “I don’t care, as long as they do exactly what I tell them to do.”
I turned the work down.
We couldn’t really afford to, and I did it anyway. He wasn’t describing a presentation. He was describing a set of instructions. Instructions have their place, and they will get something done, but they can’t make anybody want to do it, and most of what a business needs from its people lives in the gap between the two.
Why the feeling has to come first
Almost everybody does this the other way round. They look for a good story, find something from their career that seems interesting enough to survive being said out loud, and work out where it might fit afterwards. The result is a presentation where a perfectly engaging anecdote stands in the middle of a business case doing no work at all. Everybody enjoys it, but nothing changes.
A story is not chosen because it is good. You choose it because it produces the feeling you want for the room you are walking into.
Decide the feeling, and something else happens, something less comfortable and more useful. You discover that the story which would actually produce it is not in your notes. It is in your memory, filed under personal rather than professional, and you have already decided once or twice that it would not be appropriate.
That is almost always the one.
Where Your Stories Are
I have never met anybody without stories. Not once has somebody with a career behind them turned out to have nothing worth telling.
You already have them. You have just never thought of your own life as somewhere to look. Here is where I would start:
– The things adults said to you when you were young that you never quite put down
– Conversations with customers, especially the uncomfortable ones
– Journeys, delays, and everything that went wrong on the way
– The people who taught you what you now take for granted
– Your real failures, and the successes that surprised you
Now notice something about the examples in this guide so far. A four-year-old in an assembly hall. A managing director who wrote one line on a form. Neither is a story about something I did.
They are things other people said, usually in passing, usually by somebody who had no idea they were saying anything at all.
Yours may be nothing like mine. It might be something you built, something you lost, or a sentence somebody said to you in a corridor years ago that you have never quite shaken off. The only test is whether you still remember it.
Which Story For Which Feeling
Start with the feeling, and work back to the story that produces it.
What follows are nine kinds, and you have already encountered one or two of them in this guide. That is rather the point. None of them is impressive.
When you want them to trust you
Tell them about a moment your values were tested, and what holding to them cost you.
You have just read mine. I don’t tell that managing director’s story to show where I stand. I tell it because a room that watches somebody else draw a line starts looking for their own, and by the time I have finished, most people aren’t thinking about me at all. They are thinking about something they agreed to last year and wish they hadn’t.
When you want them to act
Tell them about somebody who tried the unconventional thing and found that it worked.
Years ago, leading a business in difficulty, I read about a leader who had introduced a mascot to unify his team. It was an odd idea, but I tried it anyway, and it worked. The purpose isn’t to recommend mascots. It is to leave one person in the room thinking that they might finally try the thing they have been talking themselves out of all year.
When you want them to see what they have stopped seeing
Tell them about the thing everybody does that nobody has questioned in years.
I once coached a senior executive who wanted to be more engaging. The real trouble was content crowded with detail that meant nothing to anybody listening, and when I asked why it was there, he shrugged and said, “We’ve always done it that way.” Nobody had ever asked him what any of it was for, so habit had quietly filled the gap.
A story like that doesn’t describe a problem. It holds up a mirror, and a room that recognises itself will usually do something about it.
When you want them to refuse to accept it
Tell them about the moment you stopped putting up with something.
I once worked in a business drowning in “Yes, but”. Every good idea met the same soft wall. So I had stress balls printed with “YES AND”, handed them around, and told people they could throw one at anyone who defaulted to the old habit. The balls flew. The habit went, and the culture moved with it.
That is a different job from the story above. A mirror makes a room notice something. This one shows them that somebody did something about it.
When you want them to understand why you are here
Tell them where it started.
For me, that is the assembly hall, the welcome speech, and a four-year-old who hadn’t yet learned that you are supposed to sit politely and pretend. Origin stories are shorter than people expect, and they belong earlier in a presentation than feels comfortable.
When you want them to keep going
Tell them what somebody once said to you that you never put down.
Decades ago, newly promoted and well out of my depth, my boss said: “Maurice, the only people who need to be motivated are the people who can’t see a future. Your job as a leader is to help them see it.” He had almost certainly forgotten it by lunchtime. I’ve repeated it ever since, and I still watch people reach for a pen.
When you want them to stop being afraid of it
Tell them about something that went wrong, and what was left on the other side.
A difficult boss eventually taught me the situation would never change, but my approach could. It wasn’t the lesson I wanted, and it turned out to be the only one on offer. A failure story does something no success story can. Somebody in that room is stuck because they think finding it hard means they are not up to it. Hearing that you found it hard too is often what gets them moving.
When you want them to picture what is possible
Tell them what it looks like on the other side.
Imagine a business where presenters stopped reading their slides, used images instead of paragraphs, and said only what mattered to the people listening. Imagination isn’t fantasy. It is leadership, and it’s hard to work toward something you cannot picture.
When you want them to see who you really are
Tell them something that opens a window into your world rather than your CV.
Audiences don’t want a polished biography. They want the human version, and it is almost always a small detail rather than an achievement. Bill Clinton didn’t introduce Hillary with a list of accomplishments. He said she had thick blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup, and had a sense of strength and self-possession that he found magnetic. Four plain details, and a stranger became real to millions.
Notice what all nine have in common. One is a shrug. One is a sentence from a boss. One is a small boy with a headache. The stories that work at work are almost never the ones you would choose if you were trying to be interesting.
How To Build One
Once you have your story, it needs shape, and it has three parts.
A beginning that puts them somewhere
At the 2016 Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton opened a speech built around a single story with one short sentence: “In the spring of 1971 I met a girl.”
No throat-clearing, no context, no explanation of what he was about to do. A time, a person, and something about to happen, and the room was his before anybody noticed they had been taken anywhere.
Before you get there, though, ground people in their own reality: the pressure they are under, the thing that isn’t working, the frustration they have stopped mentioning because nobody ever does anything about it. It takes two sentences, and it does something no amount of charm will. It tells them you have been paying attention.
A middle that holds them
A story holds a room when something is unresolved. Tension is the state of hoping for one outcome while fearing another, and that is the condition you want people in.
It is the structure underneath everything from ancient myth to Star Wars, the pattern Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Without it, you are reporting something that happened. With it, the room is waiting to find out what happens next.
An ending they can see themselves in
Not a call to action, which is a request, but a moment of clarity in which the room sees what the other side looks like and recognises itself standing in it.
People act when they can picture the benefit. Your job at the end is to make the picture clear enough to walk into.
One more thing: where to put it
Where a story belongs depends on what you are asking it to do.
If its job is to tell a room who you are and why you are standing in front of them, it belongs at the beginning, and usually earlier than feels comfortable. Origin stories and window stories earn their place in the first minute.
If your goal is to persuade, place the story right where resistance is likely to arise. In many presentations, there’s a moment when the room quietly pushes back: when you ask people to accept something they’d rather not, or to do something that will cost them time they don’t have. Share the story just before that moment. After people have watched something unfold, they’re often more open to what you say next.
How To Tell It
Relive it. Don’t recite it.
That is the whole technique; the rest is detail. Watch Diana Nyad describe swimming from Cuba to Florida, thirty-five years after she first tried, and after four failed attempts. She doesn’t report any of it. She goes back into the water and takes the room with her.
Use your hands
Telling a story without your hands is like crossing the Atlantic on a bicycle. You don’t need to wave your arms about. Show something small by making it small. Let them shake a little when you describe being frightened, because they did at the time. Mimic the phone call, the door, the signature.
Use your face
We have all asked somebody what was wrong and been told nothing while their face said otherwise. If your expression contradicts your words, the room believes your face. If you were happy, look happy. If you were furious, let them see it.
Use your body
When two people are speaking, let your posture mark the difference between them. No acting is required, and none is wanted. A shift of weight or a turn of the head will do. You can be the concerned parent and the disengaged teenager, the anxious employee and the immovable boss.
Use your voice
Most presenters use only a fraction of their range, wasting the most flexible instrument any of us owns. Raise and lower the volume. Change the pitch. Speed up to carry energy, slow down to land something, and pause to let people catch up with you.
One caution. If you aren’t good at accents, don’t attempt them.
Use your memory
The best storytellers go back into the moment rather than describing it from outside. Most people underestimate how much they can still see of something they lived through, and the details you genuinely remember are the ones that will put the room inside it with you.
Paint pictures
Use metaphors and vivid descriptions. Invite people to imagine, be open to vulnerability, and pause.
Think of Martin Luther King Jr.: the beacon light of hope, the lonely island of poverty, the bad cheque marked insufficient funds. He wasn’t decorating an argument. He was handing a crowd three pictures to carry home. Pictures turn a message into a memory, which is why a rubber duck has outlasted every slide I presented that year.
Keep it conversational
Leave the corporate language in the drawer. Slow down. Imagine you are talking to friends, because that is the voice in which you already do this well, and a little humour where it fits does no harm at all.
Then stop without explaining the moral. The person listening isn’t a child, and they arrived there several seconds before you did.
Keep it short
Specific and long are not the same thing. Most of the stories in this guide run to four or five lines.
What Goes Wrong
Four things will sink a story, and all four are easier to spot in somebody else’s material than in your own.
It has no point. You know why you are telling it. Nobody else does, because you never said, and a story whose meaning is left unstated is entertainment rather than a message.
They can’t see themselves in it. If the room can’t find itself anywhere in what you are describing, you aren’t telling a story. You are giving a reading.
It runs long. The least forgivable of the four, because the length is entirely within your control.
It leaves them feeling nothing. The hardest to spot, because a story can be well told, structurally sound, and completely inert. If you can’t say in one short sentence how you want the room to feel at the end of it, this is what you have.
One more is worth naming, and it’s why I am careful about how storytelling gets taught.
When someone follows a story, they stop checking it. That is what makes it work, and it is also what makes it dangerous. One vivid account of a single unhappy customer can beat the figures covering every other customer you have, whether or not it should.
So, before you use one, ask whether it is typical. Not just whether it happened, but whether it happens. If the story you’ve chosen is the rare exception, you aren’t telling the room about your customers. You’re telling them about one, and they will remember it as all of them.
The Duck
Which brings me back to where this started.
I didn’t tell the duck story at that conference because it was a good story. Reduced to its facts, it is barely a story at all. I had just arrived in Japan after eighteen hours door to door. On the edge of the bath in my hotel room was a small rubber duck, put there by somebody I would never meet, and it struck me then, as it still does, that the smallest thing can bring the greatest comfort.
I told it because of what I wanted that room to feel.
They were exhausted. The business was in real trouble, and everyone knew it. They didn’t need the strategy or the data, both of which I had and both of which they’d forget by the time they reached the car park. What they needed was ninety seconds of being thought about.
So I chose the feeling first, went looking afterwards, and came back with a rubber duck.
They are still sending me ducks.
So, before you go looking for your story, answer the question that managing director wouldn’t. How do you want them to feel when you’re finished, when they are gathering their things and heading back into their day?
Answer that honestly, and the story will find you.
Mary Oliver ended a poem by asking her reader what they planned to do with their one wild and precious life. It seems fair to ask the same about your one wild and precious presentation.
If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you work with is preparing something this week, and the best thing they know is a story they have already decided is too personal to tell.
If you need a little help telling stories in your presentations:
– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.
