Earlier this week I was asked to speak for a few minutes to a group of United Way Leaders on Loan about how they might develop their public speaking skills. The folks I was talking to would soon be asked to speak to other organizations about the United Way and would only have a few minutes, five at most, to get their message across. With that need for brevity in mind, I decided to encourage them to become better storytellers. Here’s why.

Is this a kissing book?

When you think about storytelling, you might think about things that start with “once upon a time” and involve princesses and unicorns in far away lands. They’re the things you use to put your kids to sleep at night, but not the stuff that great speeches to savvy business professionals are made of. But stories aren’t just for grandparents with children on their knee.

While it’s true that you shouldn’t start telling fairy tales at your next business meeting, the truth is that human beings think in stories. When your child gets home from school and you ask her about her day, she doesn’t just start listing facts:

Math class. Forty minutes. Pop quiz. Only missed one. Lunch. Thirty minutes. Grilled cheese, apple, carton of milk.”

Instead the answer is a story:

Well I woke up late and had to run to catch the bus, but I made it to the stop just as the bus was pulling up. Then in math class we had a POP QUIZ! I was really nervous, but it turned out I only missed one problem, so it was okay.”

We communicate via stories, but we also use stories to make sense of the world around us. If I asked you what gravity is, you’d probably say something like, “the force that pulls us down to the ground.” That’s a story. In truth, gravity is the name we give to the way objects that have mass interact. It has to do with a lot of physics and stuff, but the story of gravity is much easier to understand and helps us decide whether to leap off high places.

If we understand the importance of stories to each and every human being, we can begin to understand why it might be a good idea to become better storytellers. Here are three ways you can make your stories better.

Your stories should be:

1. True

Many stories are fictional, and some fictional stories can be useful for teaching people things (think Aesop’s Fables). But in any situation where you’re trying to persuade someone to do or think a certain thing, I think it’s best to tell a true story. The reason is that a fictional story is made up, and people understand that if that’s the case the storyteller can make the story go any way he wants. It’s much more convincing if you can say, I know this is right because it happened to me, or I saw it happen to someone else firsthand. If you can tell a true story, it’s much more personal than just saying “imagine if…”

2. Interesting

And the best way to make your story interesting is for something unexpected to happen. It doesn’t have to be an earth-shaking surprise, but something ought to happen that your audience wasn’t expecting. In the story of your daughter’s day at school, the surprise is the pop quiz. Immediately you sympathize with her and you’re filled with a suspenseful desire to know what happened. Take advantage of that kind of reaction in your audience. If they can see what’s coming around every turn of your story, they’ll tune out because they think they’ve heard this one before.

3. Meaningful

You could tell the story of the guy that dropped the cake at last year’s United Way Christmas party (I have no idea if the United Way has a Christmas party). That story would be both true and interesting and so fulfill our requirements thus far. But chances are it won’t convince anyone to donate time or money to the United Way. You need to connect with your audience. Don’t just evoke an emotional response. Evoke emotions that will drive home your point. Make sure the story you tell is one that will help them understand the action or change you want them to make. The cool thing is that if you tell the right story, you probably won’t need to explicitly describe what you want them to do.

The best way to learn how to be a good storyteller is to understand what good storytelling is. The best way I know to do that is to listen to lots of stories, identify the good ones, and then figure out what made them good. You can use a site like StoryCorps.org to find all kinds of stories from all kinds of people. Which ones stick out to you? Which ones are the most interesting? Which ones move you? Why?

We all tell stories. You’re gonna be doing it the rest of your life. Why not get good at it now?