Tell Me a Picture

Annette Simmons is the author of Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact. She says that humans have used storytelling to communicate since the beginning of time, and today is no different. Her book is intended to help you tell stories that are more persuasive, more impactful, and more fun to listen to.

I’ve written before about the types of stories she helps you craft. One is the Vision story. She writes, “A good Vision story makes your promise for future payoffs tangible enough to feel realistic. When you make a vision come alive with carefully crafted images, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings, you eclipse the burden of today with tomorrow’s reward. Overwhelming obstacles shrink to bearable frustrations that are achievable and worth the effort.”

Vision stories are powerful persuasion tools. They are what creates and maintains strong teams – think how the military, sports teams, service organizations, creators, even the church, use vision stories to bring people together and help them achieve extraordinary things.

Vision stories help people understand why you do things the way you do, and if you’re lucky (and tell a great story), they will come around to your way of doing things as well. My personal example of this is when my husband finally asked me about fruit labels. After every shopping trip, I meticulously remove the tiny labels on fruits and vegetables before putting them away. One day, he finally asked me why I bothered.

“See these lemons in the fruit basket on the counter?” I said. “If House Beautiful were coming today for a photo shoot of our kitchen, would you make sure these were all removed?” He nodded. “That’s my standard for the house,” I said. He got it in less than 20 seconds. A good vision story doesn’t have to be long; it just has to paint a picture so vivid it’s impossible to ignore.

Simmons says that, if you have to choose, choosing “pull” stories is a better way to paint a vision. She writes, “A “pull” story conjures positive emotions such as desire, hope, belonging, or happiness. Stories based on negative emotions such as fear (greed is just another word for fear) fuel stress (also a word for fear) and feed perceptions of danger, scarcity, and us/them thinking.” Charismatic leaders have been known to use both to achieve their goals. Sports coaches are masters of both pull stories and negative stories. “Are you going to end this day celebrating with champagne in the locker room? Or are you going to end it watching the other team’s celebration looping on your phones on the long, lonely, miserable, 3-hour bus ride home?”

Metaphors make for powerful vision stories. If I were to tell you that “he’s a big fish in this small pond, and now he’s going to go out and find the right big pond,” you’d know exactly what I mean. If I were to say, she’s going to “become the Maya Angelou of her generation,” you’d get a very good idea of where she wants her writing to go.

Simmons says that choosing a fictional vision story is tricky, because fiction is, well, fictional. The writer determined in advance that everything was going to turn out okay: the good guys would win, the day would be saved, etc. Real-life inspiration is better, because the ending wasn’t pre-determined. The hero actually took the risk and overcame the odds to become the hero. Fictional vision stories make it easy for your audience to push back. “Yeah, but this isn’t The Mighty Ducks. It’s real life.” They can opt out of the vision if it doesn’t feel authentic.

Annette Simmons writes about her first experience with a Vision story. “When I was a kid, my mother taught me table manners by suggesting I’d need them, “In case the queen ever invites you to tea.” I’m over fifty, and so far I’ve received no royal invitations, but I do have lovely table manners. The queen’s tea party was my mother’s version of a Vision story. When I was eight, using a short fork for salad seemed ridiculous without my mother’s “You’ll thank me someday” story about my future self barely avoiding public humiliation at a royal tea party. We can always use a good Vision story to help develop moral character and delayed gratification, no matter how old we are.”