Storytelling Leadership Quotes

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part on the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

Great CIOs are great storytellers, envision and communicate a full-fledged, people-centric digital transformation.

Optimists are more qualified storytellers.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Leadership is essentially a task of persuasion—of winning people's minds and hearts.

The quality of a brand’s storytelling is directly proportional to the quality of its content. If it’s not good, no one will pay attention. What

Storytelling is not something we do. Storytelling is who we are.

The beauty of ideas is that many can co-exist at the same time and propel new leaps in our personal and collective evolution.

Life is hard and we need people who’ve been in the thick of it to tell us a little something of how to survive and, also, thrive.

Communicators begin with generous intent and then surrender the work to the audience to do with as they will, including identifying and resonating with the work in their own unique ways.

Our imagination tells us that being as connected as we are—the ease of travel, technological advances and pooled intelligence—should have produced better results for more people than we’re now seeing.

When you’re trying to communicate a big, audacious concept, it’s helpful to remember that where data falls short, a story might close the gap, and where story alone is not persuasive enough, data can make up the difference.

While someone might attempt a feeble carbon copy of those ideas you’ve spent years developing, they can never match the undeniably distinctive aspect of your work. Especially if it resonates across multiple platforms and in multiple formats.

Those who are resonating the most with your work, who recognize themselves in your vision, will naturally crave language that speaks to that you-and-me kind of 'we.' They’ll want to identify with your ideas personally and keep talking about them.

Storytelling is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for millennia, since long before the invention of written language. Storytelling is part of what it is to be human. And the best stories share our values and beliefs. Those stories are powerful. Those stories inspire. Those stories are both the source of our WHY and the fuel that keeps our WHY alive. That’s the reason companies that understand the importance of living their WHY make it easy for their teams to fortify themselves with stories.

The majestic whale travels the seven seas piping its unique song in the hopes of finding its tribe. The other whales in the sea can hear the solitary whale. But the song to them is foreign and unfamiliar. They’re not resonating on the same frequencies and so, it seems, there can be no reciprocity. The creature carries on, searching high and low for a sign of recognition and response.

Storytelling, Johnson taught his students, was the key to successful debating. In contrast to the previous public speaking teacher who came from the “old school,” and trained his debaters to “be bombastic and loud,” Lyndon urged a conversational style that illustrated points with concrete stories. “Act like you’re talking to those folks,” he counseled his students. “Look one of them in the eye and then move on and look another one in the eye.” During competitions, he utilized all his supple array of gestures and facial expressions to cue and prompt—now frowning, narrowing his eyes, creasing his brow, shaking his head, gaping in wonder—creating a silent movie to steer and goad his charges to victory.

As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you… * are already being taken seriously in some way * have found your place (professionally or personally) * believe strongly in something relevant to your idea * are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways * are finding ways to be useful in the world * are finding ways to achieve more of what you value * have developed mastery and control * are participating in interesting things * and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others.” Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.

In a land where there are no musicians; in a land where there are no storytellers, teachers, and poets; in a land where there are no men and women of vision and leadership; in a land where there are no legends, saints, and champions; in a land where there are no dreamers, the people will most certainly perish. But you and I, we are the music makers; we are the storytellers, teachers, and poets; we are the men and women of vision and leadership; we are the legends, the saints, and the champions; and we are the dreamers of the dreams. Let us sit with God for a few minutes each day and dream with him, and with the vision he places in our hearts, go out into the world with a contagious love that cannot be ignored. Be bold. Be Catholic. When the Catholic faith is actually lived it is incredible potent.

The Leadership Seduction of storytelling invites self-pity, exaggerates one's importance, and encourages inaction.

Truth is the greatest marketing campaign.

Unfortunately, church leadership too often capitulates to youthful and parental pressure that would make confirmation as fluffy, fun, and noncommittal as possible.

The best communicators encode their signals in a way that resonates not with everybody but with certain somebodies.

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

In this era of public survival through continuous storytelling, people want someone who might surprise them.

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past.

Finally, the seventh power cue helps you put it all together to become a master storyteller who actually synchronizes brain waves with your listeners to enhance your natural leadership capacity, increase your charisma, and move others to action. Are you telling powerful stories?

I guess pencil crayons are like life; we hope to gain wisdom through our experiences, and sadly many of us learn important lessons later in life - however all that colour we scratched and pressed into our canvases create stories for our children, and grandchildren - things to laugh at as we look back, and hopefully things others can use as examples of lessons of caution, and tales of overcoming negative situations despite the overwhelming odds stacked up against us. Tales of past likes and loves, lessons learned, and the stories about how you met the right person and how you ended up with them - often a winding tale until there's an 'AH-HA' moment of enlightenment, lol. Tales of raw adversity...because rawness is beautiful, and learned wisdom which proves showing weakness is actual bravery. That not everyone you lose is a loss, and that in life, a situation will keep repeating itself until one learns their lesson. As sad as it is to see these pencils being shortened, and the way one tries to preserve what's left as they get shorter and shorter... the new box of crayons which will eventually be bought will continue the storytelling of the old, and add new stories until they themselves expire.

Mental File Cabinet Starter Set: Why do you want to be a firefighter? ☐ What have you done to prepare? ☐ Conflict Resolution Customer Service x2 Diversity Best and Worst Trait Leadership Mental wellness Physical wellness Problem Solving City Specific Time Management Future Goals Education Teamwork Hardship Positive Attitude Work Ethic Support System Honesty Integrity Trust

This is a story of personal fascism as opposed to organized fascism. [It] indicates how it is possible for us to have a Gestapo, if the country should go fascist. A character like Monty would qualify brilliantly for the leadership of the Belsen concentration camp. Fascism hates weakness in people; minorities. Monty hates fairies, Negroes, Jews, and foreigners. In the book, Monty murders a fairy. He could have murdered a Negro, a foreigner, or a Jew.” Despite the message being thickly ladled at times, Crossfire’s story was deftly told. Robert Young’s earnest homilies about brotherhood don’t carry half the weight of Robert Mitchum explaining how ugly realities released by the war can’t be neatly tucked away. “The snakes are loose,” he says, like a man who knows how bad it’s going to get. Crossfire shocked everyone, including Schary and Scott, by being a box-office hit. Whether its success was due to a timely message or taut storytelling, no one was sure (although surveys prior to the film’s release suggested little public interest in ethnically themed stories). As the picture reaped humanitarian awards, anti-Communist crusaders moved in on Scott and Dmytryk. Both were branded Red and sent to jail, members of the infamous Hollywood Ten.

There is no formula for branding! The only common truth is that you must create your formula.

We work together under the assumption that words matter, deeply.

Big ideas are often big precisely because they defy categorization. But blame it on our human tendency to want some kind of peg to hang our hat on. So before you blow up the category, what your editors, copywriters and marketing department might want to know is, what’s the niche?

An audacious proposition is designed to interrupt the regularly scheduled broadcast to deliver some new information.

The names of those who have influenced our ideas tell a story in themselves: who they were, when and where they lived, what their contribution to the great ongoing conversation was or is.

If you have an idea worth spreading, you don’t need permission from anybody to spread it. If you have an idea worth spreading, the reliable research, data and definitions can be added later. If you have an idea worth spreading, you can sound it out with some loyal friends and let them remind you how much hard-won experience you’ve racked up—how many thousands of hours in deliberate practice.

If the alignment between author, audience, topic and timing is synchronized correctly, the audience will want to imagine themselves in the story.

The best ideas weave in the logical as well as the emotional. Touch the head as well as the heart.

If our transmission is too garbled due to an unwittingly arrogant tone, the idea we broadcast isn’t necessarily the idea that will be received in the minds and hearts of the hearers.

New wisdom is the wisdom that whispers to us to pursue detachment. It is the wisdom that, steady as breath work, releases us from our monkey-mind grip on exactly how life needs to look and sound. We don’t even have to obsess about how long an idea will be relevant, trusting the universe that when the idea’s time has expired an even more useful one will appear to replace it.

Leadership is about knowing that best of everyone varies everyday...Not all days can turn out to be the same because you cannot be. Ramesh Sood

While the initial idea might have been a lone signal in an ocean of noise, through the power of collaboration it can be amplified in a way that resonates far and wide.

The biggest challenge for communicators today is found in the story of the loneliest whale in the world. This whale—nicknamed Blue 52 by scientists in the early nineties—was discovered traversing the seas and singing on a unique frequency. Year after year, its migration pathway took it across several thousand miles but, no matter how many signals it sent out, those signals failed to evoke a response from any of its own kind.

The underlying expectation of a big idea is that the audience will be smarter, more knowledgeable, more competent, more informed and possibly more in control than before.

Your audience needs to know this is important enough to pay attention to right now instead of all the other signals competing for their attention.

As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you: are already being taken seriously in some way; have found your place (professionally or personally); believe strongly in something relevant to your idea; are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways; are finding ways to be useful in the world; are finding ways to achieve more of what you value; have developed mastery and control; are participating in interesting things; and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others. Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.

We encounter ideas through the prism of our own lived experience and because of this a good argument can be made that we best understand big ideas when they’re presented through the same personal prism.

Because we live in a highly uncertain world, life frequently demands that we adjust to a new normal and a new reality, different from our old normal and the old reality of yesterday. This often involves regaining our balance in the face of a diagnosis, a disability, a death in the family, a divorce or some other drastic change in our circumstances.

Our ideas are like living entities, swimming in an ocean of other ideas. Every idea is being broadcast on a different frequency and has varying levels of resonance with those who respond to that frequency.

Irresolution, it might be said, is a hallmark of our lives. That so much of what happens is beyond our direct knowledge or control, and that there is no way of knowing our own story’s ending (or even duration) might explain why we crave the complication-resolution pattern in story.

An idea packaged up in nonfiction is a completely different animal to an idea packaged up in fiction. And while the lines blur in that hybrid creature called narrative nonfiction, we should be under no illusions that they’re the same animal.

There are things we can say in nonfiction that cannot be said outright in fiction. And there are truths that can be conveyed in fiction that the constraints of nonfiction would never allow.

One of the central problems of a time in which there are many competing voices on the airwaves, in the media and online, is finding a way to get in sync, on some semblance of the same wavelength as others who share the same values, questions and goals.

Sending resonant signals is also different from merely adding to a cultural echo chamber. That’s because of the unique flavor of your own authority and experience, origins and obstacles. All the why’s you’ve addressed in terms of author, audience, topic and timing. Delineated in these ways, your big, generous idea, located at the edges of the possible, becomes a complementary addition to a rich and harmonic symphony. Complementary yet undeniably distinctive.

In terms of the lonely whale metaphor, sending signals out into the void without a clear vision for who it is you’re singing to is a sure way for that signal to be lost in the noise.

The story of Blue 52 roaming the oceans, singing its own deep-sea version of a high lonesome, has struck a nerve with a great many individuals. And it’s no wonder. Its loneliness touches the loneliness we sometimes feel when we’re sending signals into the void.

Ideas are being described in this book as free-floating entities that thrive in a great many environments.

We sing our way forward, on frequencies only we can, depending on the chosen space, the chosen medium, the idea we’re trying to spread and the promises we’re making to the audience we’re seeking to serve.

The best ideas expand our possibilities as individuals, communities and global villagers.

We invest our time and attention into the work of those who have taken the trouble to translate their findings into stories and words we can understand—stories and words that speak to our own needs, pain points, longings and desires.

We’re swimming in an ocean of information like none of our ancestors before us. And this access to abundant sources of data presents a mixed blessing. There is so much competing information, both trivial and significant.

The best ideas are seeking out the maximum number of amplifiers and that this is the reproductive nature of generous ideas.

There are recurring patterns that show up again and again in big ideas that have spread, to indicate that they require some attention-getting wow factor, some audacious proposition, before we pay attention.

The ability to ask the right questions is a crucial leadership trait.

Always try for the best. Be practical to finish the quest.

A little push is all that you need. Newton works everywhere indeed.

Plan properly so that people feel connection with your actions.

New incubations in the organizations might need a separate culture.

Take when you need to. Not when you can afford it.

Solutions need not be fancy to be effective.

It is important to take calculated risks.

Asking questions can deliver desired results.

When change is difficult, Try new ways.

The Secret Language of Leadership y The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling,

Effective movements require bold, decisive, and sometimes idiosyncratic leadership. Powerful storytelling, briefly mentioned earlier, motivates people to support and champion the cause. Grit, the willingness to choose unconventional methods others might shy away from, and even disagreeableness are often essential when confronting established interests.