How telling stories can improve your reputation

Stories are as old as the hills and such a simple way of communication. A good yarn can create a positive narrative that reaches across audiences, let alone across generations. Some of the oldest tales have lived on thanks to their ability to capture emotion and imagination despite the lack of written records.

The Bible, the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, many of the Roman histories all record stories that existed many centuries prior to their publication. Although details may have changed like Chinese whispers, central themes remain the same.

Everyone has a story or two to tell, and while my mother’s tales might get taller with every retelling, there’s a value to repeating them for entertainment, information and education. Even the most simple story can have a learning point as I mentioned in my blog before

So at the Harrogate 4N meeting, I decided to tell a story about myself to illustrate how stories say a great deal more than you may at first think.




How I saved the life of a celebrity donkey

As a sixteen year old, I delivered the newspapers around my village. Being a rural community, some of the homes were farms a mile or so from the next nearest house. The final house on my route was a fair old walk or cycle from the rest of my route.

At the top of the long winding drive, a donkey stood in the middle of the main road; quite motionless. Being on the brow of a hill and a blind bend, I feared this donkey was soon to cause one almighty accident. Assuming the beast had escaped the paddock of the house down the drive, I struggled to haul the donkey off the road.

Donkey’s aren’t called stubborn for nothing. After Struggling for ten minutes I had barely got the animal off the busy main road, and a further quarter of an hour later I was at the front door of the owner’s house.

A knock on the door early on a Sunday morning was not greeted warmly by the home’s owner, a dress maker to the Queen, who opened his bedroom and telling me to buzz off and stop waking him up. When I explained I’d returned his ass safely, he was even less enamoured with my Sunday morning alarm call.

I had drawn his attention to the noble stead now merrily munching on his best border plants whilst I was at the door. I quickly found out the donkey was not his property. A long haul back up the drive, and a similar stubborn journey down the next led me to discover this, too, was not the animal’s home. At least this was a proper farmer and he agreed to take the donkey and ring the police’s “Missing Donkey” department.

I thought nothing more about the incident until I looked at the front page of the local weekly newspaper the following Thursday. A large chunk was devoted to the sad tale of a Donkey, used in the filming of Tots TV, a programme from the same stable as Tellytubbies and In the Night Garden. The programme originally had a pony and donkey in it, but the pony had died. Mourning the loss, the donkey escaped its paddock and was found several miles away. The newspaper credited the discovery of the TV donkey by a local farmer, quoting his thoughts on the discovery.

So what does this actually teach us about Stories?

- One learning point is there are different versions of the same story. My story was the stubborn beast refusing to move, and the struggle to make the animal safe. The newspaper focussed on the sad tale of loss and reconciliation.

- If you don’t tell your side a story first, you might find someone else distorts the story, getting in first. This could be a corporate competitor.

- Stories are based on emotion and emotive issues. Even a big business story is about creating jobs and communities, and not about how many noughts are written on the contract.

- Stories tend to have a hook early on – in my case you want to find out more about why the donkey is a celebrity and what happened. Normally the first line or headline encapsulates the whole story.

- Stories have a halo effect on an individual or organisation. How do I come out the story? Caring, determined, struggling against the odds, sympathetic.

- If you have a message, make sure your stories reflect any relevant key messages you are trying to enlighten people about.

Public relations is about managing reputations and stories can help develop and build a reputation. The best stories are based on real life and true experience. Describing untruths as reality are also damaging to reputations. What I’ve discovered talking to people in business is how mangy good stories there are, and how little mileage businesses make of them. The times they’ve saved another person’s bacon, gone way past the extra mile yet failed to tell their customers and potential customers.

The image is taken from The Donkey Sanctuary, a worthwhile charity helping to protect the animals from abuse around the world.

Panto: The art of retelling a great story

At this time of year, you sometimes have to watch when someone cries out “He’s behind you!” Even more so if you’re sitting in the front row of a theatre audience. We’re just past half way in the annual pantomime season, and it is hard to grasp that this is a particularly British art form that most other countries don’t understand.

Very few arts have been developed within Britain and this form of theatre is one of them. Over the festive period I’ve seen two pantos in theatres and a handful on television. But there is a perception that they are low brow and hackneyed. I think this view is unfair and there is plenty of life in this annual festival of fun.

The one advantage of the Pantomime is the elasticity of its genre. It encompasses everything from a tightly produced small ensemble cast to a largely improvised set and everything in between. To understand this a little further you need to understand the origins of panto.

The word Pantomime originally comes from ancient Greece but there it refers to a performance that “imitates all” as the words suggest. Even in English theatre history, the term originally referred to a low form of opera that imitated the real thing. However, the low opera did tend to retell familiar stories and it is this retelling that is important.

There has been a tradition of retelling stories over generations in Britain. Think of the Mummers’ plays or the Chaucerian idea of people sharing stories for entertainment. There isn’t just one version of Cinderella, its plot or even its characters. Probably the original pantomime, the story is a European legend that existed for hundreds of years before the pantomime was invented.
I imagine the 1870 Drury Lane version of Cinderella, possibly the first real panto, would be quite different to “Cinderella Rocks”, a local youth theatre group production being performed in Leeds this year.

The idea of a small footed beauty is believed to have its origins in China where women used to fold their toes back with bandages to give the impression of smaller feet. The Disney version has no Dandini and no Buttons. There are Cinderella ballets, Operas, books and films which are distinctly not Panto. It’s even believed that the “glass slipper” is a mistranslation of “the shoe of fun” – a slipper that allows the wearer to dance.

It is the retelling in a new form every year that makes it relevant to a new audience, evolving over the decades to reach new audiences since its creation in the nineteenth century. What makes the pantomime is a number of common features which can be overlaid on many a story, but even some of these common features can be absent. Aladdin at the West Yorkshire Playhouse had no cross dressing but it did have a dame.

The modern construct of the pantomime was heavily influenced by the musical hall. Many vaudevillians saw the panto as good seasonal work. Rather than two or three acts, the pantomime tends to run several varying scenes or skits together allowing for comedians, singers, dancers and magicians to do there “turn” even if it adds nothing to the story. A good pantomime is also interactive involving the audience and responding to the heckle.

It is also a form of art where the amateur production can be as good, if not better, than the professional production with the big cast. With few rules, the strength of the Pantomime relies on the satire, the gag writing and the relationship with the audience. Special effects can help a production but aren’t the heart of the performance. The panto will only die if it stays the same. We are no longer in the variety hall era and inspiration should come from the current. It should go back to the roots of imitating all whilst holding on to a good yarn that has survived the test of time.