Narrative

Max Browning
April 10, 2015
Observation 4

Last summer, I was the lead presenter at the National Dance Marathon Leadership Conference.  I was asked to speak about the importance of telling stories when trying to break any misconceptions pertaining to a Dance Marathon event.  During this speech, I chose to show how I break misconceptions by telling the conference about why I have decided to be involved with Dance Marathon.  I explained to everyone at the conference that their greatest recruitment and retention tool was the stories they had to tell to their campus about the impact their marathon is making on their local hospital and about the impact the marathon is making on their daily lives.

My goal in this speech was to create a paradigm shift in the listeners by making them recreate their view of the world.  The Narrative theory states that humans are not motivated by arguments, but rather good reasoning; therefore, it makes sense that we tell stories to explain our reasoning instead of arguments to show merit.  During my speech, I presented some basic science associated with story telling; however, what sticked with the audience and persuaded their judgements on my topics the story that I told the story.

When I crafted my story, I had to make sure that it had both coherency (the story seemed probable to occur) and fidelity (it seemed to be true).  Even though I only picked bits and pieces of the story to talk about, I had to make sure that each piece of the story connected to the previous one and did not leave out any necessary details to transition from one section to the next.  According to the theory, "the world is a set of stories from which we choose to recreate our lives."  When I retold my story, I was choosing the important parts of the story that I wanted to define that part of my life.