I recently went to a conference where several speakers started with the usual personal details. ‘My name is …and I have done a lot in my life etc’. You know the stuff.
One speaker didn’t start with this predictable opening. This speaker started with a story about the courage of two people who started a company from a garage in 1976. It was a very different opening and had me wondering from the first words.
The other thing I noticed was that the speaker avoided using the personal pronoun ‘I’ and spoke in the present tense. The focus was on the story and the audience. He says to his partner ‘We need a marketing manager’. His partner replied’ What about the Marketing Manager of a large multi national company like Pepsi?’
Towards the end of the story, the speaker drew us into the story with the use of ‘You’. ‘What you can learn from such a story is that you need to believe in yourself’.
The lesson I learned was the powerful use of story to get a presentation or conversation started and the importance of using ‘You’ to focus on the other person and their needs.
The company is Apple.
