The BIG List of Storytelling Books

30+ books on the art and craft of Storytelling to develop your storytelling skills for different walks of life.

49 min readJul 30, 2021

A while back, I wrote about storytelling and the power this skill yields in our life. I tried to explain why it is so important to develop a better understanding of it and to master its powers. You don’t have to believe me, just ask Warren Buffet, who in an Inc article says this skill alone will boost your career value by 50 percent!.

So, I decided to write a meticulously curated list of books, and some distilled lessons from each one of them that will help you on this endeavor.

To make it even more useful, I divided it in 4 sections for different aspects of life where storytelling is applied:

On the craft of writing.
The art of persuasion.
Taking care of business (sorry for the cheesy title)
Public Speaking.

I hope this list helps you if you are interested in becoming a better storyteller.

ON THE CRAFT OF WRITING

If you want to learn more about how to put your ideas on the proverbial paper, this list will help you develop the foundations, understand how to hone your skills, develop your style and become a better writer.

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers, and viewers.
Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realize is incomplete. ‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’
In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.
When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer, as we’ve just seen, comes from that character’s core beliefs about reality, the precious and fiercely defended ideas around which they’ve formed their sense of self.
‘Any scene which does not both advance the plot and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its merits) is either superfluous or incorrectly written,’ he wrote. ‘Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.’
Writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.
If there’s a single secret to storytelling, then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or, from the perspective of the character, Who am I? It’s the definition of drama. It is its electricity, its heartbeat, its fire.
The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values, and theory of control around. An attack on these ideas is an attack on the very structure of reality as we experience it. It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive our greatest stories.
Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.

The sense of style by Steven Pinker

The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.
The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.
A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.
As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline — the illusion of the good old days.
The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.
A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.
Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily.
The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.
Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . .”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it.
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.
Ultimately, the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know.
Ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) “What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) “What attitude am I going to take toward the material?” (Involved? Judgmental? “How much do I want to cover?” “What one point do I want to make?”

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.
Sometimes it is a good practice to uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.
Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.
E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk

When the subject is the same for both clauses and is expressed only once, a comma is required if the connective is but. If the connective is and, the comma should be omitted if the relation between the two statements is close or immediate.
If a parenthetic expression is preceded by a conjunction, place the first comma before the conjunction, not after it.
Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is. Hence, as a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form.
In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.
As positive statement is more concise than negative, and the active voice more concise than the passive, many of the examples given under Rules 11 and 12 illustrate this rule as well.
The proper place in the sentence for the word, or group of words, which the writer desires to make most prominent is usually the end.
If the interruption to the flow of the sentence is but slight, the writer may safely omit the commas.
Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.
The pronominal possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and oneself have no apostrophe.

Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques by James Hynes

The point here is that a strong plot starts with an interesting Lead character. In the best plots, that Lead is compelling, someone we have to watch throughout the course of the novel.
First, make sure your characters have unique ways of speaking. No two characters should sound exactly alike. And second, the words they use should tell us something about who they are.
Solid plots have one and only one dominant objective for the Lead character.
In order to get from beginning to middle — the first doorway — you must create a scene where your Lead is thrust into the main conflict in a way that keeps him there.
Plot is about elements, those things that go into the mix of making a good story even better. Structure is about timing — where in the mix those elements go.

“Once you get a character with a problem, a serious problem, ‘plotting’ is just a fancy name for how he or she tries to get out of the predicament.”

Opposition from characters and outside forces brings your story fully to life. If your Lead moves toward his objective without anything in his way, we deprive readers of what they secretly want: worry. Readers want to fret about the Lead, keeping an intense emotional involvement all the way through the novel.
Objective is the driving force of fiction. It generates forward motion and keeps the Lead from just sitting around. An objective can take either of two forms: to get something or to get away from something.
After analyzing hundreds of plots, I’ve developed a simple set of foundational principles called the LOCK system. LOCK stands for Lead, Objective, Confrontation, and Knockout.

Everybody writes by Ann Handley

What matters now isn’t storytelling; what matters is telling a true story well.
There are two approaches to self-editing: Developmental editing, which I call editing by chainsaw. Here’s where you look at the big picture. Line editing, which I call editing by surgical tools. Here’s where you look at paragraph and sentence flow, word choice, usage, and so on.
Write to one person. Imagine the one person you’re helping with this piece of writing. And then write directly to that person (using you, as opposed to using people or they).
The truth is this: writing well is part habit, part knowledge of some fundamental rules, and part giving a damn.
Here are some phrases to avoid at the start of a sentence: According to… There is a… It is [important, critical, advised, suggested, and so on]… In my opinion… The purpose of this [email, post, article] is… In 2014 [or any year]… I think [believe] that… You can tack them onto the end, or insert them somewhere in the middle — if you must use them at all.
Think of your content, then, as any medium through which you communicate with the people who might use your products or services.
Before you begin the writing, be sure you know the purpose or mission or objective of every piece of content that you write. What are you trying to achieve? What information, exactly, are you trying to communicate?
Give it a great headline or title.
Reframe: put your reader into it. Reframe the idea to relate it to your readers. Why does it matter to them? What’s in it for them? Why should they care? What’s the clear lesson or message you want them to take away? What value do you offer them? What questions might they have?

The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman

When expressing emotion, vary your vehicles, using both verbal and nonverbal techniques for maximum impact.
Make sure that your character’s feelings progress realistically. Map out the emotional journey within the scene to avoid unintended melodrama.
In order to avoid using too much backstory, determine which details from your character’s past are necessary to share. Dole them out through the context of the present-time story to keep the pace moving.
When writing a certain emotion, think about your body and what happens to it when you’re feeling that way.
Readers have high expectations. They don’t want to be told how a character feels; they want to experience the emotion for themselves.
A ticking clock can ramp up the emotions in any scene. As the character hurries to complete a task or meet a need, mistakes caused by rushing open the door for a richer emotional ride.
INTERNAL SENSATIONS are the most powerful form of nonverbal communication and should be used with the most caution.
Showing takes more work than telling, as word count alone will indicate, but it pays off by drawing the reader closer to the character and helping to create empathy.
Emotion is strongest when both verbal and nonverbal communication are used in tandem.

The Anatomy of Story by John Truby

Withholding, or hiding, information is crucial to the storyteller’s make-believe. It forces the audience to figure out who the character is and what he is doing, and so draws the audience into the story. When the audience no longer has to figure out the story, it ceases being an audience, and the story stops.
The dramatic code expresses the idea that human beings can become a better version of themselves, psychologically and morally. And that’s why people love it.
The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.
Stories don’t show the audience the “real world”; they show the story world. The story world isn’t a copy of life as it is. It’s life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.
To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the question in one succinct line.
A true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal.
Always begin at the end of the change, with the self-revelation; then go back and determine the starting point of the change, which is the hero’s need and desire; then figure out the steps of development in between.
What you choose to write about is far more important than any decision you make about how to write it.
Your hero should not be aware of his need at the beginning of the story.

Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman

“The first thing to say about the Bishop’s arguments in his book,” he writes in “God and Dust,” “is that I agree with every word of them, except the words I don’t understand; and that the words I don’t understand are those such as spirit, spiritual and God.”
Above all, an epic is big. It’s about big things — death, courage, honour, war, shame, vengeance. It’s about large and public matters — the fate of a nation, the return of a king, the success of an army, the origin of a people. Its protagonists are larger than human beings, and perhaps simpler too: they are heroes.
The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ.
The only good thing about being poor and obscure is the obscurity — just as the only trouble with being rich and famous is the fame.
The way to deal with feeling self-conscious is to pretend that we don’t. Don’t let’s burden other people with our own embarrassment.
Sometimes our nature speaks more wisely than our convictions, and we’ll only work well if we listen to what it says.
The epic is not a place where anyone lives happily ever after; it obeys a mightier realism than that.
That is the meaning of Lyra’s losing the power to read the alethiometer. It came to her easily, like grace; it departs as if it had never been, leaving only a memory of the ease and swiftness and certainty she used to feel. But this is not a story about how wonderful it was to be a child, and its dominating principle is not nostalgia and regret. It’s a story about how necessary it is to grow up, and its dominating principle is realism and hope.
It was Blake who got me out of this perplexing state (as I describe in more detail in “I Must Create a System”); I remembered his line “I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s,” and with one bound I was free.

Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling by Donald Maass

Work backwards from the final realization to identify every reason for resistance, all the possible help that can fail, every reason to cling to the old self and, ultimately, the source of greatest fear.
High-impact fiction requires high courage. It means not only doing something different, but delving into what matters to you: what terrifies, outrages, grieves, inspires, hurts, and heals you.
Better still are emotions that surprise. Best of all are emotions that conflict.
Deconstruct out-of-category novels and certain common factors emerge: characters we immediately care about, unique worlds, universal human experiences, high tension, plot layers, parallels, reversals, symbols, strong themes. But there’s also an X factor: such fiction is personal, meaning that it directly reflects the author’s own experience.
Anything important that’s internal can be externalized. Ask, “In this scene what can my character do? What is the biggest thing he can do? What does she secretly want to do? What won’t others expect, least of all me? What is he avoiding or resisting? What can she do that will unintentionally show her (or others) what she’s refusing to see?”
When story events reveal and change characters, that’s good storytelling. When story events also cause us to see and recognize ourselves, that’s great storytelling.
Constructing an inner journey for any character starts with discovering where that character would least like to go. What’s the hardest truth to accept? What’s the most fearful experience and why? Who has earned your main character’s undying hatred or unwarranted respect? What has he sworn never to do? What does she hope for the hardest? What principle is too solid to stand up in a storm?
Action by itself is empty. To have impact it must reveal something about a character. To do that you can’t settle for just writing down reactive emotions. Actions always have a hidden psychological significance and maybe even a meaning that has far-reaching echoes.
Avoidance and delay aren’t actions. Suffering is a negative number. Adding up negative numbers doesn’t give you a positive number, just a bigger negative. At any given moment, make your characters do something. It’s stronger than if something is done to them.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.
Don’t identify too strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words. They are not you. They were a great moment going through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.
First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.
Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, “I am free to write the worst junk in the world.” You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination.
First thoughts are also unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive.

“Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.
That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.
To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time.
Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”
A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another.
We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy.
What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life

by Julia Cameron

Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up.
The brain enjoys writing. It enjoys the act of naming things, the processes of association and discernment. Picking words is like picking apples: this one looks delicious.
We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance as well.
Making writing a big deal tends to make writing difficult. Keeping writing casual tends to keep it possible.
Another way to think of it is that writing is the art of taking dictation, not giving it. When I listen to what I hear and simply jot that down, the flow of ideas is not mine to generate but to transcribe. When, on the other hand, I struggle to write, it is because I am trying to speak on the page rather than listen there.
I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me. In a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business.
The lies we tell ourselves about writing and time are all connected to envy, to the fairy tale notion that there are others whose lives are simpler, better funded, more conducive to writing than our own.
The first trick, the one I am practicing now, is to just start where you are. It’s a luxury to be in the mood to write. It’s a blessing but it’s not a necessity. Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
Writing is the art of a listening heart.

The Writing Life

by Annie Dillard

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.
How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord?

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

Subject and verb are often separated in prose, usually because we want to tell the reader something about the subject before we get to the verb. This delay, even for good reasons, risks confusing the reader.
That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action.
Think of that main clause as the locomotive that pulls all the cars that follow.
Putting strong stuff at the beginning and end helps writers hide weaker stuff in the middle.
Targets for cuts include: • Adverbs that intensify rather than modify: just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely, exactly. • Prepositional phrases that repeat the obvious: in the story, in the article, in the movie, in the city. • Phrases that grow on verbs: seems to, tends to, should have to, tries to. • Abstract nouns that hide active verbs: consideration becomes considers; judgment becomes judges; observation becomes observes. • Restatements: a sultry, humid afternoon.
Begin with a good quote. Hide the attribution in the middle. End with a good quote.
To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: “She smiled happily” and “She smiled sadly.” Which one works best? The first seems weak because “smiled” contains the meaning of “happily.” On the other hand, “sadly” changes the meaning.
Two questions will help you make this tool work. “Can you give me an example?” will drive the speaker down the ladder. But “What does that mean?” will carry him aloft.
But the dash has two brilliant uses: a pair of dashes can set off an idea contained within a sentence, and a dash near the end can deliver a punch line.

THE ART OF PERSUASION

Almost all aspects of our social life need a certain degree of being persuasive. This is a skill that can be better understood and developed. Master persuasion and become a master on life. This list contains some aspects on better business practices, but for this list, we’ll separate them.

Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

by Kindra Hall

In his work, Zak is credited with the discovery that oxytocin, a tiny neurochemical made in the hypothalamus of mammal brains, is more than just the bonding chemical for mothers and children. He showed it is synthesized in the brain by trust and that it motivates reciprocity.
The easiest, most effective way to build bridges that capture attention, influence behavior, and transform those who cross them, resulting in gaps that stay closed and bridges that last, is with storytelling. In the end, stories are what stick.
For a story to be compelling, it should include a specific moment in time or physical space. This component, along with the fourth component, which we’ll discuss next, aids in what I call the co-creative process.
This is the first gap in business: the value gap. The gap between the problem and the value of the solution. The gap between the product and the value to the customer.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful business-building tools in existence. It captivates, influences, and transforms customers, stakeholders, talent, and beyond, closing the gaps in business with bridges that last.
If you can’t talk about your product or show it to anyone, what would you say to customers? The moment you start to think that way, everything changes.
If you have a team to unite and, for whatever reason, are struggling to do it, a purpose story is likely the bridge you’ve been searching for.
Once you’re clear on the message you want to deliver, the next step is to ask yourself: When did I learn this lesson?
Either with time, research, or experience, get to know your audience. Once you do, include details in the story you tell that will make the scene familiar and show them you really get it.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

by Dale Carnegie

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
“If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

by Jonah Berger

Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.
People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others.
One way to generate surprise is by breaking a pattern people have come to expect.
So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way. There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make people feel like insiders.
Research by the Keller Fay Group finds that only 7 percent of word of mouth happens online.
These are the six principles of contagiousness: products or ideas that contain Social Currency and are Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable, and wrapped into Stories.
The key, then, is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but valuable virality.
Contagious content is like that — so inherently viral that it spreads regardless of who is doing the talking.
Word of mouth, on the other hand, is naturally directed toward an interested audience.
How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People
One of the most universal hungers is the hunger to feel important, to have your personal worth as a human being confirmed by others, to be appreciated, to be noticed.
You Want to Make a Good Impression on the Other Fellow. But the Most Effective Way Ever Discovered for Impressing the Other Fellow Is to Let Him Know That You Are Impressed by Him.
A good rule to remember in complimenting people is this: people are more pleased at a compliment if you praise them for some virtue that is not glaringly obvious.
Try looking for little things you can compliment others on. Look for good points in those you deal with — points that you can praise them about. Form the habit of paying at least five sincere compliments each day — and watch how much smoother your relations with others become.
Men and women who have the most influence with other people are men and women who believe other people are important.
The man with a feeling of confidence steps out boldly. His shoulders are back, and his eyes are looking out and up to some goal he feels he can attain.
Another good rule to employ is to ask yourself, before you contradict someone, this question: “Does it make any real difference whether he is right or wrong?”
The ego, or unique individuality of each person, needs respect and approval and a sense of accomplishment.
We are all egotists. We are all more interested in ourselves than in anything else in the world. Every person you meet wants to feel important, and to “amount to something.” 4. There is a craving in every human being for the approval of others, so that he can approve of himself.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

When feeling overwhelmed by a complicated and consequential choice, we still want a fully considered, point-by-point analysis of it — an analysis we may not be able to achieve except, ironically enough, through a shortcut: reliance on an expert.
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason.
Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes.
Another consequence of the rule, however, is an obligation to make a concession to someone who has made a concession to us.
This principle states that we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct (Lun et al., 2007). The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

“Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”

The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.
Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressure.
It appears that the commitments most effective in changing a person’s self-image and future behavior are those that are active, public, and effortful.

Made to Stick

by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
There are two steps in making your ideas sticky — Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.
The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.
The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.
So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate — find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message — i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

For this list, I tried to put together some of the most impactful books on business skills that will certainly help you professionally.

Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work

by Dan Roam

We don’t need more words. We need more ideas. We need them fast, and we need them to be good — and to know that they’re good, we need them to be clear.
The best way to create a chart is to first draw a portrait of each item being compared and then draw a box (or circle) to show the relative size or quantity of each.
What blah-blah-blah really means is that we’ve become so enamored of our words that we’ve fooled ourselves into believing we understand things better than we actually do.
BLUF is the military’s acronym for how to get your message heard: State the bottom line up front.
Details, counter-arguments, variations, possible points of failure, potential unintended consequences — all of these are critical aspects of any idea, but not in the first presentation.
To be useful, any map must show three things: where we are now (in enough detail to decide whether that’s a good place for us to stay), a better place to go (in enough detail to decide whether that place really does look more inviting), and a clearly marked path between the two (in enough detail to make sure we won’t get lost along the way).
The books that teach us stuff best are those that reach out to both our verbal and visual minds.
Listed in order of increasing complexity, the six elemental pictures of Vivid Grammar are: portrait, chart, map, time line, flowchart, and multivariable plot.

Putting Stories to Work

by Shawn Callahan

Strategy stories are powerful because people can picture the events, remember them and retell them. A well-developed strategy story not only answers the ‘Why?’ questions but also conveys emotion in a way that inspires people to take action in accordance with the new strategy.
A story effectively answers the ‘Why?’ questions because it sets out what has prompted the new strategy and what’s going to happen next. A story provides the context for a strategy, making it meaningful and allowing it to connect with other company stories employees may have in their minds.
How do you increase employee engagement and motivation with storytelling? You use stories to emphasise and advance purpose, progress and trust.
Presentations driven by slide decks typically contain lots of facts in the form of bullet points and graphs, but because these are not supplied within an overarching narrative, it’s hard for the audience to join the dots. People forget the information almost as soon as they file out of the auditorium because the presentation lacks a memorable story.
This book uses a ratio of about one part storytelling to three parts reason, argument and logic, which is roughly the amount of storytelling you should be aiming for when communicating with your people. Every time you find yourself giving an opinion, start looking for an example (a story) to back it up and bring it to life.
So if you want to build trust as a leader, you have to act in a way that triggers stories of credibility, reliability and intimacy, but not self-interest.
Stories mostly begin with either a time marker or a place marker because they are always set in a particular time and place.
A story describes what happened. • A good story helps you see what happened. • A great story helps you feel what happened.
This study demonstrated that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to beat a story with just facts. What you need is a better story.

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”
Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair — these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy — those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter — these drive us to spread.
Remember: Every person (with the exception of a few at the top layer) in this ecosystem is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.
Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.
To use an exclamation point, to refer back to Denton’s remark, is to be final. Being final, or authoritative, or helpful, or any of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don’t bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is.
The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important — and more profitable — than the truth.
When examining a claim, even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before getting to your main argument. Because nobody will get to your main argument. You might as well not bother…. You set up a mystery — and explain it after the link. Some analysis shows a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.
Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.
Behind the scenes I work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, conflict, triviality, titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission.

How Charts Lie

by Alberto Cairo

Any chart, no matter how well designed, will mislead us if we don’t pay attention to it.
Charts may lie, then, because they display either the wrong information or too little information. However, a chart can show the right type and amount of information and lie anyway due to poor design or labeling.
If literacy, said Balchin, is the ability to read and write, articulacy is the ability to speak well, and numeracy the ability to manipulate numerical evidence, then graphicacy is the ability to interpret visuals.
To read a chart well, you must focus on the features that surround the content and support it — the chart’s scaffolding — and on the content itself — how the data is represented, or encoded.
As the old saying goes, whenever Bill Gates participates in a meeting, everyone in the room becomes a millionaire, if we take the arithmetic mean of the group’s wealth.
Reading charts is akin to reading text: the more you practice, the faster you’ll be able to extract insights from them.
We could be even pickier and point out that turnout in the election was around 60%;3 more than 40% of eligible voters didn’t show up at the polls.
First, always peek at scale labels, to determine what it is that the chart is measuring. Second, scatter plots have that name for a reason: they are intended to show the relative scattering of the dots, their dispersion or concentration in different regions of the chart.

Data Smart

by John W. Foreman

Cluster analysis is the practice of gathering up a bunch of objects and separating them into groups of similar objects.
In data science, many of the practices, whether that’s artificial intelligence, data mining, or forecasting, are actually just some data prep plus a model-fitting step that’s actually an optimization model.
The k-means clustering algorithm slides these three cluster centers around the dance floor until it gets the best fit. How is “best fit” measured? Well, each attendee is some distance away from their cluster center. Whichever arrangement of cluster centers minimizes the average distance of attendees from their center is best.
Distance between a customer and a cluster center is calculated by taking the difference between the two points for each deal, squaring them, summing them up, and taking the square root.
The main elements you plug into Solver to solve a problem, are an objective cell, an optimization direction (minimization or maximization), some decision variables that can be changed by Solver, and some constraints.
Cluster analysis with k-means, as you’ll soon see, is part math, part story-telling. But its intuitive simplicity is part of the attraction.
The goal in k-means clustering is to take some points in space and put them into k groups (where k is any number you want to pick).
Optimization, you see, is the practice of mathematically formulating a business problem and then solving that mathematical representation for the best solution.

The Truthful Art

by Alberto Cairo

The purpose of infographics and data visualizations is to enlighten people — not to entertain them, not to sell them products, services, or ideas, but to inform them.
If your data vary so much that presenting them all on a single chart renders it useless, plot your data in several charts with dissimilar scales.
Finding stories is sometimes a matter of repeatedly asking ourselves what would happen if we plot our data in a different way.
Some topics do matter more than others indeed because they are more critical to the well-being of more people.
Finding the right answers to good questions makes us capable of posing even better and more profound ones.
In candid communication, you begin with the information, and then you thoroughly analyze it to discover the messages worth spreading are.
A graphic that is truthful, functional, beautiful, and insightful has the potential of being enlightening as well. But there’s something else to consider at this point: the topic of the visualization. Choosing topics ethically and wisely — casting light over relevant issues — matters a lot.
Godin excuses himself saying that marketers “are just storytellers. It’s the consumers who are liars. As consumers, we lie to ourselves every day… Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.”
Finally, unless there’s a very good reason not to, we must disclose our sources, data, and the methods used to analyze them and to design our visualizations. Organizations like ProPublica are doing it already (Figure 3.12).

Storytelling with Data

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Slopegraphs can be useful when you have two time periods or points of comparison and want to quickly show relative increases and decreases or differences across various categories between the two data points.
Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.
In general, those communicating with data need to take a more confident stance when it comes to making specific observations and recommendations based on their analysis.
Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose their ears and attention to make your point verbally.
The waterfall chart can be used to pull apart the pieces of a stacked bar chart to focus on one at a time, or to show a starting point, increases and decreases, and the resulting ending point.
While tables interact with our verbal system, graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information.
When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.
Scatterplots can be useful for showing the relationship between two things, because they allow you to encode data simultaneously on a horizontal x-axis and vertical y-axis to see whether and what relationship exists.
Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.

Building a StoryBrand

by Donald Miller

The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.
Here is nearly every story you see or hear in a nutshell: A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.
The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive.
The second mistake brands make is they cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.
Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand. This is the secret every phenomenally successful business understands.
The fact is, pretty websites don’t sell things. Words sell things. And if we haven’t clarified our message, our customers won’t listen.
Brands that help customers avoid some kind of negativity in life (and let their customers know what that negativity is) engage customers for the same reason good stories captivate an audience: they define what’s at stake.
The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest.
The three dominant ways storytellers end a story is by allowing the hero to 1. Win some sort of power or position. Be unified with somebody or something that makes them whole. Experience some kind of self-realization that also makes them whole.

PUBLIC SPEAKING

The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead of death, spiders, or heights. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.
The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.
An idea is anything that can change how people see the world. If you can conjure up a compelling idea in people’s minds, you have done something wondrous. You have given them a gift of incalculable value. In a very real sense, a little piece of you has become part of them.
You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.
Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it.
An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity. An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution. An issue says, “Isn’t this terrible?” An idea says, “Isn’t this interesting?”
As a leader — or as an advocate — public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.
To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things: Show why it matters . what’s the question you’re trying to answer, the problem you’re trying to solve, the experience you’re trying to share? Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.
To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things: Show why it matters . what’s the question you’re trying to answer, the problem you’re trying to solve, the experience you’re trying to share? Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.

Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business

by Jon Steel

To be a good presenter, a good source of ideas, and a good writer, you have to be a collector: a collector of general knowledge about life-drawn from published information and your own experience-which you can cross-reference with your specific knowledge of products and people.
“You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.”
The purpose of any presentation is to take the key decision maker or makers from the place they currently occupy to the place where you want them to be.
It is a basic truth of human nature that imparting information is not enough to make someone believe. It is equally true that belief-even if that belief is passionately held, and passionately argued-is no sure indicator of behavior.
No, the best communicators, the best persuaders, are the best at what they do because invariably they are good listeners.
You have to understand exactly why they have asked you to present: why they might be dissatisfiedwith their current business partner, what keeps them awake at night, what they expect to hear from you, what they think they want to hear from you, and what they need to hear.
The final cardinal sin of the presenter is to provide too much detail. This stems from the belief that in order to succeed it is necessary to communicate absolutely everything you know, and everything that every single member of your audience might possibly want to know.
The Data Dump must be part of your preparation, not the presentation. Do it backstage, not in the show itself.”
A good presentation, like a good movie, will have a clear start, middle, and end.

Storyworthy

by Matthew Dicks

This is the trick to telling a big story: it cannot be about anything big. Instead we must find the small, relatable, comprehensible moments in our larger stories. We must find the piece of the story that people can connect to, relate to, and understand.
Don’t tell other people’s stories. Tell your own. But feel free to tell your side of other people’s stories, as long as you are the protagonist in these tales.
As you begin to take stock of your days, find those moments — see them and record them — time will begin to slow down for you. The pace of your life will relax.
Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new.
You must tell your own story and not the stories of others. People would rather hear the story about what happened to you last night than about what happened to your friend Pete last night, even if Pete’s story is better than your own.
In order to achieve this lofty goal, storytellers must do one thing, and happily for you, it’s exceedingly simple: Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story.
Don’t start by setting expectations.
All great stories — regardless of length or depth or tone — tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life. Let me say it again: Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.

The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie

To stand before an audience and make them think your thoughts after you is one of the greatest pleasures you can ever know.
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you.
The bravest know fear, but they do not yield to it.
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must “not look too good nor talk too wise.”
Do not make haste to begin — haste shows lack of control. Do not apologize. It ought not to be necessary; and if it is, it will not help. Go straight ahead. Take a deep breath, relax, and begin in a quiet conversational tone as though you were speaking to one large friend.
Assuming a virtue or a vice vitalizes it. Summon all your power of self-direction, and remember that though your audience is infinitely more important than you, the truth is more important than both of you, because it is eternal.
Know what you are going to talk about, and, in general, how you are going to say it. Have the first few sentences worked out completely so that you may not be troubled in the beginning to find words. Know your subject better than your hearers know it, and you have nothing to fear.

“Success or failure in business is caused more by mental attitude even than by mental capacity.”

Banish the fear-attitude; acquire the confident attitude. And remember that the only way to acquire it is — to acquire it.
Self-consciousness is undue consciousness of self, and, for the purpose of delivery, self is secondary to your subject, not only in the opinion of the audience, but, if you are wise, in your own. To hold any other view is to regard yourself as an exhibit instead of as a messenger with a message worth delivering.

Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo

You need data, facts, and analysis to challenge people, but you also need narrative to get people comfortable enough to care about the community that you are advocating for. Your audience needs to be willing to go with you on a journey.”
Persuasion occurs when three components are represented: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is credibility. We tend to agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. Logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics. Pathos is the act of appealing to emotions.
Inspiring communicators and the best TED presenters stick to one of three types of stories. The first are personal stories that relate directly to the theme of the conversation or presentation; second are stories about other people who have learned a lesson the audience can relate to; third are stories involving the success or failure of products or brands.
Researchers have discovered that our brains are more active when we hear stories. A wordy PowerPoint slide with bullet points activates the language-processing center of the brain, where we turn words into meaning. Stories do much more, using the whole brain and activating language, sensory, visual, and motor areas.

“Authentic happiness can only come from the long-term cultivation of wisdom, altruism, and compassion, and from the complete eradication of mental toxins, such as hatred, grasping, and ignorance.”

Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.
WHAT MAKES YOUR HEART SING? Ask yourself, “What makes my heart sing?” Your passion is not a passing interest or even a hobby. A passion is something that is intensely meaningful and core to your identity. Once you identify what your passion is, can you say it influences your daily activities? Can you incorporate it into what you do professionally? Your true passion should be the subject of your communications and will serve to truly inspire your audience.
The four elements of verbal delivery are: rate, volume, pitch, and pauses.
People cannot inspire others unless and until they are inspired themselves.

Do You Talk Funny? by David Nihill

As a good storyteller, you need to be totally human. Be vulnerable, embrace embarrassment, and vocalize failure before success.
The Joke Funnel means we start as wide as we can to make our story relatable and relevant to the audience, then get specific. In other words, we make the story relevant to everybody with a general topic, and then we make it relevant to us by connecting it to our own personal story.
Keep the following rule of thumb in mind when you are telling a story in front of an audience and building toward a punch line: a three-line span with nothing funny said is too much.
Placing the impact word at the end of the sentence is not just important for comedic effect; it applies to all key points.
People don’t invest in your business or product. They invest in you and your story. If you want people to remember what you say, tell a compelling story.
Stand-up comedians, top TED speakers, and even presidents tend to follow the same joke format for this: (1) setup, (2) punch line, and then (3) taglines.
Put the word the joke hinges on at the end of the sentence. For example, if the fact it’s a cat is the surprise or twist, don’t say, “There was a cat in the box.” Say, “In that box was a cat.” That way you’re not still talking when then audience is meant to be laughing.
Know where you want to end up (the punch line) from the outset. The last line should be the first line you write. Then work backward toward your inciting incident and setup.
The most powerful stories are not about the storyteller; they are about the person who is hearing the story.

Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln by James C. Humes

The prime time of any talk or presentation you give is during your opening words. Everyone in the audience is waiting to see what you look and sound like. Do not waste that psychological edge with trite blather! Go for the Power Opener.
Before you speak, try to lock your eyes on each of your soon-to-be listeners. Force yourself before you begin your presentation to say in your own mind each word of your opening sentence.
Stand, stare, and command your audience, and they will bend their ears to listen.
Churchill once said that a speech is like a symphony. It may have three movements but must have one dominant melody.
Clothes make a statement. The selection of garment should not be casual or by chance.
You ought to be able to put your bottom-line message on the inside of a matchbook — before you ever start at your typewriter.
Speech is theater. So dig up one apt quotation and frame it with props.
It is the insecure who feel they must spend every bit of time allotted to them to embellish their record; the self-assured don’t have to.
Successful persuaders open their messages powerfully, not with little ingratiating words of appreciation or praise.

Speak With No Fear by Mike Acker

Shift your focus. Think about them. How can you help them? How can you instruct them? How can you lift them up? How can you educate them?
If you change your perspective, invest in your preparation, and take time to practice, then I promise you, you will overcome your fear of public speaking.
People want you to succeed. Your success is their success. If you make it about them, then they will like you all the more.

“Light yourself on fire with passion, and people will come from miles to watch you burn.”

Remember Mark Twain’s words:

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.”

When your past pain no longer defines you, then your present fear begins to be eased.
Be a real version of yourself, not a poor imitation of someone else.
Where you are is not where you have to be.
ProTip: Talk to the one, but look at many.

Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun

If you’d like to be good at something, the first thing to go out the window is the notion of perfection.
In other words, be bigger than you are. Speak louder, take stronger positions, and behave more aggressively than you would in an ordinary conversation. These are the rules of performing.
The problem with most bad presentations I see is not the speaking, the slides, the visuals, or any of the things people obsess about. Instead, it’s the lack of thinking.

“Confidence, not perfection, is the goal.”

The documentary film Comedian, starring Jerry Seinfeld, is perhaps the best 90 minutes any frequent public speaker can spend in understanding how much effort is required to seem as effortless as good comedians seem.

“The body’s reaction to fear and excitement is the same…so it becomes a mental decision: am I afraid or am I excited?”

Success often stems from the ability to make whatever medium you’re in feel like something simpler and often less formal. It’s the art of making the unnatural seem natural.
It’s the mistakes you make before you even say a word that matter more. These include the mistakes of not having an interesting opinion, of not thinking clearly about your points, and of not planning ways to make those points relevant to your audience. Those are the ones that make the difference. If you can figure out how to get those right, not much else will matter.
All good public speaking is based on good private thinking.