When I was a child much to my brothers disgust our dinner table would-be filled with discussions of operations, emergency situations, things going well and things going badly in a hospital environment.  And I loved it.    I loved those stories, I love learning about medicine and the body, I enjoyed the drama of the situation.

Now, doing what I do, I realise what my parents were doing.   Number one; they were processing, they were in a stressful job and they were decompressing. More importantly, because they worked in different areas of the hospital, they were teaching and training through story.  They were saying, ‘this happened to me today, these were the circumstances, this was the scenario, this is what I learned’.  They were explaining what had happened and in the process, teaching and training the other. The things they talked about were often outside the norm, they happened infrequently, so if and when they happened again they needed to be prepared.

Now, I understand that health professionals, military personnel, and law enforcement all use this system of telling stories to decompress and as a process of teaching and training.  This is especially effective when scenarios fall outside the bell curve and happen infrequently.

Stories are an incredible way to train other people for unusual scenarios because they are about 22% more memorable than any data that you could teach anyone else.

It’s much more effective because it creates an emotional connection to the information. So, if you want to teach or train, stories are an incredible way to do that.

Do you have a way of teaching those around you using story?

Could you adapt this to help your clients?

Take Care

We’ll speak soon.