We Live Our Stories and Other's

 Have you ever felt a deep sense of emotional connect when someone is narrating a situation? Did you ever relate a personal story to an issue your friend,teacher, parent or trainer is narrating? I'm sure we face such feelings multiple times in our daily life.

Learning occurs when we listen to life experiences of others. Listening is a powerful mind tool. Research suggests that we remember around 25 to 50 percent of what we have heard. 

A great deal of material is available on storytelling and learning how to do it better, in today's times. Adults learn from each other everyday through stories. So we are actually storytelling in our everyday lives, always. We have stories at workplace, in webinars, in classrooms, in training rooms, even the media, always, tells us a story.

By story I do not mean pure fiction. Stories mean incidents which are either real or fictional, but they leave us with lessons to learn from. If you want to enhance your learning, then listen to other's stories, read people and their emotions. We read biographies of eminent people as those are impactful life stories.

A great deal of knowledge will be available that ways. A few tips to do that is:

a. Acknowledging the speaker with appropriate gestures and words will encourage the speaker to be detailed in his narrative.

b. See how the story relates to your own life situation. It may be that you foresee such situations in future too.

c. Focus on the bottom line. Prepare a gist of the story in your mind so that you have a take away.

d. Reflect on what the main characters did in the story, what were their actions, intentions and the emotions they carried. How could or would you have done it differently if you get into such a situation.

e. Lastly, apply the learning practically. You have to learn from other's experience and put the lessons to use.