Introduction: Stories That Stick by Kindra Hall

Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business by Kindra Hall is a guidebook that emphasizes the power of storytelling in business. The book is about how to use stories to connect with customers, motivate employees, and grow businesses.

Hall breaks down the art of storytelling into four unique Story types:

1. Value Stories: These explain the values of your company or product.
2. Founder Stories: These narrate the origin and history of your company.
3. Customer Stories: These showcase the experiences of your customers with your product or service.
4. Purpose Stories: These describe the bigger picture and the impact your company aims to have on the world.

Through these categories, Hall provides practical advice on how to craft compelling narratives that can engage audiences, build trust, and ultimately drive success for businesses.

Summary of Stories That Stick by Kindra Hall

“A perfectly placed, impeccably delivered story can transport a person to a place beyond interested, straight past paying attention, and into a state of complete captivation. The “can’t look away” kind.”

For a story to have an impact on your business, it must be a good one. Every business needs four good Stories — value, founder, purpose, and customer. Kindra Hall provides the formula for creating each story to keep the audience engaged.

The Gap in Your Business

“The goal of a business is to profitably deliver value to people, to get a product or service from point A (the business) to point B (the people who will use it). That’s it.”

The gap is the space between what you want and where you are. One of the most obvious gaps in business is the void between the customer and the company. How do you get your product or service into the hands of the people who need it? The sales gap is just one gap in your business. You can also find gaps between an entrepreneur and investors, between recruiters and prospective employees, between leaders and executives.

For your business to function properly, you need to bridge the gap.

“Those who bridge the gaps best, win. If you can sell better, pitch better, recruit better, build better, create better, connect better—you win. Bridge the gaps, win the game.”

Before you can bridge the gap, you need to build a bridge.

3 Main Elements to Build a Strong Bridge

1. The best bridges must capture attention and captivate the audience, so they know the bridge is there.
2. Influence is the means by which you compel the audience to take the action you desire.
3. The best bridges transform the audience, creating a lasting impact and leaving the audience changed, so they never even consider returning to the other side of the bridge. This closes the gap forever.

People are bad at building bridges. They often focus on one element and maybe two, and seldom three. You need all the elements.

Attention, Influence, and Transformation

Companies lament about the short attention span of their audience. They often struggle to incorporate a long-form story because they think their audience has a short attention span shorter than a goldfish. You’ve probably heard something similar before, but Kindra Hall says the whole goldfish thing is a myth.

Also, blaming the audience for having a short attention span only shifts the responsibility away from your company (message creator). You don’t have to wrestle attention away from the audience. Instead, it can be given freely without the audience realizing.

“The storytelling process is a co-creative one. As the teller tells the story, the listener is taking the words and adding their own images and emotions to them. Yes, the story is about certain characters in a certain setting, but listeners will fill in the narrative with their own experiences until the lines between the message and the recipients are blurred.”

Stories are also inherently persuasive. After catching listeners’ attention, the story influences them to adopt the perspectives within the story. Resistance dissipates. It causes consumers to fall in love with the product, recognize the worth of the service, and have a strong desire to take action. This is a desirable way to cross the bridge.

Story can transport listeners into the story (attention). The more engrossed the audience becomes in the story, the more likely they’ll adopt the perspectives in the story (influence).

Research shows that once the audience returns from the story they’re changed (transformation). The transformation has a long-lasting impact. The lasting impact is inherent in well-told stories. The audience wants to share the story.

Bridging the gap in business may seem like a transaction to move customers from point A to B. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutiae to lose touch with the bigger, more noble cause. Refocusing the message taps into the transformative power of storytelling.

Four Components of a Great Story

1. Identifiable characters.
2. Authentic emotion
3. ​A significant moment
4. ​Specific details

Identifiable Characters

A character is not a company name. A story needs a single or several single separate characters the audience can identify with and connect to. A company needs an identifiable character, not a hero.

Authentic Emotion

Emotion is not what the story receiver experiences. But rather the emotion the character or the inherent in the story feels. Through that emotion, the audience or story receiver experiences empathy with the story. No emotions means no empathy.

Significant Moment

This is a specific moment in space, time, or circumstances that sets the story aside from the rest of our existence. It’s zooming in to give the audience a better view.

“For a story to be compelling, it should include a specific moment in time or physical space.”

​Specific Details

Using specific details shows how well the storyteller knows the audience.

“The specific details component involves the use of specific, descriptive, sometimes unexpected details and imagery that are relevant to the intended audience in an effort to create and draw the listeners into a world that sounds familiar to their own. The finer the detail, the better. The strongest, stickiest stories are those that master this final component.”

The Steller Storytelling Framework

As I was reading Stories That Stick, I was reminded of the Hero’s Journey. The Steller Storytelling Framework comprises the following three components.

1. Normal: Things are how they are.
2. Explosion: Something happens.
3. New Normal: Things are different.

You need all three components for a good story.

Finding Stories

Finding your stories is a two-step process.

1. Collecting the story.
2. Choosing the story.

Story collection is about generating story ideas whether they’re any good or appropriate or useful or even tellable. It’s about brainstorming.

Not all stories will work for every situation. That’s why story choosing is so important.

Good story finding is a combination of both collecting and choosing.

Crafting Your Story

If you’ve done the work from the previous chapters of the book, you’ll have:

“A collection of story ideas: the seeds of potential stories that you can use to captivate, influence, and transform. The second is a singular story idea: one that you chose from the collection as the best possible story idea for the job at hand.”

Now it’s time to put the storytelling framework and components to work: Normal, explosion, and new normal. Start in the middle with Explosion. Stories often start here. You don’t have a story until an explosion. We recognize the normal after we see it in contrast to the explosion and new normal.

Once you identify the pivotal moment, it’s time to go back to the beginning. Crafting the normal is the most fun and most important piece of the story process. Use the components of a great story.

If you take the time to get the explosion and normal right, the new normal writes itself.

Conclusion: Stories That Stick by Kindra Hall

A well-crafted story goes beyond mere words. It becomes a bridge, spanning gaps between companies and customers, founders and investors, and leaders and teams. The Steller Storytelling Framework unveils the structure behind narratives, and the insights into System 1 and System 2 thinking have provided a strategic approach to communicate value effectively.

The book shows businesses how to humanize their brands, inspiring confidence and trust through founder stories, and aligning teams through purpose stories that transcend the transactional. The importance of emotion, specific details, and the co-creative storytelling process has been emphasized, painting a comprehensive picture of how stories can capture attention, influence behavior, and create transformations that echo long after the tale is told.

With the knowledge gleaned from Stories That Stick, storytelling becomes a cornerstone of communication, bridging gaps, and creating connections that withstand the challenges of the ever-evolving business landscape.

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Next Steps

Wondering what to do next, you can do all of:

1. Buy my new book, Leadership Reading: Spilling the Tea on How Top Leaders Read

2. Buy Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business by Kindra Hall

3. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel

4. Join the Art of Learning Membership Site

5. Download Unlock Your Genius Power Reading Tips Sheet

6. Buy me a cup of coffee!

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