It first hit me when my daughters were young. As their father, I felt it my responsibility to share the lessons I learned the hard way, hopefully to prevent them from making the mistakes I made. But whenever I started to hold forth, their eyes glazed over.
I should have known. I’ve always been an educator, from lecturing to college students on Shakespeare to delivering seminars on management to executives. In order to succeed in my career and retain a shred of self-respect, I needed people to listen to me, and I quickly learned that my valuable insights went for naught if I wasn’t entertaining as well.
The data back up my conclusion. Attention to a presentation drops dramatically after only about four minutes and only rises again when the audience hears, “in conclusion. ”Forty-five minutes of my fifty-minute lectures were a waste of everyone’s time.
I often find the same dynamic when I’m engaged in a one-on-one conversation, particularly when there is a disagreement. Rather than listening to each other, we both seem to just be biding our time until it’s our turn to speak.
Socrates got it. When asked at the Symposium (Greek for drinking party) to offer his wisdom on love, he responded, “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed … from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.” He preferred instead to have a dialogue where he could use questions to elicit understanding, “kindling the flame," as he put it.
We can change channels and zone out when someone is lecturing us. But the minute a question is asked, it grabs our attention because we need to become actively involved to answer it.
But there was another approach he used as well: he told stories. The Symposium is a story about a drinking party, and it opens with Glaucon asking his friend Apollodorus about the speeches in praise of love given at the party. We too want to hear Apollodorus’ answer to the question, and the suspense as the story unfolds holds our attention.
Today we know from neuroscience that we process our experience of the world as stories, and when someone tells us a story, we mimic their pattern of brain activation. Rather than being a detached audience, the story becomes our own. We are at that drinking party with the Athenians.
The story goes down easier than a presentation. We’re not being asked to agree with an argument, but simply to entertain the story. While it’s much less coercive, its effect on our thinking is much more profound.
Knowing that no one cares what I have to say requires me to be more strategic. I can’t simply pour my ideas into the empty vessel that is my listener. Instead, I have to think about the best way to get them to embrace my point of view. Questions and stories that pose questions just work better.
My daughters quickly learned about our Aunt Bessie. She could have been a great ballerina, as my daughters aspired to be, if she had been more careful about eating junk food. She was able to win that Nobel prize because she did her homework every night when she was in middle school.
It was only when they were in their mid-teens that they asked me one day, “We really don’t have an Aunt Bessie, do we?” Of course, my response was, “That reminds me of a story….”