- Lists have become too faddish. The 8 Communication Strategies That Ensure You Get Paid On Time. The 5 Phases of Team Development. The 5 Most Common Sales Objections and How to Handle Them. The 3 Simple Steps to a Better You. 7 Things All Negotiators Need to Plan For. The 10 Rules for Being a Great Managers. 6 Wardrobe Musts for the Business Professional. All on top of the 3 things I am supposed to bring home for dinner today, the 4 critical competencies my company wants me to master, the 16 people I need to call today, and the 184 emails in my inbox. While any one list might be exactly what I need, I’ll never remember it because the cumulative effective of swimming in a sea of lists is that no one list is memorable anymore. Want proof? Ask yourself how many of the 10 commandments you can recite. Yes, those 10 commandments. Can you do it?
- When we need to recall critical information, we recall stories, not lists. Lists make things easy to teach, but hard to learn. And really, teaching isn’t about teaching… it’s about learning. I can memorize a list, sure, but that list gets parked in my brain in a place that does not get accessed when I’m under pressure—because I respond to pressure emotionally, not intellectually—and so in the moment, that list isn’t there for me. It remains hidden by a veil of emotion. You know what gets through the veil? Emotionally charged lessons. Stories. My last success or failure. The power of AA’s famous 12 steps isn’t in memorizing what they are, it’s in living them and associating the emotional rush of success with accomplishing each one.
- I don’t like being marketed to like I’m an idiot, and lists used in sales presentations make me feel stupid. Let’s take “3 Simple Steps to a Better Me.” Really? I’ve been 3 simple steps away all this time and I didn’t know it? And now you want me to pay you to learn what the steps are? You really want me to pay you to tell me something simple? Or are you pandering to me, knowing full well that these three things aren’t really that simple after all? Either way, I already don’t like you, and we haven’t even met yet.
- Ubiquitous listing makes it difficult to train others to handle ambiguity, and that is one of the biggest things folks are struggling with right now with the younger generation: if everywhere I go I am told that there is a 3-, 4-, or 5-step process to follow, then when I get into a new situation, I assume that there is a new process to follow and I don’t know it yet… so I stall. Lists may be great descriptors, but as teaching aides, they actually train students to expect structure, and limit students’ abilities to live without it.
So what should you do? Make sure that you offer something of value. Focus me on the problem you want to help me solve, not the number of steps in the process of solving it. Match your delivery to your content. Some content lends itself nicely to lists. Most doesn’t. Use stories. Not just anecdotes for punch, but I mean an overall narrative. Tell me the story of me, and how following your process leads me to a different outcome than I will achieve on my own. You may use numbers (“…wait 3 days…”) or mini-lists (“…3 things to keep in mind at this stage are…”), but on the whole, you’re telling a story. With a beginning, middle, and end; with characters I care about, a challenge, a climax, and a satisfying conclusion.
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 