We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

—C. S. Lewis

As social beings, we have an evolutionary need to communicate and connect with other people. Each of us strives to belong to a group and bond with people, the same way we have a basic need for food and shelter.

Matthew D. Lieberman, a neuroscientist and educator who leads the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UCLA Department of Psychology, sees the brain as the center of our social selves. In his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, he hypothesizes that our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in the same way they evolved to experience physical pain. Emotional pain and physical pain are inextricably linked, which explains why parents have a need to keep their kids close, and why we hold on to our intimate relationships over time. When something goes wrong with a loved one, it activates neural circuitry that can cause us to feel physical pain in the chest—heartbreak. This reaction was born out of an evolutionary need to stay socially connected over the course of our lives, Lieberman contends.

Other research emphasizes the health benefits of being connected; one study¹ showed that a lack of social connection is a greater detriment to health than obesity, smoking, and high blood pressure. Social bonds actually strengthen our immune systems, as research from UCLA School of Medicine's Steve Cole shows that the same genes impacted by social connection also code for immune function and inflammation,² which is why having connections help us recover from disease faster, and may even lengthen our lives.³ People with healthy relationships have higher self‐esteem, are more empathic to others, more trusting and cooperative and, as a consequence, others are more open to trusting and cooperating with them, according to studies.⁴

Communication allows us to feel connected and helps us better understand ourselves, which is why storytelling has been an inherent, universal part of the human experience.

You can trace it back thousands of years to the days of the shaman, who told stories and sang songs around a tribal fire, conveying the history of the tribe; important news about people within it; and establishing the beliefs, values, and rules of the group. The shaman's ability to communicate to the tribe (and with the metaphysical world, connecting with spirits and relaying their messages to the larger group) led people to believe that his stories, chants, and prayers had healing powers that could cure a range of ailments.

Years later, religious leaders became our predominant storytellers and healers, delivering stories from religious texts, consoling members of the community one‐on‐one, and using prayer to heal.

And then it became musicians, poets, writers, and on‐stage performers who became the storytellers. Over the course of history, people have sat up and taken notice of the storytellers who are able to tap into the human experience, whether it was Homer, with his epic poems in the eighth century BC, Dante Alighieri's masterpiece Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century, or Shakespeare delivering a play on stage in the late sixteenth century.

These authors have endured today—as part of literature curricula—because of how the authors explored fundamental aspects of our existence. In Shakespeare's case, his plays and sonnets evoke a full range of our emotions and awaken our senses, through his presentation of timeless, relatable themes such as ambition, betrayal, revenge, jealousy, dreams, appearance versus reality, and difficulty in love. Human stories like that don't lose their magnetism, even centuries later.

In fact, directors, actors, and writers find so much value in these stories that they've adapted them in countless ways for audiences today (think of all the different versions of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Othello that exist).

Today, you can find talented storytellers in every corner of our popular culture, and they've tapped into the same elemental aspects of human existence as the great authors of our time have. Prolific songwriter and producer Max Martin, for example, has written many of the mega pop hits that get played so much on the radio (ones we're embarrassed to admit we know all the words to), including “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears, “As Long as You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys, “Bad Blood” by Taylor Swift and “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry to name just a few. Love or hate those songs, Martin's gift in writing relatable lyrics that we can't seem forget is undeniable. Martin is a masterful translator of human experience, taking emotion and common sentiments and transforming them into song.

Pollster Nate Silver is another a talented translator, turning raw data into totally original, breaking news stories about politics, sports, science and health, and culture with his website FiveThirtyEight. Steven Spielberg is a translator in film, enthralling his audience in 1975 with Jaws as much as he did with E.T. the Extra‐Terrestrial in 1982, and Saving Private Ryan in 1998 through his incredible ability to build intricate worlds for his characters. And famed photographer Annie Leibovitz can be seen as a translator, developing a strong rapport with each of her subjects to create deeply personal, intimate windows into the lives of people like John Lennon.

What can we learn from all of these examples? Every form of storytelling, whether it's a portrait, film, political speech, a musical performance, a religious sermon, a novel, a documentary or anything else, must be human in order to be great. The same holds true for marketing and advertising; you can't create desire without understanding what humans desire, and you can't shape a reputation without understanding how people think.

When approaching a new campaign or project, you need to think about the humans consuming your work before you think about the brand—this holds true whether you're a copywriter, a creative director, a brand journalist, videographer, graphic designer, or strategist.

Parts of the Internet have become a wasteland. Or, as I'm increasingly fond of saying, “The problem with the Internet is that it's boring.”

What I'm referring to: clickbait headlines, articles so stuffed with keywords that they say nothing, horrible stock photos, and the dumbed‐down articles that have been churned out ad nauseum. Think of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People‐style posts you see on so many online platforms.

The people responsible for such work are trying to game online search, or making safe bets by following the lead of other authors and rehashing the same thoughts. Some brands take the same unimaginative, uninspiring approach to content, solely focused on page views and unique visitors, when engagement and repeat visitors are arguably more important, because anyone can get eyeballs on a site (especially with a massive paid distribution budget), but few can sustain a community of engaged readers or create the kind of content that gets republished by other outlets.

The truth is, if you're doing the same content everyone else has done and praying your highly paid SEO specialist will save you, you've already lost. No one will remember your work or want to come back to your website if they've landed there.

It's human stories that are accessible but elevated that people remember. So aim to smarten your audience up, and tell stories in creative ways with as much attention to the visual vocabulary as the text. You'll earn your audience's trust, which is as valuable as currency.

Unsurprisingly, we can learn a lot from skilled public speakers about how to gain public trust and shape opinion. The best orators in history captured the power of human storytelling using emotional words and delivery that brought people solace during difficult times and hope for a better future. For marketers, it's worth exploring what they did to capture the hearts and minds of their audiences.

Learning from the Best Human Storytellers

1. Tailor your story for the situation and medium. You'll never hear someone like Barack Obama tell the same story the same way more than once. The way he shared his vision for the country and his personal story when he was running for president in 2008 was different when he was in front of a crowd of blue‐collar automotive industry workers in Michigan than when he stood before big‐time donors at a political fundraising dinner. The best storytellers know that you can't talk to everyone the same way. Online, with a multitude of storytelling media at your disposal, this becomes even more important with different audiences on each platform and tools at your fingertips. You wouldn't post the same thing on Twitter as you would on Tumblr, and you wouldn't run the same native advertisement on the New York Times website as you would in New York Magazine. Figure out who your audience is and speak their language.

2. Know when to speak. “Well‐timed silence hath more eloquence than speech,” said the English writer and poet Martin Farquhar Tupper. Timing is everything. Franklin D. Roosevelt began his fireside chats in 1933, amid a recession and banking crisis—one in four Americans was unemployed, and in some cities, unemployment was well over 50 percent.⁵ Some 9,000 banks had closed, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Americans were panicked about the future. Many didn't understand what was happening or the steps FDR and legislators were taking to pull the country out of its deep slump. It was time for the leader to restore the public's confidence. In these weekly radio addresses, FDR discussed his New Deal initiatives in an informal, conversational way. He used easy‐to‐grasp examples and analogies to explain what was going on and his plan to rebuild. But it wasn't dumbed down; given the length of words and sentences Roosevelt used, he was speaking at a near‐college level compared with the eighth‐grade level of speech used by modern‐day presidents, according to Elvin Lim, an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University.⁶ Roosevelt's chats succeeded because, more than anything, he had in mind the human beings on the other end of the radio. He began his addresses with “My friends,” not “American citizens.” At the end of his first chat, he said this, which really drove his message home: “After all, there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people themselves. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; and it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem, my friends, your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.” His fireside chats were exactly what Americans needed at the time—thousands wrote to him to thank him for breaking down complexities at an uncertain time.⁷

3. Prepare obsessively. Like an Oscar‐winning director thinks through every detail of a film before releasing it to the public, or an artist painstakingly reviews each and every centimeter of a piece of work, a great storyteller spends hours, days, and months preparing before unveiling a story to the public. Every single word matters. How long should a presentation take to prepare for? Longer than you think. According to Nancy Duarte, the communications expert behind Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, for an hour‐long presentation, presenters should spend roughly 30 hours researching, organizing, sketching, storyboarding, scripting, and revising. Then, an additional 30 hours building visual materials, such as slides, and then another 30 hours rehearsing the delivery. Yup, that's 90 hours of preparation for a mere 60 minutes. Sounds crazy, right? But think of how successful Gore's film was in putting climate change not just at the forefront of the American conversation but the global one, too.

Steve Jobs also took a meticulous, painstaking approach to preparing for his presentations. Jobs storyboarded the plot of his speeches, planned each word in detail, created presentation slides himself, reviewed product demos repeatedly, rehearsed his every move on stage and even planned for on‐stage technical failures. Appearing unfazed when his clicker failed, Jobs was in the habit of having a personal story memorized as he was waiting for his team to fix the issue so he could get on with his presentation.

With all of this planning, Jobs kept his audiences engaged the entire time, surprising them, making them laugh, and inspiring them with the power of technology. Audience members walked away believing in the power of Apple products to revolutionize the world, thanks to Jobs' theatrics and skillful delivery. During his keynotes, he avoided getting into technical specs, preferring to speak in human terms that anyone in his audience could understand; he described the iPod as “one thousand songs in your pocket” rather than “a tiny 6.5‐ounce portable music player with 5G of storage.”

Accept that your best work will take a lot of time to create and a lot of hours reviewing, revising, and collaborating with other talented people. It can't be rushed. In marketing, and strategic communications, we don't always have time on our side, but whenever possible, push back on deadlines and shift projects to other people to allow your team members to really focus on one project at a time. It will show in the quality of your work.

4. But remain flexible. Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was not scripted? He had prepared a speech, but 10 minutes in, decided to put it aside and skipped whole paragraphs. Mahalia Jackson, who had performed earlier and was one of King's favorite gospel singers, cried, “Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!” according to Drew Hansen, author of The Dream. He then said, “I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. It is a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal.’” As applause grew and began to drown him out, he raised his voice and said, “I have a dream that someday on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” He returned to the script just for the closing line: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty—we are free at last!” It was not the first time King said, “I have a dream”—he had used it a few times earlier that year—but it was by far his most well‐received.

“I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point, and just all of a sudden I decided—the audience response was wonderful that day, you know—and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I'd used many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream.’ I just felt I wanted to use it. I don't know why. I hadn't thought about it before that speech,” King told Donald Smith, a graduate student, later that year.⁸

As an orator, King was operating in a great tradition of African‐American preaching, in which improvisation and sudden inspiration played a central role. In this tradition, long hours absorbing the powerful cadences of the King James Bible and dissecting the finer points of theology, politics, and justice are meant to be brought together in unexpected, eloquent patterns of speech improvised in a public setting. By deviating from his planned speech, King was taking a chance, but he was also playing to his strengths. In a sense, he'd been preparing for that moment his entire life.

When you've prepared and you're passionate about your message and feel you have something truly important to say, just say it; odds are the world will listen.

You don't always have to stick to a script, and it doesn't always have to be perfect; some of the best messages materialize in the moment. King's core message was simple, emotional, and raw—all elements of a compelling human story.

5. Know your audience; have self‐awareness. In 1588, English troops stationed at Tilbury Fort readied for an expected invasion by the Spanish Armada. As someone who was always extremely deliberate in her words and her public approach, Queen Elizabeth I rallied the troops with one of the most powerful speeches of her career. She gave it while wearing a plumed helmet and a steel cuirass over a white velvet gown. Holding a gold and silver baton as she rode atop a white steed, historians say her look was deliberately reminiscent of several powerful female literary and mythological figures, including Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of war. Aware that she had to instill confidence and strength in her troops heading to battle—no easy feat for a woman leader, especially at a time when two unsuccessful female monarchs preceded her—her speech acknowledged her position as a woman but assured them she was as steadfast and strategic as a king. Here's an excerpt from what she said:

Many historians agree that Queen Elizabeth, who was also an accomplished poet, wrote the speech herself, as she knew exactly how to present herself to the public in a way that would resonate with her audience at that specific moment in time. Throughout her short speech, she speaks directly to her soldiers, without using ostentatious rhetoric, which the most authentic storytellers are skilled at. She began the address using “my lovely people” and expressed that she lives and would die for her kingdom: “live and die amongst you all” as a leader married to her people. She also evoked the nationalism that her troops desperately needed at the time, implying that the English had a direct connection to God that other nations don't have; “we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people,” she said. By the end of the speech, she established that she was far more than head of church and state—she was their general during the war and their savior. Ultimately, it was Queen Elizabeth's awareness of how she was perceived as a woman and what her people needed to hear at the moment that led to the power of that speech. And her physical appearance was as important as her words, which is why she dressed femininely, but fiercely prepared for war. The best storytellers don't kid themselves about who they are in the public eye—they're fully aware of how they're perceived and use their emotional intelligence to convey messages accordingly.

6. Believe in what you're saying. Hillary Clinton's 1995 speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing marked a watershed moment for women's rights as well as for her political career.¹⁰ “Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights,” were the defining words of a speech that conveyed that the issues facing women and girls are too often ignored or “silenced.” Clinton referenced many tough issues women face globally, including dowry deaths (women who are murdered or driven to suicide due to husbands and in‐laws attempting to extort women for larger dowries) and China's one‐child policy. According to the New York Times, Clinton clashed with White House aides as well as the Chinese regime in preparing for the speech, as both urged her to dilute the remarks. Well before Clinton established herself as a political powerhouse in her own right, the White House “didn't think a first lady should dive into delicate diplomatic issues,” according to the Times. Defying the wishes of her administration and upsetting Chinese leaders, Clinton spoke from the heart, and the speech gave her the global exposure she needed to set her up for a lifelong career in fighting for women's rights as a global figure. Her enduring words still carry the same weight they did 20 years ago, and her passion for making women's lives better carried across then (and it does now) because she truly believed in her message. If you're going to speak, make sure you're bullish about what you're going to say. When a storyteller is half‐hearted—whether it's in a written piece, short film, speech, or any other form of communication—it's obvious to the audience and thereby far less compelling. As the adage goes, say what you mean and mean what you say; otherwise no one will care about your message.

7. Be generous and empower your audience. The best storytellers are generous. They don't hold back. They don't let their egos get in the way. Many times, they invite the audience in to share their stories, too. Because in the end, the audience is the hero that can effect change, not the storyteller. For ages, the most skilled storytellers have empowered listeners to take action. Each orator I've mentioned inspired the audience in some way to fight harder for equal rights, to have confidence in the leader, to feel less confused and scared about the state of the world, and, in Steve Jobs's case, to purchase an iPod. In all of these cases, the orators put the audience at the center of the story because they recognized the message was greater than the presenters themselves. As Harry Truman once said, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish as long as you don't care who gets the credit for it.” Sell your vision, and let the rest take care of itself. As strategic communicators, we have to do more than sell our company or its products if we truly want people to listen. We need to sell a big idea and activate our audience's imaginations, hopes, and aspirations. We need to make them feel, imagine what's possible, and encourage them to act. In every story you tell, create tension that builds to a captivating climax and then deliver a resolution. Ask yourself, after you've said what you need to say, what do you want your audience to do? Why should they care about what you have to say?

The best stories compel an action. If you're not compelling them to engage, interact, change their behavior, or see the world differently, go back to the drawing board.

As John Steinbeck said in East of Eden: “If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I made a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

So make it about human nature.