We human beings love stories, be it in written form, like when we read a novel, or verbally transmitted, like we have done for centuries to pass the cold winter nights around a fire.

Stories can take the shape of fairy tales, fiction novels, mythology, gossip, movies, Netflix series, and other thousand different forms. We cannot get enough stories when we are awake, so we create even more stories when we dream in our sleep. 

We seem to think and make sense of the world in stories. It seems humans cannot get enough of their stories.

Why is that?

Why do we like stories?

I am a convinced Darwinist, so when I face a question about human or animal traits, I always look at it from an evolutionary perspective first.

The question to ask then is this: how did storytelling help humans survive and/or have more offspring? 

All animals can communicate with each other. They have some kind of language, but none as developed as humans. Many things make humans stand out in comparison to other animals, like the opposable thumb that allowed us to use tools with dexterity or the outsized dimensions of our brain, but following Harari’s thoughts in Sapiens, what really made a difference was our language and our capacity to mobilise and coordinate large groups of individuals using narratives. 

To put it in other words, we became the dominant species on our planet thanks to our capacity to tell stories.

Humans were able to gather in groups bigger than the original tribes and clans, thanks to stories. These stories allowed increasingly larger groups of people to get together, first in the hundreds, then in the thousands, and then in the millions, to work towards a common goal. 

In the beginning, these stories would be about religion and mythology, later about nationalism, philosophical currents, or political movements such as fascism or communism.

Companies like Apple or Google are fictions we have created, powerful fictions at that, like money itself, which isn’t but a story about trust that this piece of paper or metal coin holds the value that we have all agreed to give it. 

All these are stories, but essential stories that allow our societies to function and have allowed the human species to reach levels of progress and understanding of nature that no other animal has ever achieved.

The best storyteller gets the prize

We cannot go back in history and see how our ancestors benefitted from storytelling or not, but we can look at hunter-gatherer groups today. This is what some anthropologists did by studying the Agta tribes in the Philippines. 

They did several experiments, and they found out that the tribes that had better storytellers cooperated more and worked better as teams, thus getting better results from their labour. Not only did the tribes work better, but also the individuals that were better storytellers were more popular, got to mate with the best partners available and had more and healthier offspring.

Storytellers seemed to be the prehistoric equivalents of modern-day rock stars.

This is how natural selection basically works.

Compounded over generations, tribes with better storytellers and with people that were more predisposed to listen to and enjoy those stories would outperform the tribes with poor storytellers or no liking for stories. Also, individuals with a knack for storytelling would be successful and respected in their groups, and they would pass on their genes to the next generations.

Stories were helpful and made us stronger and better prepared to survive, so they became a necessary part of our lives and psyche. We evolved to like telling and listening to stories.

Even if we evolved to like stories because they helped us function as a society, the way it works is weird and surprising.

Think about it. We can spend hours lying on a sofa staring at some lights on a screen or looking at black ink characters printed on sheets of paper in what we call reading, immersed in a fictional world that makes us entirely forget what is happening around us in the real world. 

It amazes me every time I think about it.

The Art of Storytelling

We are wired to like certain types of stories.

The variety of stories we can like is vast and different people will like different types, like everything in life. Still, some common elements usually make good storytelling.

Storytelling is a valuable skill to have, whether you want to become a writer (or, god forbid, a blogger), entertain your friends after dinner, or become a great leader.

It is helpful to have the following points clear.

Clear central message

A story without a clear central message won’t engage the audience.

This is valid for a story with no message at all or with too many. It is advisable to think about the message you want to transmit, what is the main message you want your listeners or readers to get from the story, and stick to it. 

Conflict, hurdles and obstacles

Every story needs to have a conflict, obstacle, hurdle, or difficulty, or there is no story.

The best stories make us suffer and agonise with the protagonist and then be happy when they finally triumph.

This might seem more applicable to novels and fiction, but it is also valid for corporate and business storytelling. Telling about the obstacles a team or company had to endure, how they overcame them and what they learned from them is a sure way to captivate an audience.

Structure

Before I start writing a post or preparing a speech or presentation, I always think about the big ideas I want to write or talk about and their natural order for the story to flow.

You don’t need to have it all prepared word by word, but having a clear structure in your mind (or written in bullet points) makes it easier to write or tell the story.

It is also easier to follow for the audience. There is nothing worse than a story with no structure, shape or form that makes us feel lost and confused when we read or listen to it.

Make it personal

We are human beings, not robots.

We have emotions, and we have evolved to feel empathy for other human beings, so make your story personal. It will make it more authentic and human and will connect better with the audience.

Even if you are talking about the economy, politics, or business, there is always a way to connect it to your personal experience, feelings, and history. Making a story personal requires showing vulnerability and opening up, but there is nothing wrong with it. It will even help you connect better with others and learn new things about yourself.

Keep it short and to the point

There is no need to adorn your story with unnecessary words or side stories. Be concise and to the point.

People have increasingly reduced attention spans, so you will lose your audience if you flourish your story with superfluous information. In addition, your central message will get diluted and lost among all the noise. 

Engage your audience

The reason you are telling a story is to engage an audience.

You want to entertain them, help them learn something new, motivate them, or sell them something. Whatever it is, you tell the story because you want something from the audience, and you want to give them something, your story, in return. If you don’t engage the audience, you will fail. 

All the points mentioned above will help you engage and captivate your audience, but you also need to make an effort to understand who your audience is, what they need, and what they like, and then adapt your story accordingly. 

This is probably the most important tip regarding storytelling or any sort of communication: know your audience and adapt the story to it.

The hero’s journey

Some anthropologists have studied what is known as the Hero’s journey. This is a sort of template that is often followed by different mythologies and stories, from Homer’s Odysseus to Star Wars or Harry Potter. 

Many stories that we find captivating seem to share some elements of this journey.

There is always a hero who has an uneventful and quiet life, which is disrupted by an event. The hero receives a calling, which he or she initially ignores, but finally goes on an adventure, faces some challenges or crises, and comes home victorious and transformed, with a learning or new development.

There is something in the human psyche that makes us enjoy stories that follow this pattern.

Analyse the great fiction stories that have captured our imaginations over the centuries. You will usually find some elements of the hero’s journey, if not all. We seem to enjoy stories about a hero who faces some crisis that ends up changing them. 

Life is a journey of self-development, self-discovery, and personal growth that only ends with death.

What makes us human is that desire to improve and get better. There are many tools to learn, grow, and know ourselves and others better, and storytelling has been one of the most important ones from the beginning of time. 

Pay more attention to the stories that captivate you. Listen to what they tell you, and try to become a better storyteller yourself. We have evolved to love stories, and we will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Being a good storyteller can help you in many aspects of life, even if it no longer will give you the rock star aura of ancient times. 

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“Computers are useless. They only give you answers”

Pablo Picasso, 1964

When Picasso uttered those words almost sixty years ago, he probably didn’t suspect the vast amount of answers computers would give us. We can look at a map on a handheld device that tells us where the closest restaurants are and what other consumers think about them; we can access an online encyclopedia updated with new world events as they happen; we have access to all the books ever written, all the songs ever played, all the movies ever filmed and pictures of all Picasso’s paintings. 

We can get a mind-blowing amount of information through a device that fits in our pockets, but Picasso’s words still ring true today. Computers are better than ever at giving us answers, but they don’t give us questions. 

And questions are the source of knowledge, learning, and personal growth.

A good question is worth a million good answers

In his book The Inevitable, author Kevin Kelly thinks questioning will be one of the 12 trends shaping the future. Here he explains why:

“A world of super smart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question. What makes a perfect question? Ironically the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. (…) 

The technologies of generating answers will continue to be essential, so much that answers will become omnipresent, instant, reliable, and just about free. But the technologies that help generate questions will be valued more. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.”

When you have all the answers you are looking for at your fingertips, asking the right questions becomes increasingly important. As we will see below, coaches are master question-makers, so good coaches will be increasingly sought after in a world full of answers.

Intelligence comes from curiosity and from being able to ask the right questions. We overvalue all the answers we get, but we undervalue questioning. Good questioning is a rare skill, and we don’t give it the importance it deserves. 

Good questions create new fields of knowledge and new realities.

It was a good question (“why did this apple fall onto my head?”) that piqued Isaac Newton’s curiosity to work out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

It was another good question (“what would you see if you were travelling on a beam of light?”) that got Einstein to reflect on it for years and finally come up with the theory of special relativity that would supersede Newton’s laws.

But good questions aren’t only essential for scientific discoveries and progress; we also need them for our personal growth and to live a happy and fulfilling life.

Asking the right questions for a better life

Two thousand five hundred years ago, Socrates sought to find the path towards a good and virtuous life by asking the right questions. The Socratic method centred on asking questions to stimulate critical thinking, discarding some hypotheses due to their inherent contradictions, so only the best ones would remain. Through questioning, the questioned discover their true beliefs; only through questioning may the questioned achieve wisdom.

From Socrates to Freud’s psychoanalysis in the 20th century, there is a long tradition of getting to know ourselves better by asking the right questions. 

Questions like these have occupied the minds of great thinkers and common people alike for centuries:

“What is the meaning of life? And its purpose? How can I live a virtuous life? How can I be happy? Where does consciousness reside? What is love?”

We are yet no closer to getting a satisfying answer to many of these questions, and that’s because they probably don’t really exist. Good questions don’t have easy or evident answers. 

Living a good life means finding your answers to these questions, but this takes time. This takes a lifetime. Life is what happens while you are finding the answers to these questions. It is the path that matters, not the destination, and the path is about finding the right questions and thinking about the answers. It doesn’t really matter whether your answers are correct. That’s not the point.

Coaching or the art of asking powerful questions

Being a philosopher or a scientist requires you to ask good questions, but I consider coaching to really be the art of asking powerful questions. A good coach asks the right questions at the right moment, and these questions better be powerful, or the coach won’t be doing a good job.

Unlike mentoring, where a more experienced or senior professional (the mentor) imparts their wisdom and guides a mentee by giving them advice, coaching is based on the premise that the coachee has the answers within them. The coach guides the coachee to get to their answers without giving any advice by listening, paraphrasing, and especially by asking the right questions.

This is what makes coaching so empowering and so powerful. The coach doesn’t have the answers; the coachee does. The coachee is whole and unique, and they, and nobody else, know what is best for them. The coach “only” needs to listen actively, sometimes paraphrase what they just heard, and ask powerful questions. It sounds easy and straightforward, but doing it well is difficult because it is an art.

What is a Powerful Question?

Powerful Questioning is one of the original competencies of the coach defined by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). The ICF describes the competency as follows:

“Ability to ask questions that reveal the information needed for maximum benefit to the coaching relationship and the client.

1. Asks questions that reflect active listening and an understanding of the client’s perspective.
2. Asks questions that evoke discovery, insight, commitment or action (e.g., those that challenge the client’s assumptions).
3. Asks open-ended questions that create greater clarity, possibility or new learning.
4. Asks questions that move the client toward what they desire, not questions that ask for the client to justify or look backwards.“

This is fine, but it doesn’t fully illustrate the weight, complexity, and awesomeness of a powerful question. Paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart when discussing hard-core pornography in a Supreme Court Case, it is not easy to define it well, but you know it when you see it. It’s the same with a powerful question; you know one when you get it asked.

Coaches help their coachees get their insights through powerful questioning. Any person who has been at the receiving end of good coaching practice knows those aha! moments when a coach asks a question that makes them think, look deep inwards and learn something completely new about themselves. We don’t always see some evident things about ourselves and our deeply ingrained limiting beliefs because we are sitting on top of them. It is complicated for us to see them. But then comes a good coach who asks the right question, and zas! you see it. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and after that insight, you can then move into defining actions that will get you closer to your goals. That’s the secret recipe for good coaching: listening, questioning, insight, and action.

In a world where more and more answers are readily available and, as Kelly puts it, are “cheap and plentiful,” asking the right questions will be an increasingly important art. Scientifics, academics, and philosophers need to know what kind of questions to ask in their search for truth, but all the rest of us also need to know what questions to ask about ourselves and the kind of lives we want to live. A coach is best-suited to help you find those questions and start walking the never-ending path towards the answers.

The Robocoach is still far off

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the future of coaching. Somewhat provocatively, I stated then that it was easy to foresee a near future in which an AI-based coach, let’s call it the Robocoach, would replace human coaches, as at the end of the day, the heavy lifting in the process is done by the coachee. The coach “only” listens, paraphrases, and asks questions.

Previsibly, I got some deserved flak from some of my coach friends, who believed I was unjustly oversimplifying and dehumanising our role as a coach. It is true, coaching is simple, but the simplest things are often the hardest to do well.

Coaches “only” listen and ask questions, but finding the right, powerful question, that question that will produce the insight the coachee needs at that very moment, that’s an art. That’s why it is going to be so difficult for a machine to imitate it. 

Picasso, who knew a thing or two about art, was prescient when talking about the capabilities of the then-nascent computing technology. He knew they could only give you answers and not questions, and that, although important and useful, doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things. He was right, and that’s why the arrival of the Robocoach won’t happen any time soon.

If you want answers, get a computer. If you want powerful and useful questions, get a coach. A human coach, of course. 

Read more: Coaching questions: how to make them powerful and when to use them

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