Dave
Storytelling
Self Evaluation Personal Story

September 15, 2008

            My personal story centered around one of my ‘Equations of Life‘. Its main topic was how life doesn’t offer a “re-do”, and you must think before you act. The positive things accomplished in this story include good organization of story flow, structure and pace, decent audience interaction, great inflection, good placement and use of gestures, some effective use of pauses, good use of sarcasm, and ok eye contact. Some things I wish to strengthen are hitting time goal, better eye contact, comfort on stage, hand use when not using gestures, limiting my looking down, and pausing and interacting with audience when they want to not just when I think they should.
            To say story structure is important to your audience relating is a huge understatement. I feel that this was one of the strongest points of my story.  The structure of my story helped to draw in my audience by telling about a common life truth, think before you act and no re-do in life.  Also, by using myself as a bad example in the story it allowed them to relate to something they may have done in their past, even if they didn’t get it until the end.
            The flow of my story was well planned and it flowed overall very nice from introduction through building, to climax, and into resolution. I spent a lot of time massaging this story to get the flow I was looking to present. And lots of practice with voice tones, speech speed, and gestures to emphasize the important areas of the story and help to ’Paint a picture of changing emotion’ as we progressed through the story.
            I had good audience interaction, but when watching the tape, I saw more areas where I missed the opportunity to interact. I did have what I call two great times of interaction. The first one was when I was introducing the bb gun wars and the audience started to laugh and I paused and interjected with sarcasm about how I knew they thought we were stupid and how we were really ’smart’. The second time came when I was getting ready to shoot the bird and the audience gasped. The pause and reminding of “no BB’S” seemed to show that I was listening instead of just telling.
            My use of gestures was overall well placed and meaningful. The pumping of the gun, aiming at the bird both worked very well as emphasis on the section of the story. The gestures used to describe the field also looked well placed and added to the story. Another very good use of gestures was the size description of the little birds, and the whirling fingers in the air to emphasize the chaos going on in the birdcage.
            I had what I think was decent eye contact, at times; it was very good, like when I was describing testosterone. However, this area could have been much improved. I noticed when I was watching the tape; I seemed to be scanning the audience too fast. It looked like I was just looking back and forth without any meaning. While I was telling it felt like I was making good eye contact, however, it was distracting for me to watch. In the future I think it would be more effective if I slowed down when scanning for eye contact and actually ’settle’ on each eye contact for a moment or two. This should eliminate the distracting look of rapidly scanning back and forth and this should improve my audience connection.
            The biggest single thing I wish to change for my next story is the amount of times I look down. Once or twice would be good if properly placed in the story, but I was constantly looking down, then back up, and I think this hampered audience buy in and enjoyment. It gave an impression of disconnect from the audience.
            My use of hands while not gesturing needs to be addressed because I spent way too much time with my hands on my face. The hands on the face thing made me look like I was trying to hide from my audience and it made me look like I was not comfortable up there.
Two thirds of the way through the story my mouth dried up, I started licking my lips, and I was having some added trouble getting my words out. I had hoped when I was telling that it was not that noticeable, but when I watched the tape, the constant licking, and pausing to do so, not only made me look as nervous as I was, but also made it appear that I didn’t know my own story and was struggling to wrap it up. I think in the future that I will have water available if I need a drink during a pause.
            While I feel that I had two good times where I interacted with the audience, there was another that I missed.  My audience got extremely involved for the first time while I was explaining what testosterone does to the brain and I missed a very good time to pause and interact early on to build my relationship with my audience.
            The last issue I need to work on is hitting my time limit. I went over by 45 seconds. That translates to 15% longer than allowed, almost a fifth of an extra story. The hard part is, when I watch the story, I don’t see somewhere to cut that much out of the story without destroying the flow and meaning. I could have picked up the pace and tried to cram the story into the allotted time, but I think that would be detrimental to the story. In the future, I think that I will need to be more selective in my story picking to make sure that I can do the story justice in the time allowed.