This chapter is a little different. I am going to tell you stories but we’ll talk about something that I call story triggering. Those of you who read my book would have heard about it. What is story triggering? As leaders we always want our teams to understand about what we believe in, what we value, what is the culture we want to build. But most of us, what we do is we take the opportunity of speeches or webcasts or webinars and talk about, “This is what I believe in”. Unfortunately, no one believes in what we say, people believe in what we do and story triggering is an invitation to all your leaders to believe in your values and become the heroes of stories other people tell about you. Let’s look at this. On 5th September in Vladivostok, Russia where the Prime Minister Mr. Modi was to be part of the eastern economic summit. I think that if you are not living under a stone somewhere, you’d have watched a video many times. This was where PM Modi asked the people at the summit to replace his well cushioned Sofa to match the other simpler chairs of the other attendees. Every TV channel was showing it, WhatsApp groups are forwarding it and there is no way that Mr. Modi could have gotten across the message that he believes in equality if he had just gone onto a podium and pulpit and said that. By doing that small action, by getting that huge throne kind of sofa removed and getting a chair just like everyone else, he passed that message we now tell stories about. Through those stories people get to understand what this person is all about. There is another clip of the Dutch Prime Minister which was famous. Here the Dutch PM cleaned up the coffee he dropped. He took the mop from the cleaner and mopped the floor himself. There is no way that he could have passed this message to his people in across the country that he believes that anyone who creates a mess should clean up themselves. By going into public features or webinars and webcasts but by becoming the hero of stories other people tell about him he managed to pass that message by walking the talk very visibly. That is what we call story triggering. Through this chapter I invite all of you to think about what your values and beliefs are which you want to make sure that your team understands and look at opportunities to visibly demonstrate that to story trigger your values and beliefs. That way instead of just talking about what you believe in you would have made them really understand that that’s who you are. Business Points ( Tags ) #storytelling #business #bestseller #stories #storiesatwork #primeminister #modi #narendramodi #Self-demonstration #storytrigger
