Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge and Selection

As a psychologist, I prepared a presentation on OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) for a seminar to  be held in front of psychology students. They heard some basics of anxiety and compulsive disorders  before, but the purpose of this course was an in-depth presentation of the causes and treatment  possibilities of this disorder.   In contrast to some other disorders like somatoform disorders or schizophrenia, OCD is pretty well  known and even used in everyday life to emphasize ones preference for order and structure, for  example sorting pencil after the rainbow colour scheme, arranging office supplies evenly and right  angles to each other. It even has made its way into meme culture.   My challenge and goal here were to find an accessible way to explain this complex disorder to the  students on the one hand and on the other hand to demonstrate the severity of OCD that has  nothing in common with the funny memes.

Application

I decided to use a PowerPoint presentation as a medium for my presentation to use visualization as  well to tell my story.  The story I prepared started lighthearted: I showed them some OCD related  memes and comics, keeping in mind that it is important to know your audience. They seemed  interested and I gained their attention, so I proceeded to explain the key symptoms of the disorder  and the negative impact on the individual’s life and psychological stress it causes. To illustrate I  showed them a short video of an affected person – let’s call her Jane.  It seems to make them think.  “So, how does this disorder occur? What are its causes?” I asked. How can we help the affected  people, like Jane in the Video, to get out of this vicious cycle? Asking these questions in combination  with the real-life example prepared them for the hard facts of neurobiology and kept their  engagement. After lying down the biological basics, I proceeded to psychological constructs and  treatment possibilities – you have to understand the problem to come to a solution! Now knowing  all the facts, you must not forget the individual – Talking about interventions, it is extremely  important to empathize with the affected person, like Jane,  to be able to understand what is  possible and what can be achieved for the individual. That is the reason why I showed them another  video example and opened the discussion about intervention techniques.

Insights & Approach

What I have learned using storytelling very consciously and deliberately is that is not just more  engaging and easier to follow for the audience, but it is also easier to present! Once I had my  structure clear and prepared, it was easy to write down my talk and to connect one topic with  another.  Another important aspect I learned in this course is to think about your audience – who  are they? What are they interested in? How do they communicate? I feel like considering this  improved my presentation even more.

Also, using real-life examples helped the audience to grasp the challenges of an affected person and  to empathize with them. This gave the seminar and the presentation a real cause – maybe even a  cause for a professional career in this field.

Given the positive feedback I received after the presentation and my own experience preparing and  doing the presentation, I will definitely use storytelling in upcoming talks again. In my opinion, you

should always use storytelling because no matter which topic you are talking about, you want to be  heard and listened to. You want to achieve something with your talk – and storytelling is a great way  to do that.

