How Storytelling Saved Me

Challenge

I have always doubt about myself as someone who could speak well on public, but

some months ago I had to face a challenge that was presenting in a startup competition

in front of important international businesspeople. The competition consisted in

building a startup from scratch in groups of 6 people, and as soon as we started, we

had a coach that helped us through all the process of building the startup. We decided

to create a task management app called Uber that uses AI to predict user´s behavior

and provide them accurate suggestions to manage their time in a better way.

Selection

When we gathered as a group, we needed to decide the two people that were about to

present the project in the competition, and that is when I took courage and accept the

challenge to be one of the presenters. I knew that speaking wasn´t my strongest point,

but I knew it was a one life chance and that I needed to engage the jury. That is when

the advisor that helped us during the project told us about storytelling, a powerful and

innovative tool to engage the audience and I knew, that this was the tool I was about to

use to get the jury on my pocket.

Application

Now, as I already knew that this was the ace up my sleeve, I ask our coach to help us

find talks of people that are good in storytelling, and that is when we met a man from

Barry Katz Ltd. a company specialized in communication and influencing people. This

man gave us some keys of how to make a great story while presenting in an innovative

way and I took them. Some hours later of this talk I started to diagram my story that

consisted of a really bad day I had because of procrastinating tasks to be done later.

The day of the presentation arrived; I told the story with this incredible tool to engage

the judges.

Insights

The results? I was amazed… I never felt more confident of myself and as good

communicating as that way when I innovated using storytelling on the pitch deck I

prepared. When I finished presenting with my partner the jury gave us their thoughts

on our presentation and our product, their response left me freezed… One of the most

important businessmen of Argentina told me that he was touched by my story as that

always happened to him. What I learn by using this innovative tool, is that by using it I

gets to people´s emotions and engage them in the best way possible as I could

empathize with them.

Approach

Throughout all the process and thanks to the incredible coach we have before the

competition, my team and I were able to use this powerful design-thinking tool that

made us highlight in the competition. We were not the winners, but we amazed lot of

people that were doubting of us, including my parents that were really emotional when

I finished the presentation and went to see them. Something that we could maybe

improve is to also use another design-thinking tool on our visual presentation, as I think

we lacked of images to let the judges understand on a better way our thinking of our

innovative idea with this task management app. But overall, I am very happy I could

present and got to know this powerful tool and know that I had made this course I have

my mind open to even more powerful tools that maybe in the future will make me be

more and more engaging and innovative in the way I speak and present my innovative

game-changer ideas.

