Millions of women are being encouraged to “lean in” and to pursue their goals thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s book and non-profit organization by the same name. As the Facebook COO, Sandberg’s now famous 2010 TED talk, Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders, helped to launch the movement which has sparked Lean In groups, events, and educational and corporate partnerships. Sandberg’s book, published one year ago, continues to top bestselling lists. Remarkably, Sandberg’s TED talk might have failed to inspire a generation of women had she not made one last-minute addition to her presentation.
This post is part of a series of articles based on my new book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds (St. Martin’s Press).
“I was planning to give a speech chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal,” Sandberg recently acknowledged when asked to recall her original TED talk. Shortly before taking the stage, however, Sandberg admitted to a friend that she was having a bad day because, just before leaving for her trip, her daughter had grabbed Sandberg’s leg and said, ‘don’t go.’ Sandberg’s friend suggested that she tell the story publicly. Sandberg said her initial reaction was, “Are you kidding? I’m going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg?” Sandberg quickly realized that if she wanted to encourage more women into leadership roles, she would have to be open, honest, and vulnerable. And so she began her TED talk.
Facebook COO and author, Sheryl Sandberg
I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who’s three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying,”Mommy, don’t get on the plane” thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they’re at home or whether they’re in the workforce, who don’t feel that sometimes.
Sandberg had realized that the best way to connect with people on an emotional level is through the power of story. In my analysis of 500 of the most popular TED talks (more than 150 hours), I discovered a remarkable fact: stories make up at least 65% of the content of the most successful TED presentations. In some cases, like Sheryl Sandberg’s talk, stories make up more than 70 percent of the content. Most leaders who make pitches and presentations take the opposite approach, filling their content with mind-numbing and unemotional statistics and data. But as another popular TED speaker, Brené Brown, has noted, “Stories are just data with a soul.”
Stories illuminate, inform, and inspire. Science has also shown that stories connect us in extraordinary ways. Researchers at Princeton University have found that a remarkable thing happens to your mind when you hear a story. Personal stories actually cause the brains of both storyteller and listener to exhibit what the researchers call “brain to brain coupling.” To put it simply, telling personal stories will put you in sync with your listener.
Sheryl Sandberg didn’t stop telling stories after TED. She had the same epiphany when she wrote her book, Lean In. “I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. No one — and I apologize to Wheaties — no one, no one will read this book. And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories.”
Stories are impossible to ignore and hard to forget. Stories connect us. Stories spark movements. Tell more of them.
(Carmine Gallo is an independent, objective communication expert not affiliated with TED Conferences, LLC)