Telling stories is the most powerful strategy you have for helping people understand your ideas, adopt your recommendations, or buy your products. Stories have amazing effects on viewer attention. That attention is everything when you want someone to remember something, make a change, or take action.

Not a believer yet? Try this experiment:

In the middle of a talk, pause for a couple seconds and say these magic words: “Let me tell you a story.” Then, pause again and watch the reaction. Even if only half the audience was paying attention before, it’s an absolute guarantee that, now, every single eye in the place will shift to yours because of that single word: story.

The reaction is involuntary. People don’t even realize the shift occurs. Without even thinking, they pause and wait expectantly for what comes next—the story.

Now, if regular verbal stories have that kind of riveting impact, imagine what happens when you both tell and show a story at the same time. That’s a process called a picture story. It combines the mesmerizing influence of verbal storytelling with a progressive series of explanatory images that literally illustrate the story as it unfolds.

Such step-by-step visual detail gives the feel of reading through a child’s picture book. Remember those? The images bring the narrative to life, providing an explanatory depth beyond the reach of mere words.

If not doing so already, absolutely right now this instant begin integrating picture stories into your presentation materials. Show the pictures full-screen, without text, and fill in explanatory details verbally.

Want to experience the difference between a regular story and picture story? Try this:

You likely are a coffee drinker, or at least you’ve seen that black liquid before. You may even consider yourself a coffee expert, a connoisseur of java ... but do you really know the story of coffee? Can you see it in your mind or would you do better with the aid of pictures? Let’s find out. We’re going to take a tour of a coffee plantation in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

First you’ll get only a verbal tour by reading the story immediately below.Then go HERE to download the same story sequentially illustrated with pictures (in a PDf document). The words in the two story versions are exactly the same but you'll likely see a big difference in effect. So will your audiences.

We’re walking along the dirt streets of a Costa Rican village, preparing to take a rickety old van up a bumpy mountain road to reach a coffee plantation that offers guided tours. Our only experience with coffee beans until now has been the dark brown little nuggets available in bags on grocery store shelves. So, what does coffee actually look like during the growing and harvesting phases? Is the coffee plant a vine, a shrub, a bush or a tree?

As it turns out, coffee plants are short trees grown close together and trimmed to be the size of large bushes—just tall enough for a harvester to easily reach most of the beans.

In the plantation we are visiting, workers harvest the beans by tossing them into a basket worn around their waist. They are paid by the weight of their full baskets.

And those beans—they are not brown at all, but various shades of green, yellow, and red, clustered along the branches of trees, kind of like bunches of grapes on a vine. This coloring is a thick outer coating that must be stripped off after harvesting. Bright red beans are ready to pick.

The harvested beans pass initially through a long auger, a trough-like machine that separates the large ripe beans from any plant parts and immature beans that accidentally find their way into the mix.

Then, the beans are fed through a jagged, serrated, drum-like machine that strips off the outer coating, to reveal the pale green core bean inside. One might suspect that these inner cores are soft like the inside of a raw acorn or walnut, especially considering how easy it is to crack a roasted coffee bean with one’s teeth, but don’t be fooled. These little juicy-looking guys are so hard that they literally will break off a tooth if chewed raw.

Newly shelled beans are dried for a long period of time on shelves in green houses, usually for more than a year so that they age naturally. If you were to grind the beans at this stage, they would have the appearance of wheat flower and would have practically no flavor at all if brewed.

The flavor comes only from the roasting process … and certainly we coffee fanatics are sensitive to that fact. The amount of roasting—light or dark—makes a huge difference to the final taste of our favorite brew.

That’s our coffee tour. Go take the picture tour and see how your imagination faired. In all likelihood, the pictures will add a whole new level of depth and detail.

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