Four Ways to be like Adele

Wouldn’t it be great, when someone asks you to introduce yourself, if you didn’t feel like you were reaching for that thing to say that magically hits the bullseye? What if you already had a few stories that you had curated and prepared, from 30 seconds to three minutes long?

Every time Adele releases an album it is named after her age—19, 21, 25, 30. The songs are stories of times in her life. So why not take this time over August to create your own albums—not songs, but stories, that encapsulate something about you in the different times in our lives? In fact, why wait for the rest of August—let’s start now!

Take a moment to think back into your own story vault. And as you remember them, write them down as headlines, like episodes from Friends. Here are some examples:

‘The one with that disastrous job interview…’
‘The one with my first day on the job’
‘The one with Bohemian Rhapsody in a karaoke bar’
‘The one where I missed the plane’

I am going to give you some headlines about stories in my life and as you read them, allow your mind to wander and think of stories from your own life.

Here are my headlines, with my age for each one.

21: ‘The one where I hijack a body-sculpting performance in front of 5,000 people’
22: ‘The one where I turn up to my first day as a teacher, late and in trainers’
25: ‘The one where I become the singing supply teacher’
26: ‘The one where I am a hand model for the Power Rangers’
28: ‘The one where I am very nearly a backing singer for the Spice Girls’
31: ‘The one where I coach my first client’
32: ‘The one where I become a barista in Brick Lane’
32: ‘The one where I give up acting and go full time on Amplify’
36: ‘The one where I nearly lost Microsoft as a client’
40: ‘The one where I ask a billionaire what he does for a day job’

All of these stories I can tell in 90 seconds and three minutes. And this is how you do it:

1. Have a beginning—paint the picture.
   ' I was cycling on a rainy day in Oxford after lectures, when I got a phone call from my wife.'
   As soon as you do that you find yourself speaking in story. Then keep speaking in story.
   
2. Bring as much picture as you can to the story, and how you felt about what was going on. And keep going until the end.
   
3. The most important thing is that you end confidently.
   To my Microsoft story I say, ‘If I had deleted that email I wouldn’t have gone around the world to Dubai, South Africa, Brazil and India coaching the WindowsPhone sales team.’
   Allow a pause as the sentence ends and then stop.
   
4. Now find a friend and start to share. See which ones stick.
   Let August be your month of storytelling prep. And then bring it to your clients and your colleagues in September.

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