Story telling in a tour

14/7/2015

There comes a period I become so skeptical and turn to doubt my career. It’s when I realize that information a tour guide provide is not necessarily exact. Nobody cares if this king died in 1845 instead of, say, 1900. In a real business world, providing wrong information means you are a fraud. Not in a tour though.

However, in the end everybody has a specific role and I am quite satisfied with the conclusion that a guide carries with him or he various roles, one of which being an entertainer, a storyteller. In other words, your stories may not be exact, but they should be captivating. A great tour guide is also a great story teller.

Regarding this, Kelsey Tonner, an acclaimed tour leader from Canada shared some insights with us:

Let’s listen to him and see what we can filter out of it:

“Hi there, it’s just be 30 degree Celsius where I am right now. Just pretty warm for me. And I realize in this video I don’t need to wear pants. So this week, just shorts.

Hi it’s Kelsey from Beabetterguide.com and very exciting to welcome to ….edition for a community Q&A. This is a …to ….from Chicago area. She leads tour there and reached out last week asking about story telling and actually sharing some of her tips and how she uses story telling on her tour. And I though this is a great chance to weigh in on how important story telling is to being a great guide.

So stories are so important and central to human experiences. Before we had writing, we passed our most important knowledge through stories. Great speakers, if you think of any great speakers, they use stories, they get across a point, and say bare bone facts or things like this. And many schools, business schools for example, like Harvard or John Hopkins business school use case studies. Centrally story telling helps make their lessons more sticky. In this way you are business owner with your protagonist through struggles or challenges in a business world and then there is a resolution or outcome and students learn and tease out the morals and lessons from that story. So stories are extremely, extremely powerful and you definitely wanna use them on your tour. Let’s take a look at 4 important things you can use to tell better stories.

What is the message?

What is the most important information or message that you wanna get across to your group? You are obviously choosing to share some information with some people on your tour. But what is the most important message? We think of this sometimes as the morals, maybe some insights or lessons to be drawn from that. Maybe it’s for humor. Whatever that main message is, it’s gotta be clear. Because wait a second that will allow you to cut out the fat out of your stories. Anything that doesn’t contribute to that main message can be cut out, you can be a much more effective story teller. Quick example, I was leading a tour in France and we started our days on a hilltop where …. defeated United army of the……This is a very very important battle. So of course there is a ton of facts that I can share about that battles, the details. But they key message that I wanna get across was a few points:

1. How important this battle was for the future of Europe.
2. How victories for the Romans wasn’t certain. This is a kind of tension we take for granted now but actually wasn’t certain.

and lastly was the affects of that, the consequences of that battle echo until this day. So these were three big things that were my message.

Who is your audience?

Every story telling exercise should begin with: Who is in the group that I am telling the story to because if I am talking about a building, I am gonna tell very different stories to groups of children and people from general public. Maybe a group of architects or something like that.

You always want common reference points for your audience. You want to be able to relate to the protagonist in some ways or relate to the struggle. So back to my example of the biking trip in France. So I knew right away that these weren’t history bugs or this isn’t an archeology tour or anything like that. So I tried to keep the tour short and I keep the focus on Julia Cease, someone who most of the groups probably heard of. And I am really focused on the human struggles between these battles that Julia Ceaser was facing in that battle.

Show. Don’t tell

Always show. Don’t tell. So a great story teller will use a visual language and sensory language to really get people immersed in that setting where stories are taking places. So, for example we are talking about the… I had to imagine that they were rising on that camp on top of the hill. They looked down on the mist and see that romance and campaign. And the smell of campfires and shoots. And… of horses. And you’re looking down and you see the glint of the medal of the Roman ….Little details like this, visual language will set the setting much better than a simple day or description or anything that wasn’t in this…So always use visual language as much as possible.

Practice

And practice. That’s one of the most important thing, honestly. If going onto your stories or facts or information you get on tour might tease out some characters, some tension, and plot. And plots show the short stories over and over until they are comfortable. Practice with your friends, your videos until you are comfortable with. Because story telling issuch a huge subject, I want to pop out a few more “do” and “don’t” for story telling. So let’s take a look:

So in your comments below, let me know your best story telling tips.

How do you tell great stories on tour?

Share this video if you are inspired!