Business Storytelling Quotes

“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”
― Jimmy Neil Smith

“As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you…
* are already being taken seriously in some way
* have found your place (professionally or personally)
* believe strongly in something relevant to your idea
* are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways
* are finding ways to be useful in the world
* are finding ways to achieve more of what you value
* have developed mastery and control
* are participating in interesting things
* and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others.”
Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“When you’re trying to communicate a big, audacious concept, it’s helpful to remember that where data falls short, a story might close the gap, and where story alone is not persuasive enough, data can make up the difference.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The majestic whale travels the seven seas piping its unique song in the hopes of finding its tribe. The other whales in the sea can hear the solitary whale. But the song to them is foreign and unfamiliar. They’re not resonating on the same frequencies and so, it seems, there can be no reciprocity. The creature carries on, searching high and low for a sign of recognition and response.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Communicators begin with generous intent and then surrender the work to the audience to do with as they will, including identifying and resonating with the work in their own unique ways.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Our imagination tells us that being as connected as we are—the ease of travel, technological advances and pooled intelligence—should have produced better results for more people than we’re now seeing.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Those who are resonating the most with your work, who recognize themselves in your vision, will naturally crave language that speaks to that you-and-me kind of 'we.' They’ll want to identify with your ideas personally and keep talking about them.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“While someone might attempt a feeble carbon copy of those ideas you’ve spent years developing, they can never match the undeniably distinctive aspect of your work. Especially if it resonates across multiple platforms and in multiple formats.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The underlying expectation of a big idea is that the audience will be smarter, more knowledgeable, more competent, more informed and possibly more in control than before.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“We’re swimming in an ocean of information like none of our ancestors before us. And this access to abundant sources of data presents a mixed blessing. There is so much competing information, both trivial and significant.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Your audience needs to know this is important enough to pay attention to right now instead of all the other signals competing for their attention.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you: are already being taken seriously in some way; have found your place (professionally or personally); believe strongly in something relevant to your idea; are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways; are finding ways to be useful in the world; are finding ways to achieve more of what you value; have developed mastery and control; are participating in interesting things; and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others. Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The names of those who have influenced our ideas tell a story in themselves: who they were, when and where they lived, what their contribution to the great ongoing conversation was or is.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“If you have an idea worth spreading, you don’t need permission from anybody to spread it. If you have an idea worth spreading, the reliable research, data and definitions can be added later. If you have an idea worth spreading, you can sound it out with some loyal friends and let them remind you how much hard-won experience you’ve racked up—how many thousands of hours in deliberate practice.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The story of Blue 52 roaming the oceans, singing its own deep-sea version of a high lonesome, has struck a nerve with a great many individuals. And it’s no wonder. Its loneliness touches the loneliness we sometimes feel when we’re sending signals into the void.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Ideas are being described in this book as free-floating entities that thrive in a great many environments.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“We encounter ideas through the prism of our own lived experience and because of this a good argument can be made that we best understand big ideas when they’re presented through the same personal prism.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Because we live in a highly uncertain world, life frequently demands that we adjust to a new normal and a new reality, different from our old normal and the old reality of yesterday. This often involves regaining our balance in the face of a diagnosis, a disability, a death in the family, a divorce or some other drastic change in our circumstances.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“We sing our way forward, on frequencies only we can, depending on the chosen space, the chosen medium, the idea we’re trying to spread and the promises we’re making to the audience we’re seeking to serve.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Our ideas are like living entities, swimming in an ocean of other ideas. Every idea is being broadcast on a different frequency and has varying levels of resonance with those who respond to that frequency.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Irresolution, it might be said, is a hallmark of our lives. That so much of what happens is beyond our direct knowledge or control, and that there is no way of knowing our own story’s ending (or even duration) might explain why we crave the complication-resolution pattern in story.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“An idea packaged up in nonfiction is a completely different animal to an idea packaged up in fiction. And while the lines blur in that hybrid creature called narrative nonfiction, we should be under no illusions that they’re the same animal.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“There are things we can say in nonfiction that cannot be said outright in fiction. And there are truths that can be conveyed in fiction that the constraints of nonfiction would never allow.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“One of the central problems of a time in which there are many competing voices on the airwaves, in the media and online, is finding a way to get in sync, on some semblance of the same wavelength as others who share the same values, questions and goals.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“If the alignment between author, audience, topic and timing is synchronized correctly, the audience will want to imagine themselves in the story.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The best ideas weave in the logical as well as the emotional. Touch the head as well as the heart.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“If our transmission is too garbled due to an unwittingly arrogant tone, the idea we broadcast isn’t necessarily the idea that will be received in the minds and hearts of the hearers.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“The best ideas expand our possibilities as individuals, communities and global villagers.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“New wisdom is the wisdom that whispers to us to pursue detachment. It is the wisdom that, steady as breath work, releases us from our monkey-mind grip on exactly how life needs to look and sound. We don’t even have to obsess about how long an idea will be relevant, trusting the universe that when the idea’s time has expired an even more useful one will appear to replace it.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas

“Sending resonant signals is also different from merely adding to a cultural echo chamber. That’s because of the unique flavor of your own authority and experience, origins and obstacles. All the why’s you’ve addressed in terms of author, audience, topic and timing. Delineated in these ways, your big, generous idea, located at the edges of the possible, becomes a complementary addition to a rich and harmonic symphony. Complementary yet undeniably distinctive.”
― Anaik Alcasas, Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas