3 Skills Every Business Storyteller Needs

Regardless of where your story is shared, who should the storyteller be? More specifically, what skills and traits does the ideal storyteller possess?

There are three specific attributes — clarity, confidence, and caring — to look for (or hone) as you’re preparing to deliver the story to your audience.

1. Clarity

In 1944, the United States Air Force began to bomb Japan in the hopes of ending World War II. The American bomber planes flew high over the Japanese islands but kept missing their targets badly. Something was wrong. An onboard military meteorologist discovered that 200+ mile per hour winds were pushing the planes faster than in recorded history. At the time, that seemed impossible.

These days, we have a name for those high-altitude, high-speed winds — the Jet Stream. It was a revolutionary find. But the U.S. Air Force wasn’t the first to discover the Jet Stream — just the first to clearly communicate their findings.

The global air current was originally discovered 18 years earlier by Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi. Oishi completed over 1,300 experiments observing the high-altitude wind stream before publishing a paper on it in 1926. Normally, a paper like that would have caused an international stir. It would have made Oishi famous, at least in the…