How Do You Know Which Stories To Share With Your Audience?

When developing personalities, programmers often encourage talent to "include more of your life' in the show." The instruction is undeniably important and right. To become a true personality you have to showcase yourself to the audience. You have to be seen - and believable - as a multi-dimensional person. The challenge for on air talent though is always in the understanding of exactly what this means. What stories from their real life should they bring to their shows? How do they know which stories they should share with their audience?

Successful personalities have figured out that it is the meaning or emotion behind the experience that makes it compelling enough to share. Not the experience itself. Telling the story without understanding why it matters to you often results in mundane and insignificant stories about what you did at the weekend appearing during your show. No one needs or wants that.

Personalities should only bring stories to their show when they have an emotional reaction to the experience. You are looking for experiences in your life that moved you. Experiences that anger you, surprise you, intrigue you, fulfil you... We experience a lot of things in our lives many of which we would never bring up at a dinner with our friends. Instead we opt to share stories with our friends that make us laugh, that frustrate us and so on. You share and exchange stories that have caused an emotional reaction in you. Your friends want to hear the story because of the emotion fuelling it. Emotion always drives a story. It's more important than the actual act. Your radio show should be the same. You should only be sharing real life experiences that you have a strong emotional reaction to.

You need to understand why the real life experience mattered to you in order to be able to turn it into a compelling story worthy of your listener's time and attention. This emotion must then be used to inform the way you tell the story again. Remember emotion drives a story.

Secondly, it is important to remember that listeners can only relate to your story if they can imagine themselves in it. They must be able to imagine themselves as the story's main character; to be able imagine themselves standing in your shoes. If your story is about being happy to be at a swanky VIP party, the audience probably won't relate to you. They won't care.

Next time you are contemplating whether or not to share that real life experience on the air make sure... (1) You understand the emotional reaction you had to the real-life experience, and (2) The audience will be able to see themselves in the story!