Storytelling focuses on influencing the right side of the client’s brain. Why? Because that is where decisions get made, where people picture and buy into what we are telling. This technique will help you to exponentially improve your ability to articulate, clarify and persuade about financial concepts and products. This technique will literally double the impact your presentations are having on your clients because the technique is based on brain science that demonstrates how to engage the whole brain in our presentations.

How do you mesmerize your client’s interest? How is trust developed? the answers to these questions are evident once you see the discoveries of modern brain science and how these discoveries relate to storytelling.

Ned herrmann in his book The Whole Brain Business Book offers the concept of ‘Our Four Different Selves’ that shows the different shades of personality we display from the two sides of our brain:

• Our rational self
• Our safekeeping self
• Our experimental self
• Our feeling self

As is customary in our culture, we pay an inordinate amount of attention to the left brain issues of rationale and safekeeping and often neglect the experimental and feeling side of ourselves. We direct clients to volumes of numbers, statistics and small print. Many of these clients give the materials a cursory glance or ignore it. They want you to illuminate them and relate to them on a personal basis. They want you to discover the individuals that they are. They want you to tailor a program that is specific for their unique circumstances. Their circumstances may not seem unique to you, but clients feel that they are in specifically unique circumstances.

Note that speculation and risk taking are actions that come from the right brain experimental self What is investing if it is not about speculating and taking risks? To properly communicate to those right brain functions, we need to speak a language the right side of the brain can relate to. Statistics, numbers and prospectuses are not that language! Yes, they play a role – a supporting role, not a leading one.

What is my point? The materials and presentation style many financial professionals use is a half brained approach to selling because it only engages 50 percent of the potential attention the client has to give. Half the client’s brain remains asleep.