How to Tell Stories That Create Impact in Public Speaking and Everyday Communication
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Carl Buehner said it best: people do not remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. I have watched that play out from the stage more times than I can count. You can deliver a flawless set of facts and get polite nods. Tell one story that lands, and you see the room change. Shoulders drop. Phones go down. Eyes light up. That shift is the whole reason storytelling works, and it is the subject of this piece.
This is not a how to on structuring an opening line. If you want the step by step on building a story into a speech, read my guide on how to open with a story. This article answers a different question: why do stories move people and stick, when a list of facts slides straight out of their heads? Understand the mechanism and you stop telling stories out of habit and start telling them on purpose.
People Remember the Feeling, Not the Facts
Think back to the last presentation you sat through. You almost certainly cannot recall the third bullet on slide seven. But you can probably remember a moment that made you laugh, or wince, or lean in. That is not a flaw in your memory. That is how memory works.
Your brain is ruthless about what it keeps. Information that arrives with no emotional charge gets filed as low priority and quietly binned. Information wrapped in feeling gets flagged as important and stored. So when you stand up and recite facts, you are handing the audience a pile of things their brains are designed to forget. When you tell a story, you are handing them something their brains are built to keep.
This is why the goal of any story is not that the audience understands it. It is that they feel it, and then carry it out of the room and tell it to someone else. A story that gets retold at dinner that night has done its job. A fact that gets forgotten in the car park has not. If you want a simple test for whether your story will stick, ask: would anyone repeat this to a friend? If the honest answer is no, the emotion is not strong enough yet.
Why Emotion Makes a Story Travel
Here is the part most people miss. A story is not the sequence of events. It is the feeling attached to the events. The events are just the delivery mechanism.
That is why two people can tell the same story and one lands while the other dies. The one that lands has decided, before opening their mouth, what the audience is meant to feel. The one that dies is just reporting what happened.
So before you tell a story, pick the single emotion you want to create. It might be:
Laughter
Tension
Relief
Pride
Recognition (the "that is so me" feeling)
Then shape everything around that one feeling. Cut anything that does not serve it. If you are going for tension, do not undercut it with a joke halfway through. If you are going for recognition, do not reach for a dramatic event nobody in the room has lived through. One emotion, aimed deliberately, beats a story that tries to do everything and lands nowhere.
And in a work setting, the emotion has to match your audience's own experience. A story about a high stakes board meeting will not move a room of junior staff who have never been near one. Match the feeling to a situation they have genuinely been in and the story stops being about you and becomes about them.
Why "It Is About Them, Not You" Is the Whole Game
The strongest stories are not the most impressive. They are the most recognisable.
When you tell a story about getting past a small obstacle at work, or learning something from scratch and fumbling it at first, the audience is not admiring you. They are seeing themselves. That recognition is the emotional hook. They think, quietly, "I have been there," and from that moment they are with you.
This is also why the ordinary beats the dramatic. You do not need a remarkable life to be a remarkable storyteller. A grand tale told flatly does less than a small, true moment told with structure and feeling, because the small moment is the one your audience has lived through too. Notice the everyday moments, shape them well, and you will outperform someone with a far more exciting life who does not understand this.
There is a reason the illustrations that travel furthest in my own work are the mundane ones: lost luggage at an airport, learning to drive, the smell of cinnamon cookies. Nobody remembers those because they are impressive. They remember them because they have felt exactly that frustration, that nervous first attempt, that hit of nostalgia. The feeling was already theirs. The story just reached in and switched it on.
Emotion Does Not Just Make People Remember. It Makes Them Act.
This is the part I care about most, because it is where storytelling stops being a nice to have and starts changing outcomes.
Feeling moves people. Not just to remember, but to do something. And the moment someone feels something is the moment they are most likely to act on it. Which means the timing of your ask matters enormously.
I once ran a webinar to around 250 people. Everything most people do says you save the ask for the end: build your case, deliver your value, then request the demo in the final slide. I did the opposite. I put a single poll in the middle of the session, at the point where attention and interest were at their peak, asking who wanted a demo. That one prompt, placed while the room was most engaged, produced 60 demo requests for the software product, right there, live, during the session. Not from a follow up email afterwards. From the poll itself, in the moment.
Sixty out of roughly 250 is not a rounding error. It is a quarter of the room raising their hand because they were asked at the moment they cared most, not at the end when the feeling had already cooled. That is the whole point. Emotion has a peak, and the peak is not at the finish line. If your story builds a feeling and then you wait until the last slide to ask for anything, you have let the energy drain out of the room before you used it.
So when you tell a story to move people towards something, do not save the ask for the end. Ask in the middle, while they are still feeling it.
Take the Audience on the Journey, Do Not Just Report the Destination
Stories move people because they let the listener travel with you rather than watch from the outside. A report tells them what happened. A story lets them feel it happening. That difference is why a journey structure carries so much emotional weight.
A journey has four parts, and each one does an emotional job:
Start and finish. Where it began and where it ended. This gives the audience the gap they are hoping you will close.
The struggle. The challenges you hit and got past. This is where they see themselves, because everyone knows what struggle feels like.
The defining moments. The decisions or turning points. This is where the tension sits.
The emotional arc. How you felt at each stage. This is the part that truly transfers the feeling to them.
Skip the emotional arc and you have a timeline, not a story. Include it and the audience does not just hear what you did. They feel what you felt, and they start to believe they could do it too. That quiet thought, "maybe I could do this," is the most persuasive thing a story can produce, and you cannot manufacture it with facts.
This is the A to B change that sits at the heart of every story that moves people: you are not showing them where you ended up to impress them. You are showing them the route so they can walk it themselves.
Actionable Takeaways
Decide the feeling first. Before you tell any story, name the single emotion you want the audience to carry out. Shape everything around it and cut whatever dilutes it.
Choose recognisable over impressive. The ordinary moment your audience has lived through will outperform the dramatic one they have not. Make it about them, not you.
Use the emotion while it is hot. Feeling drives action, and the peak is not at the end. If your story is building towards an ask, make the ask in the middle, not the final slide.
For the full picture on structure and delivery, see the Ultimate Guide to Public Speaking, and for turning attention into impact, read on the three pillars of attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do stories work better than facts?
Because your brain treats emotion as a signal of importance. Information with no feeling attached gets filed as low priority and forgotten, while information wrapped in emotion gets flagged and kept. Facts are not useless, but on their own they have no staying power. Attach a fact to a feeling and it survives; leave it bare and it fades. The story is not decoration around the point. It makes the point memorable in the first place.
What emotion should my story create?
One. Pick a single feeling before you start, whether that is tension, relief, pride, laughter, or recognition, and aim everything at it. The common mistake is trying to make a story funny and moving and impressive all at once, which flattens all three. In a work context, also make sure the feeling maps to something your audience has genuinely experienced, or it will bounce off them no matter how well you tell it.
Do I need dramatic stories to move people?
No, and often the reverse is true. The most powerful stories are usually the most ordinary, because that is where the audience recognises themselves. Recognition, the "that is so me" feeling, is one of the strongest emotional hooks there is, and you only get it from moments people have lived through. A small, true moment told with feeling beats a grand tale told flatly every time.
How does storytelling drive action, not just goodwill?
Emotion moves people to do something, and it has a peak. The mistake is building a feeling and then waiting until the very end to ask for anything, by which point the energy has drained. When I ran a webinar to around 250 people and put the ask in the middle rather than the end, while attention was highest, that single mid session poll produced 60 live demo requests. Same audience, same offer. The difference was asking while they still felt it.
Is this different from learning how to structure a story?
Yes. Structure is the mechanics: how to open, what to cut, how to sequence the beats. That is a separate craft question about structure. This article is about the why underneath it: what emotion is doing to your audience's memory and behaviour, so that when you apply the structure you know what you are really trying to trigger.
TL;DR: Why Stories Move People and Stick
Stories work because feeling outlasts information. Facts are processed and discarded. Emotion is encoded and remembered.
People remember how you made them feel, not the data you gave them, so lead with the emotion you want them to carry out of the room.
Emotion gets a story retold. A moved listener repeats it to someone else; a fact does not travel.
Stories put the audience inside the experience, which is why they feel like something happened rather than something being explained.
A story lets the audience picture themselves in your shoes, so it persuades without you having to push.
Emotion also drives action. When people feel something, they move, and the middle of your speech is where to ask.
More from Liam Sandford
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