The power of stakes in storytelling

Stakes are essentially sort of what your audience should be worried about, what they should be wanting for you, what they should be concerned about, what they should be wondering about.

When I work with people in business, they are constantly under this misconception that people want to hear what they have to say.

I assume 100% of the time that no one wants to hear anything I have to say, and so I am relentless in my attempt to get the audience to be constantly wondering what the next sentence is.

And stakes are a big part of that. Alfred Hitchcock has a movie where it opens with a police officer is chasing a man across a roof.

We don't know who to root for, but something is at stake here, and now we're wondering what's going to happen next.

We have to do the same thing with our ordinary true life everyday stories, we have to put stakes into stories.

If your audience isn't wondering what you're about to say, they're no longer listening to you.