Storytelling took center stage at Sunday’s Golden Globes when Oprah Winfrey gave an inspiring speech as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award. Even if you didn’t watch it live, you’ve probably heard about it because it’s become a social media sensation and even sparked talk of an Oprah run for the presidency.
A New York Times article about Oprah’s speech and potent storytelling pointed out how much audiences crave speeches like the one they heard Sunday night because people are drawn to stories. And few people are better storytellers than Oprah. The Times television critic James Poniewozik said Oprah’s speech followed a powerful structure. According to Poniewozik, “It’s a story about stories. It moves from the personal (young Ms. Winfrey watching Sidney Poitier win an Oscar) to the communal (women in Hollywood, and women working on farms and even ‘some pretty phenomenal men.’) … It tells the audience: I have my struggle, and I know you have yours, and that connects us all in the sweep of a global struggle.”
I made a similar observation about Oprah’s speaking style in one of my books on storytelling. It’s a powerful formula for making a profound connection with an audience.
Classic storytelling structure requires that the narrative begin with a fact, event, or action that sparks something in the storyteller. Oprah’s speech began with an event drawn from her personal life that inspired her to embark on her own adventure. Oprah began: “In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: ‘The winner is Sidney Poitier.’… I tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses.”
Like all great great storytellers, Oprah kept her story short, but provided enough detail to paint a vivid picture for her audience. In doing so, she transported them to her world. They could see themselves sitting on a linoleum floor as history is made. They could empathize with a parent who is “bone tired” and trying to make ends meet to feed her children.
In a remarkably effective transition, Oprah broadened her personal story to encompass the stories of so many others whose voices were never heard: “So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.”
By the time Oprah ended the speech by telling young girls that “a new day is on the horizon,” her story had become their story. It’s through stories like the one Oprah told that people dream of a better life. In his book, The Written World, Martin Puchner, an English professor at Harvard, argues that throughout history, stories have shaped people, history and cultures. “The impulse to tell stories, to put events into a sequence, to form plots and bring them to a conclusion, is so fundamental that it is as if this impulse is biologically rooted in our species…In the process, we develop ideas of how to get from one point to the next.”
Leaders in business, politics or nonprofits must develop their ability to move people through their words and their stories. Storytellers spark movements and ignite our imaginations. Oprah’s Golden Globes speech is another example of the power of story to touch hearts and move minds.