The afternoon was sweltering when I stepped out of the vast New Orleans convention center to clear my head. It was midway through a multi-day Microsoft technical conference, and I was straining under the burden of too many demands. I wandered across a small patch of emerald green lawn when, quite unexpectedly, I became a 12-year-old boy.
The air was rich with the smell of freshly mowed grass. I took a deep breath and I found myself transported to the edge of a bunk bed at Camp Fitch, my childhood paradise. It wasn’t just that I remembered those long-ago days. For a few precious moments, I lived them. I felt the shimmer of the summer heat, reveled in the promise of an endless afternoon. Decades and miles disappeared.
This moment happened five years ago. I remember it more vividly than anything that took place in that conference hall.
Making Scents in Your Communications
You’ve probably had the sensation of feeling taken back in time by a distinctive smell. Researchers believe the phenomenon has to do with the wiring in our brains. The olfactory region, which processes smell, is distinctively situated near the amygdala and hippocampus–areas that focus on emotion and memory. Scientists believe the comingling of these neurons is why smell, more than any other sense, evokes such transformative responses.
This unique neural architecture also offers a unique opportunity for anyone who wants to connect with customers or other stakeholders in irresistible and unforgettable ways. You can immediately become a better storyteller simply by using the right kinds of words – ones that pique the senses and bring a living, breathing experience to life.
In my storytelling workshops, I do an exercise that lets people see (or perhaps “smell”) this for themselves. I tell them to go back to a time in their childhood when they were perfectly happy, when they felt utterly safe and alive. Then I ask them to name a smell that they associate with that memory, some special scent that transports them back to that idyllic time.
Everybody has one. It’s often the highlight of the workshop to hear people reveal theirs. One by one, they list such pleasures as the smell of salt air at the beach, cookies baking in a grandmother’s kitchen, or the first blush of rain as the monsoons arrive.
What’s worth noting is that almost nobody can name a cherished smell without also sharing a bit of a story. “The one that I remember is my dad’s Old Spice aftershave,” one man told the group. “Every time my brother and I smelled it, we knew our parents were going out on a date and we’d get to raise hell with the babysitter!”
As we listen to such vignettes, every mention of a particular smell prompts us to imagine it. Quite unconsciously, we generate a moment of virtual reality. We hear “wet dog” and it’s as though we smell one. If we, too, have an association with a wet dog – a beloved childhood buddy, say – that association comes springing to life, with all the joy, melancholy, and beauty it carries for us.
The kicker is in the way that this effect can scale. You may, for example, tell an audience of 100 people, “The air smelled like cotton candy.” It takes only a few seconds. But saying it invokes a brief little experience of cotton candy, as people unconsciously try to recreate the smell for themselves. You might quickly move on to a different topic, but in the minds of your audience, all those sticky, sweet, happy cotton candy memories linger on. Those six small words can potentially create 100 different little bursts of happiness. And odds are that no one will quite be aware of why listening to you seems to make them feel so good.
Sensory Language Brings A Story to Life
The crime that’s committed in too many business settings is that, by using bland, sterilized language, we rob our communications of their potential to make people feel anything. It’s a sad irony. The desire for meaning is a cornerstone of job satisfaction and is especially cherished in the cynical, noisy, overextended world of the typical corporate denizen.
In all of your writing and presentations, look for the concrete elements in your stories and bring them to life. Use words that paint pictures and that vividly describe people and places. Delight the senses. Smell is powerful, but so is sound; music especially has similar powers to transport people. Call out color, taste, temperature, and light. Use active verbs that generate motion. And don’t forget the power of names (“Nancy” may conjure either a first love or a hated rival).
Don’t tell the audience what an experience felt like, make them feel it for themselves.
The good news is that by simply presenting your story on human terms, with words that are rich in physicality and sensation, you’ll quickly make connections, in small ways that can have big impact.
