Connecting Deeply
Tour Directors and Guides wear many hats but for most of us, the juice of the job lies in creating opportunities for our guests to connect deeply to the sights and sites, people and places, cultures and traditions, that they have come from afar to experience. Whether funny or sad, sweepingly historical or intimately human, we use storytelling to invite our guests to connect deeply to cultures and experiences that might otherwise seem interesting but disconnected from their own lives and deepest concerns.
Engaging storytelling speaks to the listener and connects to their own emotions, personal experiences, and modern concerns. Here are a few tips that will get you started transforming information into stories and making those stories entertaining and engaging in ways that invite your guests to form their own connections to the story of the tour.
Identify broad topics in your tour. Your tour is more than a collection of places, events, and hotels connected by highways and walking districts. Ask your product designer for their insights about how the different days, excursions and destinations all relate to one another. Categorize your own research using both topics that were part of the design and topics that compliment that design. Every talk that returns to a topic is an opportunity to build out the story in easily digestible and meaningful vignettes. If you have several topics that weave in and out of your tour, chances are you’re going to be appealing to different segments of your group and that’s great – you’ve got something for everyone! Look for opportunities to connect the dots between your days and when the time comes don’t hesitate to let your guests know that you are doing it. “Remember two days ago when we saw the Patton Posts?” “Three days from now we’ll pick up this story at the Orangerie when we see Monet’s full 360° view of his garden.” This will give your tour a coherence that helps your guests stay engaged with their experiences.
Turn your topics into Themes – A theme is different from a simple topic. While topics help you organize your information so that your audience can easily follow your stories, the theme should answer the question “why should my guests care?” Your themes become the foundation upon which you will select the best information for your stories. If struggle to find meaningful themes, start by identifying why you care beyond "because it's interesting!" Once you can explain why it's interesting (why you care), you gain insight into why your guests might care. And the more you get to know your guests, the more you will refine your insights and tailor your talks to match your passion for your topic to their deepest interests.
Focus on the unexpected questions that come from your guests. If you are already running the tour, your current guests are a goldmine of inspiration. They will ask you questions you don’t have answers for and while it might be ‘what’s that tree?’, more often something you or another guide talked about sparked a bit of curiosity. That’s something to celebrate! The questions your guests ask will help you understand their changing tastes, curiosities and concerns. Interests change, world events weigh on people’s minds, so let your guests lead you in new directions of research, themes and stories. .
Once you have the topics and themes you want to as the foundation of your talks, there are a few additional tips that will help you make those talks engaging, moving and curiosity-provoking.
Connect your stories and themes to universals. Certain universal experiences touch the lives of nearly all of us. They could be personal (love/loss, birth/death, health/sickness, being accepted or rejected, feeling safe or endangered), social (uncertainty of ones place in society, the excitement or discomfort of changing norms, and social values), or daily lives (wanting our children to have great educations, getting ready for retirement, starting a business, making or losing a friend, looking for opportunity). If you struggle with this, think about your favorite movies and books. What universal concepts exist in those stories? Can you put the concepts together into a theme that explains why you care?
Make it personal. Whether you are talking about Marie Antoinette, Thomas Edison, or a simple farmer at the end of the Oregon Trail, if you get your guests to think about themselves and their own experiences in connection with your story, they will begin to build personal connections to the people in your stories. “Think of a time when you…” “At one time or another you’ve probably…” “Have you ever tried to…” are all ways of trying to hook into emotions or memories that have meaning for your guests. Invite them to keep that moment in mind while you tell the next story. If your stories frequently use of the word ‘you’ (meaning your listeners), that’s a good signal that you’re creating space for your guests to connect to the story’s deeper meanings and common humanity.
Provoke rather than inform. Rather than telling them what conclusion they should draw at the end of a story, leave the issue open and your guests with a question to consider as you move on to other topics and excursions. One guide I knew would always leave her guests with an open ended question to consider right before a group lunch during one of the early days of tour. Guests inevitably talked about the question over lunch and once back on the bus, they could share their own hypothetical solutions to the questions she had posed. The discussion would take off from there. Another interpreter talked about the Syrian refugee crisis when it was still a hot-button issue for many of her guests. She kept her tone neutral and talked through multiple different and often opposing viewpoints. She always ended with the observation that she was inviting her guests to make up their own minds having heard so many different views.
Ask questions and discuss. If you give guests the opportunity to ask questions you are also giving them time to think about what you just shared and make their own connections. Try breaking up your talk by asking intermittent questions and actually waiting for their answers. Choose open ended questions that let you gauge what has captured their imaginations so far. “What do you think”, “How would you” , ‘what are some” are all invitations to let your listeners tell you where their attention is and what is their foundation of interest. If you know your topics well, you will inevitably hear an answer that lets you move ahead or even venture off in new directions you hadn’t anticipated.
People travel for many reasons, but they travel with professional guides because we bring our destinations to life in meaningful ways. Whether you are a Naturalist, a Historian, or a Culture Maven, if we craft our stories to spark interest, caring, passion, and curiosity in our listeners, they will stay engaged with the ideas provoked, the people and cultures visited, long after they leave us.
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