Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks is a best-selling author, columnist, blogger, podcaster, playwright, and teacher. He wrote my all-time favorite book on storytelling, Storyworthy. He is an elementary school teacher by day and by night teaches storytelling and public speaking to individuals, corporations, universities, religious institutions, and school districts around the world. He’s taught storytelling at Yale, MIT, Harvard, and Purdue, along with Amazon, Salesforce, Slack, Lego, and others.
Communication Skills
Public speaking anxiety is mostly a pre-performance issue that can be mitigated through auditory familiarity with the material.
"98% of your nervousness is actually before you begin speaking. Once you begin speaking, almost all of your nervousness falls away... preparation is going to reduce your level of nervousness. One of th..."
Presentations must be entertaining to be effective, relying on four specific engagement drivers.
"I say it stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening. And if you're not engaged in one of those four things while..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Leaders can use personal stories to model values and change team behavior more effectively than direct commands.
"He tells the story about his son, and he says, 'Listen, there's nothing wrong with being sad, being upset with failure, but we cannot allow it to slow us down as much as we are right now.'... That bec..."
Marketing Skills
Effective business messaging uses 'adjacency'—connecting a relatable personal story to a product's value proposition through shared themes.
"We're not going to match content to content. Instead, we're going to match theme, meaning or message... That snap when someone realizes, you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling m..."
All effective stories are centered on a singular, brief moment of internal change or realization.
"Every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It's a moment of either transformation, meaning I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new..."
Stories should feel natural and conversational, avoiding 'performance' tropes like unattributed dialogue or sound effects.
"The dinner test is the idea that when you're telling a story in a formal way... the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the story you would tell someone if you were having dinn..."
Stories must establish stakes immediately to capture and hold audience attention.
"I always say you should have, what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story... We have to immediately know that something is at stakes. We have to be worried about something."
The 'Homework for Life' practice builds a 'lens' for storytelling, allowing you to find meaningful moments in everyday life.
"I just decided every day before I go to bed, I'm going to look back on the day and find one moment that would've been worth telling as a story. Even if it wasn't really worth telling, I was going to w..."
Opening with specific location and immediate action grounds the audience and signals that a narrative is beginning.
"Start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life with those two things. So you start with location, where are you? Location activates imagination... and you start with action, meaning somethi..."