How to use the Moments Method® to tell your story

Most people see storytelling as rooted in the humanities. Writing, performance, but not science. So, you might be surprised to find out that disciplines from neuroscience to business to psychology have also studied storytelling. If you think about it further it makes sense, because storytelling touches every part of who we are. It’s one of our most important ways to connect over shared experiences as human beings.

The Moments Method® is a storytelling approach created by Story2. It teaches you how to use the science of optimal communication to quickly improve your speaking and writing. It distills scientific findings and experience working with more than 250,000 students into an approach you can use to tell essential, authentic stories.

An essential, authentic story tells people exactly who you are at some of the most important moments in your life such as college applications and job interviews. A good story advocates for your point of view.

The Moments Method is a five-step process:

• Find Stories helps you identify experiences that reveal your character strengths. You choose a set of traits you want to illustrate and explore the possible scenarios where those traits have had an impact.
• Focus In distills your broad scenarios into a moment, a specific place and time that show who you are in a unique and authentic way. A moment is something that happens in the world rather than in your head. No two moments are exactly alike because no two people’s stories are the same.
• Tell It Out Loud teaches you how to use your spoken voice to explore moments and connect with your audience. Many writers and storytellers will get caught up in stiff and generic language because that’s how they were taught to write in school. But when you actually say it out loud, you immediately hear everything that rings false.
• Map It shows you how to structure your essays with a clear sense of purpose and direction. Every good story has a strong beginning, middle, and end. When you map it, you go a bit further. The “Magnet” makes your audience stick to the story until the end. The “Pivot” shows a risk, a lesson, a learning, or an important change. The “Glow” ends with a specific action, rather than your interpretation of what it means. This map helps people vividly remember your story and leaves them wanting to know more about you.
• Focus Out gives you strategies to edit your essay, sentence by sentence, to engage the reader in your point of view. It is called “focusing out” because you look at your story from another person’s point of view, and think about whether they will understand it, whether they will interpret it the same way that you do, and whether it meets their expectations for the kinds of stories they are used to hearing. You narrate what happened instead of describing what you thought or felt about what happened.

That’s how you take thousands of years of human evolution and use it to connect with people every time you speak or write. With these five steps, although it may not seem like it, you are applying many years’ worth of research and human experience. That’s pretty cool!

To practice the Moments Method, head over to StoryBuilder, our writing platform that makes the Moments Method simple and easy to use.

For more info about college admission and scholarship essays and interviews, sign up for self-paced courses and our award-winning StoryBuilder writing platform FREE. Want to stay up to date on the latest tips and resources? Follow us @story2 on Instagram!