Fired Up, Ready to Go! Lessons in Storytelling and Leadership from President Obama
Love him or hate him, there’s no doubting that Barack Obama was one of the best leadership storytellers to sit in the Oval Office. Obama’s exceptional ability to weave together storytelling and leadership was perfectly timed with the rise of social media, when—for a few moments in time—so many of us truly believed in his vision of Hope.
Fifteen years later, and plenty has changed in the world. Regardless of your politics, every leader can learn valuable lessons from studying Obama’s leadership storytelling.
That’s exactly what we’re going to do in this article. I’m going to take one of my favorite Obama speeches and peel back the layers, so that you can understand some of the storytelling structures hidden beneath the surface.
Are you FIRED UP? Are you READY TO GO?
Me too. Let’s start our journey.
Lessons in Storytelling and Leadership: Understanding the Goals of this Article
Quickly, a little about me: I’m a professional facilitator of storytelling workshops for business teams. Over the last ten years, I’ve taught thousands of leaders how to be more evocative and charismatic storytellers. So I’m going to look through this speech through a very particular lens.
Here’s what I’m going to examine:
Understanding The Goal: What was Obama trying to get people to do? What was the point of this story? Was he successful?
Understanding the Tactics: How did Obama integrate storytelling and leadership specifically? What are the storytelling tactics that another, less Presidential leader like you or me can copy?
That’s what I’m setting out to address. Hopefully, you can find a few concrete takeaways that you can apply to your next leadership storytelling speech. Need a little help? You can always hire me as a storytelling coach!
OK, enough with the self-promotion. On to the story!
Obama’s Fired Up, Ready to Go Speech from the University of Maryland in 2009
Before we get into the analysis, why don’t you start by watching the speech? You might find it beneficial to watch it twice.
The first time, enjoy it as if you were in the audience.
The second time, watch it with a more critical eye. What is he doing specifically to get such a rousing response?
What was the Goal of Obama’s Fired Up, Ready to Go Speech?
Now that you’ve watched the speech a couple times, we can begin our analysis! Let’s start with the most straightforward question of all: why was Obama telling this story after all?
On the surface, this anecdote—an anecdote is a short story about a real situation or person—seems to have nothing to do with his political goal, which, as he said at the beginning of the speech, was to win support for Health Care reform. Why is he telling us a story about a woman in a church hat?
Let me suggest a few reasons, from a purely leadership lens:
First, this story was placed at the very end of an hour-long stump speech. Because it was at the very end, it will likely be the thing people remember when they leave the event. In sports terms, this story was Obama’s buzzer beater.
In psychological terms, this story exemplifies something called the Peak-End Rule, which says that people judge an experience based on how they felt during the most intense moments, rather than on an average of the entire experience.
If your team loses on the buzzer beater, it doesn’t matter how much fun you were having for the rest of the game: you’re going to go home angry.
So Obama wanted to leave people on a high. In storytelling terms, we call this a climax. You can just feel the ecstatic energy of the audience, flowing out onto the campus… heading out, presumably, to advocate for Health Care reform. But there’s something else that I think he was after, also.
At the time, the whole concept of what would become Obamacare was unbelievable. It has been a political dead end for decades, and yet it had been a pillar of the platform that brought Obama into office. Obama was selling a story about something that seemed impossible, so it was essential to rouse people’s motivation—to get them to believe that they could run through a wall.
In this sense, the storytelling is very strategic. Obama’s anecdote is not just about meeting a woman in a church hat who inspired him. The more important piece to his story is in what a storyteller would call his “perspective”. This “perspective” is what makes him feel relatable and authentic to his audience.
Let me give you a specific example of what I mean. The “perspective” crops up early. Obama is having the conversation with the State Representative who is getting him to go to Greenwood.
So I said, “Madam Representative, I need your endorsement.”
She said, “I will give you my endorsement — if you come to my home town, Greenwood, South Carolina.”
And I said — I’d had a glass of wine — I said, “Fine. I promise.”
That line—I’d had a glass of wine—got a big laugh. That’s a clue for us budding storytellers. What Obama is telling us is… he was desperate! He didn’t just wanted the State Representative’s endorsement. He needed it. He needed it so badly that he made a quick decision when he was drunk to do something that, pretty soon, he would regret.
This piece of the story automagically makes Obama feel closer to us. Many of us have also been in a similar situation in our lives; this piece of the story feeds into his relatability. And because his goal is to convince us, later, that “one voice can change a room,” it’s essential that he shows us early on that, deep down, President Obama is just like us.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t feel like there is much in common between me and Barack Obama. But his magic as a storytelling leader was his ability to convince me otherwise.
I’ve seen this speech now more than a hundred times, and every time I get the same feeling that, if we sat down at a bar together, we could be buddies.
On my part, that’s delusional. On Obama’s part, that’s evidence of great storytelling. So we can say that relatability was a primary goal that Obama was trying to “accomplish” in this leadership story.
What Leadership Storytelling Tactics were used in Obama’s Fired Up, Ready to Go Speech?
Personally, I think this speech is a masterclass in leadership storytelling. There are so many different ideas, tactics and skills on display here. But this is already a long article, and I’m just getting started… so I won’t dwell on all of them. Instead, I’m going to focus on just these three:
How using “CHARACTERS” in leadership storytelling brings the audience in emotionally
How to build “SUSPENSE” by asking compelling questions
How tying together a “MORAL” of the story gave the audience goosebumps and brought them out of their seats.
Let’s dive into each one.
1. Using CHARACTERS in a Leadership Storytelling Anecdote: How Did Obama Do It?
Let me start with a general truism: all great stories are about people.
OK, that’s not totally true. There are great stories about animals, insects, inanimate objects… Pixar has made all kinds of stories about toys!
Perhaps a more accurate statement is that all great stories are about human-like things. (The technical term would be anthropomorphic.) But for simplicity, let’s stick with my first statement: all great stories are about people.
The reason? As human beings, we are primed for emotional relationship.
Many business leaders are predisposed to “deliver the facts”. From this perspective, Obama’s speech could have been about the “concrete reasons” why someone should believe that one voice can change a room.
But from a storytelling perspective, our goal is to find compelling characters and guide the audience to create an emotional relationship with them. By doing so, this makes it seem like the audience is on the journey… rather than us.
This is something that most of us have become so accustomed to that it might seem obvious. Still, I’m going to dwell on it anyway. Picture turning on a Netflix show. First episode. What’s the first thing you see? It’s probably not a bullet point list of who the characters are, who is related to each other, who is sleeping with who, and who is cheating on who. Instead, what you probably see is a person—a character—doing something.
You’re intrigued. What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What does what they are doing say about them? For example, is there something distinctive about the way they look, the way they dress, the way they walk…
Fixating on these details guides us into a kind of “relationship” with them. No, we’re not dating them or married to them. But we do start to feel like we “know” them in a way. As we “get to know them”, we can start to understand when they are lying or when they are telling the truth. Or when they do one thing, but when they really want to do something else.
Now, let’s look at an example from Obama’s story:
Obama: So about a month later I fly back into Greenville, and I’m tired, I’m sleepy, and I’ve been campaigning for two weeks straight.
I’m dragging my bags to my hotel room, and suddenly I get a tap on my shoulder — my staffers — I said, “What?”
They said, “We’ve got to be in the car at 6:30 tomorrow morning.”
I said, “Why?” (Laughter.) Six-thirty? Why?”
“Because we’ve got to go to Greenwood like you promised.”
In these few lines, Obama has created two compelling “characters”: there’s himself, and then there’s his staffers. Even in his short description, we can learn a lot about their relationship. Look at some of the key phrases:
“I’m dragging my bags to my hotel room”. What does this say about Obama’s physical and emotional state of mind?
“Because we’ve got to go to Greenwood like you promised.” What does this line say about the relationship the staffers have with him?
These character relationships are the essence of effective leadership storytelling. As storytellers, we’re not just trying to tell our audience something. Instead, we’re wanting to engage their imagination through use of a compelling narrative.
This concept of creating a character and demonstrating how they relate to each other is the essence of the famous storytelling maxim: show, don’t tell.
Here’s another example from later in the story:
Suddenly I hear this voice behind me shout out, “Fired up?”
And I’m startled. But everybody around me, they just think this is normal. They say, “Fired up!”
And suddenly I hear this voice, “Ready to go?” And everybody goes, “Ready to go!”
I say, what’s going on?
I look behind me — there’s this small woman, she’s about 5′, 5’2″. She’s about 50, 60 years old. And she’s dressed like she just came from church — she’s got a big church hat. And she’s looking at me, she’s smiling, and she says, “Fired up?”
Even with a few economical words, Obama has done an excellent job “painting” an image of this small woman wearing a church hat and a smile in our minds.
Show, don’t tell. That’s great storytelling and leadership.
2. Building “SUSPENSE” by asking compelling questions: How did Obama Do It?
Most of us learned in high school that every story has a flow. Conflict, climax, ending… we know these pieces intimately, even if we don’t know quite what they mean… or how to create them.
For beginner storytellers, the basic idea goes like this: stories move in waves of suspense.
Let me explain: In a conventional leadership message, we’re told to put all the facts up front. Make an Executive Summary! But in storytelling in leadership, it works differently. In storytelling, we don’t want to give away everything up front. Instead, we want to create mystery, intrigue. Where is the story going to go? What’s going to happen at the end? These are “questions” that the audience asks itself.
These “questions” are what create suspense. Suspense literally means asking a question and “suspending” the answer.
I’m sure you can think of many movies that exhibit this idea. A question is raised in the beginning that will be eventually “resolved” at the end. Questions like:
Will the couple get together or not?
Will the good guy or bad guy win?
Will the hero live or die?
Will good triumph over evil?
Great storytellers “raise” these questions in the audience’s minds, and then “suspend” the answer. The art of storytelling is all about asking just the right questions and then suspending the answer just long enough for the audience to keep watching.
Questions like: who is going to win the Game of Thrones can keep people compelled for years….
Let’s look at the specific ways that Obama uses this idea. He sprinkles suspense throughout the story:
Some of you remember during the campaign we had a slogan, Not everybody here knows how this story came about, so I’m going to tell it again. Because it bears on health care reform.
What’s the question being raised? “How did the story of the slogan come about?” What’s the answer to this question? I’ll tell you in a second…
She said, “I will give you my endorsement — if you come to my home town, Greenwood, South Carolina.”
And I said — I’d had a glass of wine — I said, “Fine. I promise.”
What’s the question being raised? “What’s going to happen in Greenwood?” What’s the answer? I’ll tell you in a second…
So for the next five minutes, she keeps on doing this — she says, “Fired up?” “Fired up!” “Ready to go?” “Ready to go!”
And I realize I’m being upstaged by this woman. So I’m looking at my staff, asking what’s going on here? When is this going to stop? And they’re shrugging their shoulders, they don’t know.
What’s the question being raised? “How is Obama going to react to being upstaged?” What’s the answer? I’ll tell you in a second…
So you can see how all these questions are resolved in the conclusion. This is a deft example of effective storytelling, where all the pieces fit together. The questions have built on each other, one at a time, until they reach the stirring, out of our seats climax.
We’ll talk about how to do that later. Right now, it’s more important that you understand that this is what storytellers are trying to do: we are trying to link together suspenseful questions so that build and build towards the final resolution.
Ask a question. Suspend the answer over time. Keep practicing. Now you’re a master at suspense!
3. Tying together a “MORAL” of the story: How Obama Did It
Here is the last few lines of the story:
Obama: So it goes to show you — and this is so important for young people — it goes to show you, one voice can change a room.
And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city.
And if it can change a city, it can change a state.
If it can change a state, it can change a nation.
If it can change a nation, it can change the world.
This is the moment that gets people out of their seats. One thing that should be immediately obvious is… these lines are not directly tied to either Health Care or the woman with the church hat in Greenwood. In fact, there are probably a million different stories that someone could tell that would end with these lines.
In other words, these lines have “universal appeal”. That’s why they are so compelling.
These final lines are where Obama shows his hands. The whole build up of the story has been to establish “context” for him to deliver the “moral”. This is what he is trying to communicate to his audience: one voice can change the world. This is a highly inspiring message, if you believe it, and based on the way the audience reacts, it’s clear to us that they have.
This moral tells us the “point” of the story.
What is the point that you’re trying to get across? How can your message be summed up in just a few pithy lines? This is a question that storytellers have agonized around for millennia. This suspenseful question is what keeps us working.
Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas to think about around storytelling and leadership.
If you want a little more help, feel free to reach out! Happy storytelling!
