First — why would you want to?

Business guru Alan Weiss gives a dramatic example: if you were told the number of deaths caused by smoking every year, would you remember that exact figure three months from now? Probably not. But what if you were told that this figure was equal to three fully loaded Boeing 747 planes crashing into the earth every day for a year, with no survivors? Quite a bit more memorable, eh?

The brain’s language is images, pictures, stories– the more dramatic, the more memorable. One of my coaching clients was an executive in a Big Four firm, who needed to impress upon his team the importance of telling their clients about a new regulation which could gravely impact their business.

Rather than telling his team “you really need to tell our clients about FASB 151″, we phrased it as “not telling your client about FASB 151 would be like letting them walk into a lion’s den, armed with nothing but a toothpick–and blindfolded.”