I know that I have extolled the webinar-presenting prowess of Terrence Gargiulo on several occasions, but I really can’t express often enough how well he puts on a webinar.

That goes double when he teams up with Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote consulting firm. The two had presented an excellent webinar about a year ago, so I was eager to “attend” their most recent production, It’s a Marathon Not Magic: Deliberate Practice Approach to Developing Business Storytelling Skills.

I’ve talked before about what makes Terrence’s webinars so special, and this one last week enables me to add to the list:

• Terrence is wonderful about welcoming folks and chatting with them as they enter the webinar. Shawn noted that Terrence is “the master of saying g’day to everyone.”
• He (and his co-presenters) always stick strictly to the planned schedule, never failing to end on time — but this time, Terrence and Shawn invited folks to stick around if they wanted to continue the conversation.
• And “conversation” is key because Terrence and Shawn ran this webinar as more of a give-and-take discussion instead of a purely didactic presentation. They also involved participants in a couple of polls during the session. In one, a third of webinar participants felt it was not hard to notice stories in events and other aspects of everyday life. Asked how often they use a book or movie story to illustrate a point, participant responses were pretty evenly distributed among possible answers.

The webinar offered a number of valuable suggestions — not just by the presenters, but also by participants — for enhancing storytelling skills. Here are some of them (and of course, you can see all of them in the video of the webinar, embedded below):

• Noting that Ben Franklin rewrote his essays and then wrote them again in verse, the presenters suggested practice, repetition, and soliciting feedback are excellent ways to polish storytelling skills.
• Starting a story with a “relevance statement” (Why would you want to hear this story?) is an effective technique.
• Find a story in a book or on the Web. Work out its point and pinpoint the aspects of the story that make it work.
• Try telling the story of a book or movie in varying lengths of time.
• Jot down stories or notes about stories as you encounter them in real life. Participants suggested the applications Evernote and Whrrl as excellent tools for this kind of note-taking. (I wrote about Whrrl, a “storytelling application for the web and mobile that lets people share and remember their real-world stories as they happen,” here. I’ve gotten the sense from at least one tweeter that the app has changed since I originally wrote about it.) Writing stories down, of course, is more for clarifying them in your mind than for memorizing.
• Terrence offers a “circle” technique (best absorbed by viewing the webinar video), which prompted a participant to suggest mind-mapping as a good way to work out stories.
• Practice techniques are also listed here.
• A fabulous resource for finding appropriate stories in Anecdote’s StoryFinder.
• Care and intention, the presenters noted, make your story believable. You can open the doorway to your story by posing a question to the audience.

Meanwhile, Steve Denning has posted a related 3-minute video about how anyone can tell a story in business. “If we all do it, we can learn to do it better,” he says, echoing Shawn’s and Terrence’s theme. (The audio is a little hard to pick up in the video.)