#494: Speaking Secrets to Dramatically Increase the Impact of Your Stories

#494: Speaking Secrets to Dramatically Increase the Impact of Your Stories

One of the most rewarding periods in my career was when I was a Professor of Storytelling in Arizona State University’s Executive Masters for Sustainability Leadership Program.

For five years, I taught storytelling to executives worldwide in iconic brands that included American Express, Philips Electronics, and Cummins.

My promise to each student was to help them own any room with their stories: from the boardroom to the break room to the chat room to the living room.

But I cautioned them that storytelling isn’t enough. That story loses its importance if you deliver it with a boring, resting business face.

To connect, you want to tell your stories with the kinetic energy of oral pacing, non-verbal cues, and using your environment like a stage, even if you’re stuck on ZOOM.

Communication and speaking coaching, Laurie Schloff, co-author of Smart Speaking: 60-Second Strategies for More Than 100 Speaking Problems and Fears, shows you her speaking tips and techniques to help you own any room.

Even Oprah tapped Laurie for a guest appearance to teach her audience how to use their whole being to become an impactful leader and speaker.

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Vivek Shankar

#493: How to Unlock Customer Insights That Make Your Stories Sell

#493: How to Unlock Customer Insights That Make Your Stories Sell

In July 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker launched the Significant Objects project to objectively measure the effect of narrative on an object’s subjective value.

They purchased 100 tchotchkes and knickknacks in thrift stores like Goodwill, for an average of $1.25 apiece.

Then they hired creative writers to attach a fictional story to each object and sold the items at auction on eBay.

For example, they purchased this acrylic-encased globe for $1.49. Guess what it sold for because of its story? $197.50!

They made meaning and money out of the mundane.

Glenn and Walker invested a total of #128.74 for the first collection of baubles, sold that collection for a combined $3,612.51, and created an ROI of 2,800 percent.

They said,

“Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.”

We all recently witnessed this same storytelling phenomenon on a grand scale when absurdist Italian artist Maurizio Catalan bought a 25 cent banana from a Manhattan Street vendor, taped it to a white wall with masking tape, called his conceptual art, “Comedian,” and sold it to cryptocurrency entrepreneur  Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for the piece.

I think the joke might be on Sun who apparently has more Bitcoin than brains.

Catalan, on the other hand, created a roughly $6.2 million dollar ROI by reframing this mindless artwork with a story.

But what it really illustrates is that we are truly a planet of storytelling apes.

So what stories are you telling to evolve your commoditized product or service offering into an appealing treat?

Today, you learn how to craft your stories from a B2B content marketing expert, Vivek Shankar, who will help you turn customer pain points into growth strategies through the stories you tell.

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Chris Miller

#492: How to Leverage the Power of Place-Based Storytelling

#492: How to Leverage the Power of Place-Based Storytelling

Today I have an expert on place-based storytelling for you who will show you how to make your brand, sales, and marketing stories more compelling by centering your stories on a time and a place.

Chris Miller is the Corporate Communications Manager at Visit Phoenix, the non-profit organization that promotes the Greater Phoenix area, the fifth largest city in the country, as a travel destination and meeting venue.

Tourism generates an estimated annual revenue of over $12.9 billion for the metropolitan area.

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Luke Peters

#491: How to Leverage Your Brand Story for a Profitable Business Exit

#491: How to Leverage Your Brand Story for a Profitable Business Exit

As an entrepreneur, you’re excited about launching and/or growing your brand and if you get everything pretty close to right, then you can sell your enterprise for top dollar.

But are you so busy building your organization that you haven’t invested time in planning your exit?

Luke Peters is the former CEO of NewAir, a company he founded in 2001 that sells compact appliances for your home or office.

It used to be a direct-to-consumer play, but the global recession upended that model and the big box retailers like Lowes and The Home Depot presented some formidable competition in the online market.

So Luke pivoted and began selling through them, which created a whole new set of problems he had to deal with before orchestrating and remarkably profitable exit from the company.

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Pia Silva

#490: How to Quickly Build a Badass Brand to Profit On Your Expertise

#490: How to Quickly Build a Badass Brand to Profit On Your Expertise

We’re like Veruca Salt, the spoiled girl in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory story. “We want everything and we want it now.”

Okay, so that might be a gross overgeneralization. But you must admit our impatience is stoked with every rapid Amazon delivery.

So can you do rapid-fire branding for your small company, turning what used to take months into a couple of weeks or even days?

Pia Silva believes you can.

Pia is an entrepreneur, speaker, coach to small branding agencies, and author of Badass Your Brand: The Impatient Entrepreneur’s Guide to Turning Expertise into Profit.

In 2021, she founded No BS Agency Mastery, a training program in which she teaches one—to two-person branding agencies how to scale to $30-50k months while reducing their workload by up to 80%, all without employees.

Pia delivered a popular TED Talk on cultivating true confidence. She is also the host of a top-ranked podcast “No BS Agency Podcast,” a former Forbes contributor, and has been featured on MSNBC, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Entrepreneur Magazine, among other notable platforms.

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Tamsen Webster

#489: How to Inspire Meaningful, Lasting Change and Build Enduring Buy-in

#489: How to Inspire Meaningful, Lasting Change and Build Enduring Buy-in

You know how exciting and rewarding a major change in your life can be.

But you, me, and everyone we’re trying to change hate change.

It appears to scare the sh!t out of us because it activates the amygdala, which thinks change is a threat. So it releases a milkshake of hormones for fear, fight, or flight.

This is our basic survival instinct, which believes that remaining in the status quo will keep us safe even as everything is changing around us.

Seems odd given that evolution is all about the survival of the fittest; changing as our environment changes.

But people resist change because of:

Today, we focus on how to lessen resistance to a proposed change using effective storytelling.

My good friend Tamsen Webster joins us to share insights from her new book, Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change.

You’ll learn some of those principles as Tamsen takes us on her journey in change management and communication, emphasizing the importance of understanding how adults learn and the need for effective storytelling strategies to get people to buy into and prosper from your change initiatives.

Because, the risk of change lands squarely on the shoulders of the initiator. If you’re the initiator, then those are your shoulders.

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Jane McCarthy

#488: How to Discover Your Brand’s Authentic Feminine Archetype

#488: How to Discover Your Brand’s Authentic Feminine Archetype

Early in my career, I was taught to ask my customers insipid questions like: If your brand was a dog, what kind of dog would it be?

What kind of car reflects your personality? How about a drink? Are you a cocktail? A beer? Diet soda? Energy drink?

This accepted branding process never sat well with me.

From all our insightful exploration, we have determined that your brand is a five-year-old green golden doodle named Hazel that drives an Audi Q3, enjoys Manhattaans, reads Vogue and Outisde magazines, and gives her Nordstrom personal shopper birthday presents.

Seriously, man, that was nuts. This put me on a quest for a more authentic exploration, which led to my discovery of brand archetyping.

Here at last I found a foolproof way of sculpting and authenticating a brand’s distinctive, enticing personality.

It is important to understand your brand personality because it informs the creative expression of your communications.

How do you currently look, sound, and feel to your customers? Are you a Ruler brand like American Express, a Creator personality like Lego or Ikea, a Regular Guy/Gal persona like Charles Schwab, a Caregiver identity like Oprah and her OWN Network, or do you represent the character of the Hero archetype like Patagonia?

The above is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brand Bewitchery, on how to identify your personal and professional brand.

But my guest takes exception to the idea of using the 12 Jungian archetypes to define your brand personality.

She says they are too masculine and don’t address feminine archetypes found in most brands.

Jane McCarthy is a brand strategist with over a decade of experience in advertising.

She has collaborated with global and local brands in a variety of categories, working with brands like SweeTarts, Southern California Edison, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Jane’s emphasis is on leveraging archetypes to unlock a brand’s true essence and power.

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Sean Grace

#487: How to Ask Better Questions and What Happens When You Don’t

#487: How to Ask Better Questions and What Happens When You Don’t

Have you ever been in a collaborative exercise and, with all good intentions, peppered your team member with pertinent questions in hopes of finding an innovative solution?

But you got nowhere? Maybe your questions were off-putting to the person you were working with.

Maybe they even answered your questions to the best of their ability but you got the right answers to the wrong questions.

What if the first question(s) you would be asking is of yourself? Questioning your beliefs, biases, and even your neuroses that color the character of questions you ask of others.

Your answer might be Sean Grace. He is a communication consultant, coach, and speaker, with over 25 years of experience developing and training sales, marketing, and leadership talent across diverse industries.

Sean just published his new book: The Art of The Question: Better Decisions, Deeper Connections, Breakthrough Ideas.

His unique brand of business consulting is forged from his long career in media, advertising, and the creative arts.

Sean studied music performance at the Juilliard School and SUNY Purchase, and finance at Wharton.

As an award-winning musician and multi-instrumentalist, he borrows techniques from jazz improvisation to help foster creative collaboration and cooperation within and across teams.

Sean’s track record of success as a consultant and coach has earned him a reputation as a trusted advisor and trainer to some of the world’s most innovative and successful organizations.

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Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

#486: Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: How to Live the Earned Life

#486: Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: How to Live the Earned Life

When the time is right to do something, you just know it, don’t you?

My dad, Keith, grew up in North Dakota during the Depression.

One Christmas when he was a boy he got just one present: a pair of mittens knitted by his aunt Dora.

He said it was the best present he had ever received given that there was ice on the inside of the windows in his home.

Following WWII, Keith became a successful civil engineer and president of Constructors PAMCO in Seattle.

Long after he comfortably retired, a new, expensive restaurant called The Barking Frog opened near my mom and dad’s home.

Dad told me it was something like $250 for a seven-course meal. He was curious about it.

But he had never splurged on anything that expensive until one day he did.

We were talking on the phone when he mentioned that he’d taken Mom to the Barking Frog for dinner.

Surprised, I asked him why he suddenly decided to indulge themselves.

He said, “I woke up that morning, looked in the mirror, and decided to stop saving money for old age.”

He’d earned a seven-course email.

He was living his earned life.

But today’s guest thinks we should all be living our earned life much earlier.

That’s why Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, considered by many the #1 executive coach in the world, wrote The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment.

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Fran Mallace

#485: How to Build A Positive Company Culture With Your Storytelling

I recently produced a Business of Story training for the Board of Directors and team members of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the global nonprofit founded in Arizona in 1980 that now has 59 chapters throughout the United States and operates in about 50 countries.

They do marvelous work granting wishes to critically ill children.

During a break, one of their board members jumped on a call with a prospect and closed a deal using the ABT story structure he had just learned.

Talking about immediate ROI!

Read about six-year-old Luis and his Nintendo wish.

But can the ABT really be that easy? Can it be that effective in such a short amount of time?

Today, Fran Mallace, the President and CEO of Make-A-Wish Arizona, joins us to share how she uses storytelling to build vibrant relationships, grow powerful teams, and build a winning company culture.

And how you can too through the stories you tell.

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