Mike Adams, Author

#176: The Seven Stories You Need to Tell to Sell

Many sales and business professionals ask themselves questions every day.

“How do I earn the trust of my audience?”

“How can I become an effective salesperson?”

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Andrea Waltz, Author & Keynote Speaker

#175: How to Reframe Failure Into Stories of Success

One of the most fearful words that has ever existed is “failure”. It hinders even the most ardent dreamer from pursuing their dreams. This fact made me thoughtful of an important question: if we remain fearful, will our dreams ever come true?

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Arthur Samuel Joseph, Founder of Vocal Awareness Institute

#174: How to Find Your Storytelling Voice

The actual aesthetic of our voices is something many of us have worried about at some point or another. We’ve all seen or heard a recording of ourselves and thought, “Is that really what I sound like?”

The good news is that perception can be changed. Yes, we can even change how we hear our own voices through simple exercises and mindset changes. And more importantly, we can change the way others hear and understand our communications through vocal awareness.

In this week’s show, we’re diving into how to use our voice as an instrument to become a better business storyteller.

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Richie Prynne, CC Smugglers Front Man

#173: How to Use Brand Storytelling for Guerrilla Marketing

Richie Prynne, a young street performer (also known as a busker), formed the British Blues-Americana band CC Smugglers in his early twenties. He knew it was hard to make it as a band these days, and that they’d have to get creative with their marketing to really stand out.

Their big idea? ‘Guerrilla Busking.’ They’d pop up and play to queuing crowds waiting to go into similar shows. The long list of targets included the fans of SeaSick Steve, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Devil Makes Three, Jools Holland and more. And it seemed to be working. Crowds would congregate to listen to them play, and then they’d tell their friends about it. The strategy instantly became fundamental to their innovative brand promotion.

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Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO

#172: How to Craft Your Brand Story to be Nimble

As a business storytelling speaker, a customer relationship management (CRM) system is pretty important for me to organize my prospects. But I find my relationship with the CRMs I’ve tried to be frustrating, cumbersome and not particularly effective.

I recently heard about another up-and-coming CRM called Nimble and decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to use. Yet I wondered what their story was. How were they able to stand out among the other CRMs? I thought I’d challenge Nimble’s CEO to see if he could use the Story Cycle System™ to define his core advantage and humanize his technical offering.

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Ron Ploof, Author

#171: How Tiny Proverbs Have Huge Impact in Your Business Storytelling

I love wordplay. You’ve heard me say things like, “storytelling is the Velcro of collaboration” or “an anecdote is the antidote”.

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Dr. Ron Bonnstetter, Researcher

#170: How to Use Storytelling for Optimal Personal Performance

Robert McKee once told me that our conscious mind is simply the P.R. department for our subconscious mind, where all of our real decisions are being made.

In the advertising world, we know we buy with our hearts and justify our purchases with our heads. We tell ourselves emotional stories as to why we need to buy something, and then we create nonfiction in our brains to counteract any buyer’s remorse we might experience.

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Liz Warren, Director & Co-founder of Storytelling Institute

#169: How To Advance Your Education and Life With Storytelling

Storytelling is so highly relevant in elevating the skills and competence of professionals in their respective fields. Yet, why is no one in business has taught how to use storytelling to their advantage?

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Air Force Brig. General Christopher “Mookie” Walker

#168: How to Develop Your Leadership Story

There has always been a distinction between a commander and a leader. A commander gives instructions, delegates tasks, and implements orders. A leader has a more serious responsibility – that of influencing people and making the critical decision to choose what kind of influence he will be.

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Randy Olson, Author & Filmmaker

#167: For Want of a Story, the Democrat’s Kingdom Will be Lost

As the Kavanaugh hearing underscored, the Democrats still lack a focused, cohesive narrative on which to build their platform. We bring back narrative consultant, and scientist-turned-filmmaker, Dr. Randy Olson, author of the landmark 2015 book, Houston, We Have A Narrative from University of Chicago Press.  He last visited us the morning after the election to explain how Donald Trump has what he terms “narrative intuition.”

His episode became our most popular.  Now he is putting together the pieces of the bigger picture for the Democratic party — spotting the trend starting with Obama in 2012 conceding his failure “to tell a story to the American people,” connecting to Hillary Clinton in 2016 failing to have a clear story for her presidential candidacy, and now the failure of the Democratic senators in the Kavanaugh hearing to tell a story to the American people.

Lack of a story is clearly a recurring theme with the Democrats, and our concern is (drawing on the legendary proverb “for want of a nail”) that they are running the risk of losing everything some day — all for want of a story.

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