Paul Morton

#479: How to Craft Effective Leadership Narratives Using the S.O.A.R. Story Structure

#479: How to Craft Effective Leadership Narratives Using the S.O.A.R. Story Structure

Yogi Roth

#478: How a Popular College Football Analyst Became an Emmy-Winning Storyteller

#478: How a Popular College Football Analyst Became an Emmy-Winning Storyteller

Joy Spencer

#477: Learn the C.R.E.A.T.E. Process to Reframe Your Story Into a Powerful Brand

Jenny Poon

#476: How to Build Community and Collaboration Through the Stories You Tell

#476: How to Build Community and Collaboration Through the Stories You Tell

Have you ever started a business?

Or maybe you were responsible for launching a new initiative or enterprise within a large organization.

Either way, you probably hit one roadblock after another.

You filled your tanks with the passion to make the endeavor successful.

But the universe had different plans for you. And it just seemed like it delighted in punching you in the nose at every turn.

Sounds like the life of an entrepreneur, huh?

Today you will hear from someone I believe is an entrepreneurial phenom, Jenny Poon.

Like a jiu-jitsu black belt, Jenny grappled with every setback and turned that energy to her favor not just helping her start-ups, but countless other small businesses.

I think you’ll be as enamored with her business-building spirit as I am.

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Marta Ravin

#475: 3 Ways to Find Your Funny in Your Business Storytelling

#475: 3 Ways to Find Your Funny in Your Business Storytelling

You may be like the Walmart Canada leader who asked me about when to interject humor in your business presentations.

Studies show that using humor in your business stories and presentations boosts your credibility at work. Some people suggest…  

“Teams that grin together win together.”

According to the Harvard Business Review, in one experiment, presenters who used humor were rated as more confident and competent than those who gave joke-free talks.

Even if they used just one joke. Even if it wasn’t a knee-slapper.

But are you, like many professionals, reluctant to be funny because you fear looking silly or that your joke(s) may not land right?

Now you can learn how to tickle the funny bone of your audiences as gifted comedian and TV showrunner Marta Ravin, Founder of Marta Ravin Productions, joins us to show you three ways to find your funny with your business storytelling.

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Phillip Swan

#474: How to Create a Customer-Centric, Go-To-Market Strategy With Your Brand Storytelling

#474: How to Create a Customer-Centric, Go-To-Market Strategy With Your Brand Storytelling

You’ve heard me say this often, “You, your brand, and your product or service are NOT the center of your business story. Your customer is. Always.”

This is the drumbeat of customer-centric brand storytelling.

Story Truth #2 is that your brand story is not about what you make, but what you make happen in your customer’s life.

Outcomes trump offerings everytime in your business storytelling.

But what if your sales and marketing team are at odds on how to tell your story?

Marketing leans into hyperbole with messages all about your wonder widget.

Sales, on the other hand, push features and benefits selling when what your prospects really want is the emotional pull of a solution story.

Phillip Swan, Managing Partner at Pi Partners and supporting the family business as the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at LingoAid, shares how to create gripping go-to-market strategies using customer-centric storytelling that builds affinity moving your audience to action.

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Dr. Jessica Vogelsang

#473: Why Building Trust With Your Storytelling is the Best Medicine

#473: Why Building Trust With Your Storytelling is the Best Medicine

When you see a loved one in the hospital, is your first inclination to race to their echocardiogram and review their charts?

Or do you spring to their bedside, clasp their hand, and ask how they’re feeling?

We all naturally gravitate to their story, not their data. We leave that up to the docs to translate and explain their findings later.

But first, their story.

Our guest today, Dr. Jessica Vogelsang, is a veterinarian and Chief Medical Officer of the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA). She’s also an international speaker and bestselling author of All Dogs Go to Kevin.

As you will hear, Dr. Vogelsang is a huge proponent of storytelling in evidenced-based practices like pet and human healthcare.

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Francisco Mahfuz

#472: What’s the Point in Telling Your Story?

#472: What’s the Point in Telling Your Story?

I was sitting in a Tucson hotel conference room watching his PowerPoint presentation when I thought a 3D pterodactyl would leap from his deck and chomp off my head.

The “He” I am referring to was a brilliant social scientist from Phoenix presenting to a group of nonprofits about nutrition deserts in, well, the desert.

At least that’s what I think his big idea was because he was so obtuse about the needs of his audience that he never got to his point.

His slides were so crammed with numbers, charts, lines, and scribbles that it occurred to me that they were busier than an Autosterogram.

That’s a big word for those two-dimensional images that when you stare at them they create an optical illusion revealing a three-dimensional image.

That’s when my exhausted brain chuckled at the idea of a 3D dinosaur emerging from his intricate maze of detailed data.

Maybe he was the dinosaur in the room rendering his message extinct by the meteor of metrics he projected on us.

Another brilliant mind mired in his message. So sad.

“What IS HIS POINT?” I still wonder.

Francisco Mahfuz, a National Champion Speaker and Storytelling Coach joins us today to ensure this doesn’t happen to you or me.

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Randy Olson

#471: How to Make Your Stories Stronger by Calculating Your “But-to-And” Ratio

#471: How to Make Your Stories Stronger by Calculating Your “But-to-And” Ratio

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Albert Einstein said, “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple,’”

But in the business world, we tend to over-complicate everything.

Especially our communications.

We find ourselves in “And Land.” And, and, and’ing our audiences to death-by-boredom.

Now you can test how clear, concise and compelling your communication is by using a tool developed by today’s guest, Dr. Randy Olson, my co-author of The Narrative Gym for Business.

If you don’t know Randy, he is a Harvard Evolutionary Biologist turned filmmaker, author and teacher of the ABT (And, But, Therefores) narrative framework.

For the past eight years, Randy has been using a tool called The Narrative Index to quantify the power of a particular communication by measuring the “But-to-And” ratio in its content.

He developed it to prove the power of the ABT in speeches dating back decades.

The higher the score (meaning replacing “ands” with “buts” and “therefore” to propel the narrative forward) the more compelling the communication is compared to thousands of competing speeches, articles, and presentations.

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Pleasant Middelhof

#470: How to Make Your Complex Sales Simple by Exploding the View

#470: How to Make Your Complex Sales Simple by Exploding the View

Have you read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck?

I loved it. Talking about a new refreshing take on stoicism.

One of my favorite takeaways from Mark Manson’s book is that we all should aspire to manage good problems versus tackling bad ones.

But we often get overwhelmed by the bad problems that suck our energy because we wrestle with them in all of their complexity.

Today’s guest, Pleasant Middelhof, shares how to simplify complexity by exploding the view, especially in sales.

She uses the analogy of her six-year-old son, who is a huge fan of Legos, assembling a 10,296-piece Titanic set in just seven days by exploding the project to its component parts.

Pleasant explains how you can do the same thing to simplify your complex sales for both you and the buyer.

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