Where are you in the audacious and tenacious stories you tell when you speak?

"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories."
George R. R. Martin

One of the great joys of speaking may be found in that moment when something you say inspires or motivates your audience. There are two ways you can make this happen.

The first is through sharing deeply profound insights that clear the cobwebs from your audience’s mind, allowing them to see clearly through to an outcome you envision.

The second is through the telling of inspiring and motivating stories.

If you take option number 2, you should tell stories of audacity to inspire and tenacity to motivate. When you tell these stories, they will have greater impact on your listeners if they have you as the hero.

AUDACIOUS TALES

I have heard many speakers, keenly intent on inspiring their audiences, tell heroic stories of other people’s accomplishments. True as these stories may be, they lack the first-person credibility a speaker needs to add gravity to the inspiring point they seek to make.

One reason for this, is many speakers do not feel comfortable telling stories of their own audacious experiences. They view this act as “bragging”. But, it is not. It is merely the opportunity to humbly share lessons learned through your own experience at the crucible of life.

Audacity (being audacious) is the ability to take bold risks. If you want to really inspire your audience, take the time to reexamine your life and look for those moments when you stepped outside of your comfort zone. It could be the story of your first time away from home or you're the time you took on a project without any idea of how you would pull it off. Audiences are inspired when they hear stories about the possibilities of human endeavor. The stories that resonate the most with them are delivered through first person testimony.

When audiences hear you tell stories about the achievements of famous people, the listening rule they follow is “If the story is not about you, then why are you telling me?” To be your most effective as a speaker, open up and let them hear about your trials and triumphs.

TENACIOUS TALKS

When I speak on success, I often ask my audience if they have “A capacity for tenacity?”

My goal with this question is to help them gain an understanding that success is not an instant experience, but an accumulation of many instances of success over time. In other words, you can motivate your audience to see why a dream is possible if they can attach themselves to the bigger vision with a massive amount of tenacity.

One story I tell is how I trained my dog to ring a bell hanging by our back door to alert us when she needed to go outside. Now this may not seem like a big deal, but for the dog and our family it was. This story combines elements of overcoming the nay-sayers, calling upon extreme ingenuity and innovation, patience, understanding, commitment to the vision, teamwork and success.

When your audience learns, through your stories, that no dream of theirs is too small to be given their all, they will become motivated to reach for newer and bigger goals.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series said, "Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories."

To be a really effective speaker you must feel comfortable being the hero of your stories. To inspire your audiences, you will need to seek out the memories of where you have boldly gone and look for the wisdom within the tale. You can use this to drive home the critical point of what you want to say. To motivate your listeners to new heights, you will have to revisit the life experiences that will help others learn the value of focused commitment as a means toward achieving greatness.

Have no fear, speakers can be heroes too.

Thanks for your support as a reader of my blog and I eagerly welcome any comments on this post or suggestions you might have for a future blog on a topic near and dear to you in the comments section below. As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer

Now you can easily create and share engaging stories with The Brain Tamer's C.A.R. technique

"If you're gonna tell your life story, you gotta be honest, or don't do it."
R. Kelly, American Musician

Today, in corporate and professional speaking circles, storytelling is all the rage.

This come as little surprise to me. Humans have been communicating through stories since the first cave dweller put a flame to a twig. Let’s face it, humans are storytelling machines.

People tell stories in all kinds of settings other than after the daily hunt. They tell stories at parties, while networking, in meetings, when training, on sales calls, on the phone, over a meal, and especially during job interviews. Perhaps you do as well.

A story has the power to inspire, motivate and transform its listener. The goal of a story is to convey an experience of value from one person to either another person or to many people. The purpose of the story is to either persuade, inform or entertain the listener in the process.

Regardless of the setting, the basic structure of all stories is the same with a clear beginning, middle and end. When some people speak, it is not uncommon for their story to seem fractured with disconnections between the three basic parts making it difficult to follow and hold your attention. This most commonly happens when the storyteller jumbles the order of the events within the story. It’s similar to hearing the punch line before the joke.

The best stories are the ones we cull from our mind. They’re made truly engaging when the details they contain are placed in their proper and most effective chronological order. It really helps when you are constructing a story to have a method to guide you in this process. So, today, I am offering my C.A.R. Technique to help you create and share engaging stories with your listeners.

THE C.A.R. TECHNIQUE

Whether you look at your resume or a roster of clients, every instance of experience or performance tells a story. The story has elements common to all good storytelling. By using my C.A.R. Technique you will be able to quickly construct an engaging and meaningful story with relative ease.

What does C.A.R. stand for?

C.A.R. represents the three basic elements of every experiential encounter. They are:

• Challenge

• Action

• Result

By simply recounting these three basic elements you can craft a story that will engage your listeners.

Let’s look at each element.

CHALLENGE

Every fictional story ever written or told begins with the lead character having to meet a great challenge. Think about the experiences you have had in your life. Without over dramatizing it, everything you have learned or mastered began as a great challenge. From learning to walk to learning to ride a bike. From getting into college to finding a job. Each experience begins with the challenge. So, does your story.  So, begin your story with the challenge.

• Think about the challenge you had to meet.

• Think about how you would define the challenge.

• What were the circumstances that created the challenge?

• What was at stake if you did not meet the challenge?

• Why did you take on the challenge?

The beginning is where you build your listener’s anticipatory interest in how your story will end.

Once you have clearly established the intensity of the Challenge you will meet, you will want to move the story along by detailing the Action steps you performed.

ACTION

Every summer, moviegoers stream into theaters around the world to gobble up the latest action film. Action sells, because it tantalizes the reader, viewer or listener with the possibilities of human achievement. Through the action of your story, you will inspire your listener while demonstrating your creativity, resilience, and resolve. In your story, you may not save the Universe, but you may have surpassed a sales goal, or discovered a new process for doing something, or earned the loyalty of a customer.

Remember, in every story, it’s the action that captivates, inspires and engages your listener.

Once you have detailed the action steps of your story, it is time to bring it to an end with a triumphant Result.

RESULT

Think about the stories you’ve read, heard or seen. How do they end? Some stories might end with, “And they all lived happily ever after”. Others with, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” The ending justifies the meaning of the story.

Think about how you’d like your story to end. What is the one thing you’d like your listeners to remember about the story you are telling?

The ending of a story should represent a triumph of some sort. There are many varieties of triumph from the utterly spectacular to the completely amazing. The end of your story will detail the effect of the Result that came about due to the Action(s) you took to meet the Challenge you faced.

The Result need not be too long. In fact, the one thing you really don’t want to do at the end of your story is ramble on or rehash the story you’ve already told. Instead, think of how you can wrap it up in one sentences or two. Think about how you can summarize the story with a pithy line, turn of phrase, or tag line.

STAYING TRUE

American Musician R. Kelly said, "If you're gonna tell your life story, you gotta be honest, or don't do it."

One of my executive speaking coaching clients was asked to deliver the keynote address at a trade conference because he had written a paper about a technical process. His first instinct was to deliver a presentation detailing the paper with lots of slides that had a ton of detail on them. After working with me, he delivered a keynote that told the story behind the paper and the process. His keynote covered the Challenge he faced, the Action steps he took and the Result he achieved.

My client’s keynote received a standing ovation and he went on to speak and travel for many years based on this one success. He succeeded because his story came from his mindful truth. He engaged his listeners by sharing the truth of his story without the need to embellish beyond the actual and the factual.

YOU CAN DO IT TOO

Click here to download my C.A.R. Technique Worksheet to help you on your way to crafting engaging stories of your own. This worksheet will help you construct clear, concise and accurate stories to support your speeches, interview responses and networking conversations.

From the beginning to the end of your story, my C.A.R. Technique can help you remain true to the details of your story while crafting an engaging experience for your listener. No speaker is ever at fault for being too truthful. In fact, there is no such thing as being “too truthful”, there is just the truth governed by a level of disclosure deemed appropriate to the situation.

When a speaker tells a story, there is only one way to tell it, honestly. As a speaker-storyteller, you will have to learn to trust the truth of your story as being important and impactful enough to warrant your listeners’ awareness, attachment and appreciation.

I trust you enjoyed learning about how you can use my C.A.R. Technique to create engaging stories for your listeners. Storytelling is a pivotal Content Creation skill enabling you to speak effectively as a thought leader, subject expert, or executive. I am grateful for your support as a reader of my blog and I welcome any comment on this post or suggestions you might have in the comments section below. As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer

It's Time for the Expert in You to Start Thinking Deeply About What You Feel, Know and Say.

“Learn as though you would never be able to master it;
Hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it”
Confucius

I recently had a gentleman ask me, “What does The Speech Wiz do?”
He asked me if I can help with body language, gestures, vocal variety and a host of other nonverbal speaking skills all of which I answered in the affirmative. Then he looked at me, paused and asked me a question that betrayed a deeper understanding of the most difficult aspect of a speaker’s skill.
“Do you coach people on what they should say?”
“Ah,” I said, “that’s a really insightful question. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” he responded, “I seem to hear a lot of people speak with great style and flair, but they don’t really say much of value. I guess that’s the hardest part.”
Kudos to him! His observation is spot on.

LEARNING TO SPEAK

When you learn to play an instrument, you begin by learning the basic skills long before you begin to refine the style and type of music you will one day play. And, just because you master one style doesn’t mean you will excel at all styles. Rudolph Nureyev was a master ballet dancer and a so-so tap dancer. Fred Astaire was a master tap dancer and a fairly good ballet dancer. The trick in becoming a Speaking Master is to find your theme and keep at it. It is rare when a thought leading speaker excels at more than one vein of thought.
Like any skill you practice, speaking is a multi-faceted skillset that can take years to master. In the process of learning how to say it well, the true master speaker spends enormous time and energy on what they want to say as well. They become masters of Content Creation within their core line of thought. Through this lengthy process of deep thinking, they aggregate a massive amount of existing knowledge and generate innovative new perspectives on their theme or passion.

THE MASTER’S VOICE

The goal of a Master Speaker or Thought Leader is to sprinkle their audience with a few concepts and suggestions that will allow the seeds of their message to take root. Most thought leaders begin as a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Their subject areas are incredibly diverse ranging from arts to science to philosophy to self-help and more. The toughest challenge for many SME speakers is controlling the amount of content they share with their audiences on each speaking occasion.
Unfortunately, for some audiences, some SME speakers rush to the speaking stage and in the process skip the lengthy deep thinking on their topic that is needed. This results with the SME speaker hitting their audience with a “firehose” of content overwhelming their processing ability and drowning out their unique message.
While what we say (verbal content) represents only 7% of the communicated message it is one of those rare times when the math of 7% and 93% are of equal value.
No matter how you run the numbers, what you say is just as important as how you say it. So, while all of the nonverbal skills (body movement, vocal variety, and personal presentation) are critical to being well received by your audience, having your message remembered and repeated by your audience because it has taken root is priceless. A Master Speaker’s Voice is that unique message they bring to their audience’s and the ease with which it takes root and grows its impact.

THE DEEPER THE THOUGHT, THE HIGHER THE MESSAGE

Deep thinking is a solitary experience. No Cliff® notes available. It is a self-occupying, constantly-curious, and never-ending experience. A speaker will never suffer a loss for the time invested in deeply thinking about their core topic. The journey is always exhilarating, liberating and profoundly beyond the intended destination.
If you’re a speaker and curious about how to craft your core message, deep thinking on your primary topic area is where you need to begin. Pick up your shovel and pick axe and get ready to begin exploring the mine of your mind. The nuggets of insight and gems of clarity you’ll be looking to find will be found among 3 Veins of Thought within your mind:

1. What you know

2. What you’re passionate about

3. The experiences you have had.

Together, these three veins will supply you with the relevant stories you need to support your profound observations, foundational phrase, and unique massage that create your speaking value.

THE RIVER OF DEEP THOUGHT

Ultimately, a speaker should desire to achieve a facility of topic knowledge and expression that makes them “at one” with their topic. Deep thinking speakers do not speak in a stream of consciousness. Instead they speak from a deep river of thought. From within this river, a speaker will exhibit two qualities of their knowledge, fluency and spontaneity, they use to create a genuine bond with their topic and their audience.

In the deep river of thought fluency means you speaker’s knowledge, insights and recommendations are endless. They flow without restriction or hesitation. This fluency has been derived from your process of extreme self-occupying, constantly-curious, and never-ending examination of the topic that is integral to you.

Spontaneity imbues you with all the qualities of a master river pilot. It enables you to see the hidden perils you might encounter in any part of your journey down your river of thought. With spontaneity you have the knowledge on where the deepest water is. You easily know how and where to cross the river to touch upon an adjoining shore of thought. With spontaneity, you can ride the swiftest or the choppiest water with the same level of confidence because you have deeply thought about the journey more than the destination.

DEEP THOUGHTS EQUAL DEEPER ROOTS

Your deep-thinking efforts will serve you well as you approach your speaking life. Read everything you can find about your area of expertise. Listen to other speakers who populate your topic space. Become a real student, a willing teacher and a giving master.

From your garden of deep thoughts, be the giver of your unique seeds others will eagerly plant, nurture, harvest and share. The more seeds you plant, the wider your crop will grow. The deeper your thoughts, the deeper the roots of the seeds you share will grow. In the end, your true value as an SME speaker will be realized when you can see the impact of your thoughts.

Above all, as a Subject Matter Expert speaker, remember to head the words of Confucius, “Learn as though you would never be able to master it; Hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it”. And, never stop the process of mining the 3 Veins of Thought within your mind.

I am delighted to share this Content Creation deep thought with you from my experiences as an Executive Speech Coach and a Success Speaker. I am grateful for your support as a reader of my blog and I welcome any comment on this post or suggestions you might have in the comments section below. As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer