Fine-Tuning the Art of Storytelling with Mike Pacchione
What is the secret to delivering an unforgettable talk? That's what we're unpacking in our latest episode with Mike Pacchione. We get into the nuances of storytelling, differentiating between narratives and stories, and exploring how the right structure married with vivid details can paint vibrant pictures in the minds of the listeners that they’ll remember for years to come.
Guest Bio
Mike Pacchione is an international speaker and speech coach who specializes in helping executives, athletes and entrepreneurs deliver smart and engaging messages to audiences of all sizes. Among his client list are James Clear, Laura Belgray, Don Miller, Amy Porterfield, Pat Flynn, Scott Hamilton, and more than 10,000 employees from companies like Apple, Google and Nike.
Connect with Mike at his website bestspeech.co
Key Topics and Takeaways
00:07 - Tell Better Stories With a Speech Coach
We sit down with Mike Pacchione to discuss tension, editing, and detail to tell better stories and build better talks.
10:23 - The Importance of Storytelling in Communication
We discuss storytelling vs narratives, storytelling's power to build communities and Mike's journey into speaking with ADHD.
27:51 - Leveraging Storytelling for Effective Presentations
Emphasizing relatable stories over remarkable ones, storytelling to create connections, and the vulnerability of sharing your story.
41:07 - Best Speech Coaching and Freebies
Tips on public speaking, storytelling, and engaging an audience.
Episode Transcript
0:00:07 - Isaac
Welcome to Make it Kick Ass, where we help leaders of growing communities bring their people together with purpose and lasting impact. Join us as we explore how to make events engaging, exciting, energizing and profitable so that you can build a healthy, sustainable community. I'm Isaac Watson, founder and lead strategist at Kick Ass Conferences.
0:00:29 - Nessa
And I'm Nessa Jimenez, operations Manager, at Kick Ass Conferences.
0:00:34 - Isaac
Now let's make it kick ass together. Welcome back everyone to Make it Kick Ass. I'm Isaac Watson and I'm joined, of course, with the fabulous Nessa Jimenez, operations Manager for Kick Ass Conferences, and our guest today, mike Pacchione. He is an international speaker and speech coach who specializes in helping executives, athletes and entrepreneurs deliver smart and engaging messages to audiences of all sizes. Among his client lists are James Clear, laura Belgrade, don Miller, amy Porterfield, pat Flynn, scott Hamilton who remembers him and more than 10,000 employees from companies like Apple, google and Nike. I met Mike here at ConvertKits Craft and Commerce Conference a couple months ago. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
0:01:32 - Mike
Oh, man, thank you for having me. I'm pretty excited for this. I know the story is like one of my favorite things to talk about and I'm looking forward to helping your folks get even better at it.
0:01:44 - Isaac
Excellent. So let's start off with a little bit of what like. What piqued my interest about you at Craft and Commerce, this conference that we attended that you spoke at. You gave a talk on storytelling during the main stage and I'm wondering if you could just clue the audience in for a little context as to the three tips that you gave the audience about how to tell better stories.
0:02:07 - Mike
Yeah, totally. You know. I think that in life storytelling I mean forget like a business purpose, but in life storytelling is a wonderful skill. People love the person at the dinner table who's got like this awesome story like that gets you invited back. That's that reputation is great and helps so much in business too.
So you know, every story is a little bit different, but I found that if you can do three things, you've got a pretty good chance at making the story work. So those three things are to leverage tension in the way that you're telling the story, and that's true even if the story is funny, right. So I'm not saying tension where we're like worried that someone gets stabbed or something, but just tension where the audience is saying, wait, what happens next, hold on, oh wait, what what? Or it's just like come on, keep telling the story, keep telling the story. That's how it should feel for your audience. Is that there's some level of tension you can tell. You don't have that if you're telling the story to someone and they're going uh-huh, uh-huh, like you get one. So tension is the first thing. The second thing is editing.
Now I think a lot of times people will tell a story where the best part is not the ending. We've all done that right, where you've got like this awesome story. But the best part is actually 75% of the way through, and then the rest of it is like but it turned out that everything was okay. Right, that's the end of the story. So I understand. That's why your brain processes it.
When you're telling a story out loud and this is especially true if you're giving a speech or you're writing an email or you're making a video, you actually have permission to edit it to end earlier. So what we're shooting for there is the emotional impact for your audience. So let's say, I'm trying to tell a funny story. I want to end with the part that makes them really laugh, even if in real life there's there's stuff after that. So tension and editing, and in the last one is detail. Okay, so detail is always a little tricky because there are certainly people who give too many details. We all have that person in our life that's talking about. It's me. I'll just have you. What does it sound like when you tell a story?
0:04:30 - Isaac
Oh no, don't get me wrong. You're like I was taking notes during your talk because I was just. I had regaled some friends with a story Recently, maybe a couple weeks prior, and I was like oh crap, I didn't do that. Oh crap, I didn't. You know, the best part was anyway. So that's me too much detail not not ending when I should.
0:04:51 - Nessa
These are the tricky one.
0:04:52 - Mike
I mean, we can get into it more, but the the longer the short of it is. It's easy to have too much detail, it's easy to not have enough detail, and what you want is a small amount of detail that allows the audience to picture what's happening. But it doesn't need to be so complete as to say, isaac had this earring on, and I remember there's a poster behind him. That's like the detail has to matter. So one of those details is helpful, or one of those details might be helpful, but we don't, we don't need he was wearing a red shirt and he had earrings, and I remember the poster behind him. Because then it's as a person listening. You're like okay, that matters, that matters. Mm-hmm, it didn't matter, did it?
0:05:31 - Isaac
right? No, it didn't. It didn't at all, and I've definitely been guilty of that and I think we probably all have at some point.
0:05:37 - Mike
The reason why that happens is because for you, it's kind of fun to remember those details, like there's a part of your brains getting a little dope immune hit of, oh, I was wearing my pink Floyd t-shirt that day. But you know, like any kind of communication, it's really about how the audience receives it, so that pink Floyd t-shirt needs to needs to matter for some reason. So my three tips you know not, obviously I can talk more about these, but attention, editing and detail. I Was telling people about these three tips for years before I realized that there's a nice little acronym that ties in the speaking, which is Ted. Hmm, there you go. I know I used to see yeah, and it was like I remember, like I was literally I was giving this presentation and I'm looking at the screen, like big drop-down screen, and I'm seeing those three things on the screen that I realized like, oh, that's an acronym. I don't know why. I've heard that acronym before actually.
0:06:33 - Nessa
It's like a lot of speakers, but we'll remember that one. Yeah, so you weren't just a speaker at Craft Commerce, though you played a big part behind the scenes, so could you tell us a little bit about that and what you do to help people become better speakers?
0:06:50 - Mike
Yeah, craft Commerce is something that's really smart, which is they pay someone, which is me, to coach all the speakers. No, it's not. It's not exhaustive, right? So it's not like I'm Doing ten hours with each speaker or anything like that, but they pay for every speaker at the conference to have at least one session with me, which, um, some people use for brainstorming, some people use for general Q&A, some people use for rehearsing.
But it's like if your conference, what make her, what makes or breaks the conference? I mean it's it's the people who attend and the amount of networking that we all get. But it's also like if the speakers are good and we've all been there where our speakers just running on and on Going over their time limit, they very obviously never rehearsed because we're 12 minutes in and they haven't hit point number one. So convert kit pays for this. It's not meant to be like a Micromanaging thing. It's like it's it's just a bonus for the, the speakers there, and I found it's really helpful for them. For the speakers, it's really helpful for convert kit, it's really helpful for for me too, and it's pretty cool because you know someone sits down.
I remember like Logan Urie did such a good job at this conference and I had this. That's like a proud father, it's just Ah, she did it. You know we had we had looked at her Google doc and I'd given her some advice, but there's a certain amount of what she can do with this and she really took everything to heart and her speech was just Awesome, and so it's a really great thing for me and I think it's it's great for the conference too, because nobody sucks.
0:08:25 - Isaac
We always tell our clients that there are two components to a good conference. At the bare minimum you need a good receptive audience and you need quality speakers. If you don't have those two, you can't have a conference, right, yeah, so in fact, I think investing in the speakers is a really valuable way to do that. What's interesting is that in typically we we will offer up some some voluntary speaker coaching of our own, just because we have so much experience working with people and presentation stuff, but it's it's not really coaching, if I'm perfectly honest. It's more like topic development and helping pinpoint, you know, like what to actually talk about. We don't do anything nearly close to what you would do in a more hands-on fashion to help actually develop the content and to Train them, though I will say even doing that is really helpful.
0:09:17 - Mike
It's amazing how many times I'm working with someone and like okay, cool, see the first phone call. It's like okay, so when's the conference? What are you talking about? Like I don't know what.
0:09:30 - Isaac
Don't be speakers on the plane to the conference that I still like trying to figure that out oh yeah. Okay, so so, in the context of what you do, what? How would you describe the difference between a story and storytelling versus a narrative?
0:09:50 - Mike
So years ago I was. I was. I figured what it's called. What is it called when someone sends you their book to like it's not, it's before it officially launches? What's like a proof or something?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is something in the book there was purportedly about storytelling, and I read, like in the middle of reading this, and I had this moment where I was thinking like I might not know what a story is. That this is story. I think it's a. It's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. I mean, there are people who talk about storytelling with data. There's there's a from stage storytelling, there's Storytelling as a speech. There's there's the the brand story of this. You know story brands. So like what, what are we even talking about? Well, I don't know.
I guess everybody probably has a little bit of a different definition, but but to me a Story is something that has a beginning, a middle and an end and, importantly, there is a sense of location. So locations doesn't have to be like anything extravagant, but the audience can picture the thing happening. And then there are other times where there are other things that think people call stories that are really Narratives. So it's an overall arc to a presentation, but it's not a specific moment in time at a specific location that people can picture happening. So, like an example of that, one of my favorite TED talks is by a woman named Amy Webb. It's called how I Hacked Computer Dating. So the whole thing is this narrative you can imagine actually. Let me just say the title. What do you think happens in this talk? What happens at the beginning? What would you think?
0:11:39 - Nessa
I think that she'd talk about maybe why she started it right, Like how she's gotten to it. There's like a bunch of not great stuff that happens and then what happens at the? End, and then she achieves her goal Like she wins the game.
0:11:56 - Mike
She meets her guy. Yes, that's very good. That's the overarching narrative. She decided that she should try this computer dating thing. She had a number of misses but she progressively got better and better at it and in her case it's like it's a super fun talk. I mean, she talks about figuring out, like taking a scientific approach, to even like how long you should be writing what your photo should look like, things like that. And at the end she meets her guy and we all live happily ever after. But that's the narrative. Within that narrative there are specific stories where she goes out on a date with a guy to a super expensive restaurant. He says he's going to the bathroom, he leaves and she has a bill for like $200 or whatever it was.
That's a specific story, the narrative is like her whole journey. That's a narrative. I think that's an important distinction, because sometimes I don't know what people are talking about when they say story yeah.
0:12:54 - Isaac
Do you feel that way? That's a really good point. I mean, you were describing the first part thing and I was like, oh yeah, that's a story, it's a beginning and middle. But you're right, that's not. That's the narrative for the talk. The story is a specific example. Within that, that's a little kind of nugget of illustration or conveying a point.
0:13:13 - Mike
Yeah, and each of those is really helpful in each of those matters. But the thing that at least in a speech, like a lot of times, the story is the speech.
0:13:26 - Nessa
The.
0:13:26 - Mike
Thing you remember is the specific story that happened at a specific time, right, and the story is like a walk away, like at Crefton Commerce. I remember Amy Porterfield's story where she went to mediation and had a moment where she was talking to a business partner and just said I will burn this thing down, mm, hmm, that I mean she's got a 45 minute talk, but that's that. That's what I remember from it. The story is the speech a lot of the time. Yeah. So I just think that's an important distinction to make, because you need those stories that people will remember from narrative arc.
0:14:02 - Nessa
And what do you think makes a good storyteller versus a bad one? Then?
0:14:06 - Mike
Yeah. So, nessa, who's who's like a bad? You don't have to say the person's name, but who's that? Who's a bad storyteller in your life?
0:14:15 - Nessa
Me. Is it really? Yes, because I got ADHD. I start talking and I have a million other things, so I add like a billion like side quests to the story. I'm not good at it.
0:14:26 - Mike
Oh yeah, you're a rambling storyteller. So yeah you're. You add a bunch of extra details that don't matter Exactly.
0:14:34 - Nessa
And I never get to the point.
0:14:36 - Mike
And by the time.
0:14:36 - Nessa
I'm halfway through and I don't even remember what the point was. It's your own story. You don't remember the point. Yeah, that's not great.
0:14:42 - Mike
That's not great. So funny I mean. I mean all three of those things tension, editing, detail really matter, but I think detail is the quickest fix for someone like you, which is the audience doesn't need to know that you had lemonade that day or you were wearing our gauze, socks or anything like that. I think when you think of someone who's a bad storyteller, it's usually because they're rambling, and they're rambling with too much detail, and they are telling you every last thing that went through their brain. So usually what you want are one or two vivid details, vivid detail. We want to be able to. So in the book made the stick, they talk about this, the OK. So they did like a mock trial type thing and they presented this one part two different ways. Version one talked about the kids brushing their teeth. Version two talked about the kids brushing their teeth using a Darth Vader toothbrush. Which of those had more credibility to it? What do you think? Credibility? That's what was easier to picture. That's another way of saying it. What?
0:15:45 - Nessa
seemed like more of the Darth Vader one. Yeah, yeah, the toothbrush.
0:15:49 - Mike
So you want one or two of those details just to enable the audience to picture the scene. But you don't want the Darth Vader toothbrush and the aim to aim. That's still brand. You don't want that. We don't need all the brand names, but just like one detail is really helpful, especially if it is a detail that helps us picture the scene in which the story is taking place.
0:16:14 - Isaac
Yes, yes, I think that's a really interesting point because it helps helps the audience visualize and put themselves in that place in a way that you know, if you're just, you know, describing so and so's hair and what they're wearing that day and like if you're overwhelming with details, then you just kind of get lost in the imagination of it.
0:16:38 - Mike
Yeah, yeah, details. I will say details are also a way to even Nessus, you're like I'm not good at storytelling. There are people who are like pretty average that actually they added detail will be really helpful. So an example of that I was helping a guy recently to talk about why he believed in this kind of telling the story of him joining the company that he works for. And what he was saying is he said I knew they could change the world. I was like, ok, it's a powerful statement. That's pretty good.
But you know, it would be even better is if we can see that transformation happening, happening in you. So do you remember when it happened? And he like walks me through this whole thing. He's like, yeah, we had a coffee shop and I remember Dave coming in talking to me and he pitched me on the whole thing and I wrote down in my notepad if they can accomplish this, it will change the world. So do you see how that second version where we're like we're in the coffee shop and he's writing it down on the notepad, like that, that hits on a much deeper level and that that's the better storyteller. Yeah.
0:17:40 - Isaac
OK, so I'm trying to figure out, like storytelling. Obviously, storytelling is important. Yeah, why? Why is that? What is it about stories that connect us so much? Is it like human experience? Is it? I don't know what? Put your science hat on? Tell me why.
0:18:03 - Mike
Ok, so it's like there are a million cloud computing companies out there and I don't necessarily know the difference between. I don't necessarily know the difference between any of them Aside from size of company. So you could say, like my insert cloud computing company here, so we harness the power of the cloud to help make employees more efficient. It's not like you have no idea what I'm talking about, but what might be a lot more effective is that I mean a little bit longer story. Where it's like what we do is when people go to save their work, every day we run into they typically run into problems one, two and three. So instead of that happening, we enable them to do blah, blah, blah. Now let me do that better. It could say more like. So every day, Isaac logs into his computer and he's got a million different files because he works with a million different people, and some of those files are really big and some of those are really small. The problem is his MacBook can only hold so much. So how can we help Isaac so he's not constantly deleting things and wasting his time trying to figure out what's a gigabyte and what's a kilobyte and what's a megabyte? Well, insert company name here. What we do is, and then you get into how the company helps you. Being able to picture the character of Isaac in that story is a lot easier for the audience to picture, for one thing, but it's just more human.
The other answer I sometimes give is this Once upon a time, there was a world without MacBooks and without laptops, and without iPhones and iPads, and without typewriters and without computers at all, and without pen and paper and without Quill and ink. Once upon a time, none of those things existed. So how did our history get communicated? A lot of times it was through story. Hey, here's what happened to this person. So on some level I'm not a scientist, but on some level I think we just remember it better. That's my answer for it. It's a long way to say we just remember it better.
0:20:17 - Isaac
It makes me wonder if there's actually a little bit of ego involved, I guess, like being able to picture ourselves in someone else's shoes or to visualize a thing. There's like maybe that's a dopamine hit, maybe that's, you know, feeling like we relate to somebody because maybe it's empathy, maybe it's I mean, it could be all of these things right, but I think the story has the power to bring others along on a journey in a way that is can build, can make or break a relationship, can build trust, can create alignment, like there's all kinds of things. I'm sure you've seen tons of this in your work over the years.
0:21:01 - Mike
Yeah, I like that, yeah, and we are able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. Which why did you say ego?
0:21:08 - Isaac
I don't know if that's empathy. It is empathy, but it's also like like why do we like watching drama or drama shows or things like that where we can like reality TV, right, Like? We love imagining that we might have made different choices in the circumstances.
Right and I feel like there's an element of that too, and I think that ultimately, that's driven by our ego and like trying to reassure ourselves that either we are as intelligent or more intelligent than another person. I don't know, I'm also just totally making this up, so I could be completely wrong, and feel free to challenge me on this.
0:21:47 - Mike
Well, I think I would lean toward. I mean, there's ego in most of our activities, but I think, yes, I think it's largely, at least if it's done well, I think it's largely empathy. That's my contention.
0:21:59 - Isaac
Yeah, I think you're right. We'll go. We'll lean on empathy, because I think that's really important, especially as relates to building communities, which is the other thing that we talk about a lot, and I think that, in this case, story has the power to create shared experiences and to kind of unite people around a cause or a common idea or whatever that is. Have you, do you have any examples in your experience that you can give on how you've worked with clients to better strengthen the relationship that they have? Maybe it's a leader with a team, maybe it's somebody who's actually leading a community. You talked a little bit about ConvertKit and why they brought you in to do that and what benefit that brings. I'd love a couple other examples if you haven't.
0:22:46 - Mike
Well, let me give you. Let me give you why it works. And then I want to give you an example and this is actually not someone I've worked with, but it's just the best that I've ever seen. So I think one of the reasons reasons why it works well with building communities is because stories are so portable. If I do my job well, then when I tell a story, it's not like you were there, but you'll be able to remember 80, 90% of it and you'll be able to then tell that to Nessa, who can tell it to someone else? Who can tell it to someone else? Who can tell it to someone else. That's one of the things I love about story is it's free. I don't usually think of it in this marketing, but that actually is what it is Like. I'm allowing someone else to do the work of telling this story for me, and that's a lot harder to do with just a random assortment of words about cloud computing or whatever. So when listeners are trying to build communities, one of the strongest things you can do is to form a story that everybody on your team or in your community can mostly repeat. Again, it's a lot easier for the person who actually experienced it but can mostly repeat Like that's, that's. That's a lot easier than giving them a random assortment of words that basically turns into a homework assignment.
And the guy who I've seen, and this is, you know, there's one keynote that I think people should watch. It's Scott Harrison's from Charity Water, and if you know Scott or not, that is the absolute best and I'd stop short of saying the whole community is built around his keynote because they do a lot of smart things and exciting things. Well connected. But I mean he tells this this whole. He has a whole narrative, to use my own language, a whole narrative with a bunch of stories in there. But a lot of those stories are are things that the audience either wouldn't know about or never knew anybody who has experienced at first hand. So we talked about as an example he.
So the overall narrative of Scott's life is he was a nightclub promoter, basically reached the end of himself. He's Doing drugs. All these things is just not making his life better. I mean, like any old episode of VH, one behind the music, right. So deadly combination of sex, drugs and I guess it wasn't deadly. But it's like sex, drugs and alcohol, like that it's not working. He reaches the end of himself. He just wants to do something that's good for the world. He tries to volunteer can't volunteer anywhere except this Organization thing is called Mercy ships but she had to pay, since not even volunteering anymore to pay to volunteer. So goes there, he's working on this boat.
There's the overall narrative and he winds up being an African. He just sees these children walking around with like cleft lips, with these giant, giant lips, and he shows these photos in the keynote words like what you can't believe, what you're seeing. That was the impetus for him starting charity water. But he's got this whole collection of little stories like that, ones where he's in the community and he's he's just, he's walking around like I forget what village it is. He's walking around the African village and seeing these women carrying buckets on their head and he's he's talking to people and he's saying, well, how far did they have to walk for that? And they, they tell him like whatever, how much mileage it was. They're walking like half the day just to get water and you're able to picture that whole thing. See those details and and Around that. I mean you should see when he delivers it in real life. I mean people can't wait to donate money to him. He can barely make it to the end of the talking.
People are ready to donate money and that is the groundswell of that has has caused charity water to not just be like an incredibly effective charity. But All these people feel like they're involved in the company, myself included. I don't actually work there. I get an email from them. I Feel like I'm in the community. Yeah, so Scott Scott story and his overall narrative is is pretty incredible and you know I don't want people to feel like they have to be on that level, but when you tell a story, well, it's something that people can repeat and it makes the community overall feel Like they're invited. They're invited in, whether that's in for a conversation or in to help or whatever you're trying to accomplish.
0:27:05 - Nessa
So I'm really curious about how did you end up in this line of work? Like you're really thoughtful about all of this, I can tell you're passionate. You know a lot, but how did you? What path brought you to this work that you do? Hmm?
0:27:18 - Mike
Okay. So Even going back to elementary school, speaking was just something I really enjoyed, I think. Now that I have a little more Distance from it, I realized that a lot of it can be tracked back to the fact that I've ADHD, which I didn't learn until earlier this year. My attention span is terrible when someone gives a speech that goes off topic or is too long or goes into too much detail, or in regular life, if someone is telling me a story and there's more than one, uh-huh, this is a disaster for me. I had a sales job straight out of college and remember I had a review and I'm sitting at you know, like the little circular table and she's my manager is going through other, like here's the stuff you do great and here's the stuff you do poorly. And the review is like exemplary, and we're talking about me moving up in the company. She's like but you're gonna have to come up with a way To not look disgusted to be in a meeting and I'm like huh, she's like yes, you look so mad to be there and that's because meetings were terribly inefficient and I, guess, was not very good at hiding it. I've come to find out that's actually like pretty common with ADHD. People's we really like need to Be writing things down less. Our mind wander and I guess in my case it just looked mad. I think really because of my attention span, I've always been trying to help people cut to the chase faster and more effectively. Now, none of that would have mattered if I didn't get a really lucky break.
I was an adjunct professor at Portland State. I was in, I was teaching a class it's like a four hour class, so you know you get breaks. I would get nice long breaks partially for myself, and remember I was this is back in the days of VCRs. Some like wheeling the TV with the VCR back to the room where those are held. So VCR was blinking like 12 o'clock. 12 o'clock. Just a few seconds ago A guy comes up to me that I thought was in my class. Apparently he was just there because his girlfriend was and he wanted to support her. I didn't even know this, I just thought he was in the class. He's like hey, mike, you're a really engaging presenter. I actually work at Nike. I would love to bring you in to present on main campus sometime. Is that something you'd be interested in? Well, at this point I think it was going to pay like $1,600 to teach this two credit class or something like that. Like I'm like sure, like that sounds like something I should do. I did not know that that was helping people with speeches was something that you could do for a job.
I gave a presentation at Nike. It was good. It was the first time in my life that I had encountered a situation where the audience intimidated me. I distinctly remember being on a stage like spotlight on me and looking at it at the audience, and it was the first time that I can ever remember where I couldn't tell if they liked what I was saying. Afterwards I finished, I had a good ending and everything like I knew it was going to end well.
I got hindsight to give myself a B minus. At the time I probably give myself an A minus, but afterwards there were like a couple of people who came up and started talking to me and they said you know, at Nike we have this storytellers group on campus. And then I started I'm like, okay, well, sort, there are more things like this out there. So I started doing some research and I found this company in the Bay Area that I wound up doing work for for several years flying all over the world helping companies learn how to present, and from there I spawned off to working with all these people one-on-one that Isaac mentioned at the top of the show working with people one-on-one and I found that speaking is really important.
Speaking is great for getting on stage, building communities, all this stuff and again, a lot of times the stories that you tell are the speech. So I think I've really focused in on how to make stories as effective as possible, because a lot of times that's the stuff that people remember and that's the stuff that gets passed on from person to person, and so I think that's really important and that's the stuff that gets passed on from person to person, and so I feel like that's. Speaking in general is my specialty, but helping people with speaking in general is my specialty, but especially the story part. That's the part that lights me up and it tends to light the audience up as well.
0:31:52 - Isaac
Yeah, so in your experience with business leaders in particular you have tons of corporate experience as well as the entrepreneurs that you've worked with how have you seen leaders able to leverage storytelling to lean into telling good stories and presenting well in order to build deeper relationships? Is it all about that empathy that we were talking about before? Is there something more there?
0:32:19 - Mike
It's usually empathy. So it's like my friend Chelsea says with stories you're often not looking for remarkable, you're looking for relatable. Now, there's some exceptions to that. Scott Harrison's an exception. Beginning of James Clear's book is an exception. He gets hit in the head with a baseball bat and has to get transported to the hospital in, I think, cincinnati. That's an exception.
But for the most part what your audience is looking for is stuff that's relatable. So relatable doesn't mean I literally went through the same thing that you did. But if you can talk, if as a leader you're talking to your employees or your department or your community and you're able to tell these stories, that lets the audience get to know you a little bit better. That's a connection that they are looking for. So that really helps community, that really helps them get to know you better and it's a pretty big win for everyone involved. But of course, especially in the corporate world, most people run from that because they're scared that if the audience ever knows that they accidentally reply to all that, they will no longer respect their boss, which of course is not true. Too much vulnerability, the fear of too much vulnerability I can't believe. Isaac replied to all instead of just me yeah, no, those are the things that people that's actually the stuff that people love and wins them over.
0:33:45 - Isaac
Fantastic. Well, thank you. I heard you hint earlier that you might be willing to help me tell us.
0:33:54 - Mike
Yeah, you want to do the challenge.
0:33:55 - Isaac
Do you want to do? Are we going to do this? What do you need for me?
0:34:00 - Mike
Who's we're going to do we're going to have this is an unfair activity, but I love doing it and I'm just trying to help our friend Isaac here, right? What we're going to do is we're going to have Isaac tell a story. I don't know what it's about, but we're going to have Isaac tell a story and then I'm going to, after you finish, I'm going to help you rethink it, or maybe you just say something. I said maybe there's nothing for me to do, but I'm going to try to see if I can help you improve the story, okay, you want me to just start telling it?
0:34:27 - Isaac
if you're ready, yeah, do we know anything.
I Think I will explain it, probably in too great a detail as we go, so so we're just gonna run with it.
So, several years ago, after the total solar eclipse, that happened I don't remember when, that was 2016, 2017, something like that.
Anyway, we were on our way home from Seeing it and we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch and my partner and I had our dog Zeus, who is asleep here next to me, and we were hanging out in the park with the dog on a leash Just having a good time picnicking, and we hear this like clop, clop, clop, clop. And we look over down the path and there are two park rangers or police officers or something riding horses through the park and we're just kind of watching as they get closer. Our dog Zeus notices them for the first time and he left his body like he jumped up and was so Overcome with this these two enormous, strange creatures that he was seeing that he had never seen before. I presume that he it looked like his soul left his body and he just was like completely bewildered in a way We've never seen before, and he's just watching them and they just clop, clop, clop, clop, clop by and off they go and that's the end of the story. Yeah, tell me my story better.
0:36:11 - Mike
Okay, this is the unfair part. I put you on this spot. Okay, so what happened? There is what happens to a lot of people, which is what we had. The most important thing that we can do is to figure out what, what's the point of the story, to edit it so that it matters. So One of the advantages that you would have in real life that we don't have on this podcast is that that can transition to something else. So, naturally, you would use a story to lead to a main point, right, right. So what, what's Point? Yeah, what's that?
0:36:42 - Isaac
story. It was funny. Dogs never cease to surprise and delight their owners. I don't know, hmm.
0:36:54 - Mike
Okay, so let's make it a little broader. Mm-hmm, which is the, the wonder that you saw in Zeus's eyes, or the, the sense of wonder, or what it's like when you encounter something exciting for the first time? Mm-hmm, does that seem like that's really what this is about? Love it? Okay, cool. So that would be like the end of it, and you would, you know, you'd have to come up with a way to use that to transition to the next thing, the story itself. I don't know how long that was, but it didn't. It didn't seem like it was going on for too long. In fact, I thought there was gonna be a lot more to it. So you.
0:37:29 - Isaac
I was attempting to be brief and concise because I was like oh, don't give two details. And then, like I was like who cares that it was a solar eclipse, who cares that? Okay, you're doing your own contesting.
0:37:40 - Mike
Yeah, yeah, that stuff doesn't matter Like the eclipse, the, so the eclipse could matter if it was just like you're. You're so frustrated. But I remember that being on I5 and it's just like, oh my gosh, we're not moving. Oh, it's like the traffic was awful. Yes, then it's, then it's, then it's. We decide like we can't handle this. Or maybe Zeus is whining in the car and it's like, all right, we're just gonna get off, we'll have a picnic, we'll deal with the rest of this later. So that that's when the eclipse could matter. But just as a reference point, it doesn't matter that it was the eclipse, so just go in one direction or another. With that, I would encourage you to tell us what kind of dog Zeus is.
0:38:22 - Isaac
Oh yeah, some details, or at least the size of the dog. Yeah.
0:38:26 - Mike
Yeah, so is Zeus an ironic name, or is this huge?
0:38:31 - Isaac
He's. He's Medium-large. It's not ironic, but it's not. He's. He's not a great Dane. I will say that he's 55 pounds.
0:38:42 - Mike
All right, so my dog's name is Zeus. That name might be a slight exaggeration for his size, but he is big. He's like 55 pounds.
I might say, it's something like that, and then when you're talking about so that nice job, we can picture the picnic table, the clock, clock, clock, like that detail, and saying those words excellent, clop-clop-clop. And I would encourage you to even like, maybe slow it down a little bit, clop-clop, and here's the clop-clop-clop, and then he leaves his body, which is a real culmination, right? But one thing that we want to be clear about is was is leaving his body angry or is it excited? I know now, but during the story I didn't know if that was angry or excited.
0:39:21 - Isaac
Right, okay, good, so I don't know, I know. I know it was bewilderment and and like Caution right it was like. It was wonder like what is this? I want it, it's enormous, it might kill me. I mean, they weren't Clydesdales, but they were big horses.
0:39:48 - Mike
So that's that. That's like the perfect. I actually love that as a transition. I can see the look on his face as best I can interpret a dog's facial expressions saying Is this thing friendly? What's it going to do? Might it kill me? And then you transition slightly to and then like, very next line is Transitioning to what you want to talk about. And then it's like which is exactly how a lot of us feel when we try new software or whatever that thing is.
0:40:18 - Isaac
All right, there we go.
0:40:22 - Mike
Facetious software is not gonna kill you, but it's true there is that, like this thing is new, do I really? What should I do with this?
0:40:29 - Isaac
Yeah, it's kind of how I felt when I looked at when I use chat gpt for the first time.
0:40:35 - Mike
Yes.
0:40:40 - Isaac
Wonderful.
0:40:42 - Mike
There's your AI related email or speech.
0:40:46 - Isaac
Amazing, mike. That was a fantastic little five-minute lesson in how to make a story better, an anti-climactic and pointless story better, but we found it and it was. It was great. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. We really enjoyed having this conversation today. Why don't you tell our listeners where they can find you?
0:41:06 - Mike
Yeah, totally so. I do one-on-one coaching, I do group coaching and I do corporate trainings. You can find out more about me at best speech dot co. Best speech dot co. And I have a little freebie for your group.
So when I work with people one-on-one, the things that people tend to have the most difficulty with that is super important is the beginning. So I think a lot of times people will start at least in a speech People will start with and they don't know what to do. So it's like, hey, I'm glad to be here, my Lana is wonderful this time of year, and that's the beginning and you'd be there. They're much better strategies to put together. So for those of you who are interested in speaking, I have put together a PDF that is a free download just for you. It is my strategies for Starting a presentation. One of those strategies, as you probably figured out, is a story Frankly like this is that PDF is worth Thousands if you're speaking from a stage, because it wins the audience over and then you're more confident. So I'm gonna park that at best speech dot co slash Kick ass. Best speech dot code slash kickass.
0:42:34 - Nessa
Thanks for listening to this episode of make it kick ass. We hope you found it entertaining and helpful. If Hosting a community event is on your radar, visit get event lab calm to take our free 30-minute training called Community event mastery. That's, get event lab calm or use the link in the show notes. Make it kick ass is hosted by Isaac Watson and Nessa he manners. Post production audio by Chris Nelson at Mittens Media. Our theme song is feel it by dojo for crooks. Make it kick ass is a production of kick ass conferences and event strategy and design agency serving leaders of growing communities.