Master Storytelling | Stories With Traction Podcast

 

PODCAST SUMMARY: In this episode, Mark Carpenter and Matt Zaun talk about what makes a great story, and they give actionable ideas for how leaders can better document their messages.

MARK CARPENTER BIO: Mark co-authored the book Master Storytelling: How to Turn Your Experiences Into Stories that Teach, Lead, and Inspire.”

For more info, check out Mark here:
Website
LinkedIn

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors.

Matt Zaun 

Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things, how to become a master storyteller.

Today I am joined by one of the co authors of master storytelling. How to turn your experiences into stories into that teach, lead and inspire.

Mark Carpenter was a storyteller as not only a child, but leveraged his ability in his career in marketing into public relations and later as a college professor.

Mark Carpenter, welcome to the show.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Matt, thank you.

 

Matt Zaun 

It's my pleasure to be here. So I love this topic. I'm obsessed with this topic. So I want to dive into many different elements of storytelling, but I just want to start out with asking you, when you picture storytelling, where does your mind go?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

What is the first thing you think of when you think of Well, in the world that we work in, the storytelling I think of are stories that are based on real life experiences.

So some of the great stories that I think everybody has are stories from their family. Family experiences that have happened in their past.

So those are some of the stories that I think of first when I think of stories. we teach people to take their real life experiences and.

Turn them into impactful stories that can, as the subtitle of the book says, teach, lead, sell, inspire.

 

Matt Zaun

That's a really good point. And I appreciate you mentioning Real Life Experiences. I think a lot of times business leaders, their mind goes to a movie production or a Broadway play where they need to perform for their audience.

And as you know, Mark, stories were all around us. And a lot of times the most authentic and vulnerable stories come from our Real Life Experiences.

These are stories that people relate to the most. I appreciate mentioning Real Life Experiences. Now, what do you think separates a masterful storyteller versus storyteller that is boring?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Well, I think there's a bunch of things. There's a long answer to that question that. But for me, it starts with intention.

It starts with the intent of telling the story. get some people who just share an experience and they think they're telling a story.

And they may just be sharing something that happened in their day. Fine, and I guess you could call that a story, but there's no intention to it.

I'm looking at telling a story that has a purpose. And so the focus on that intentionality in your storytelling is one that's really big for me.

That I'm telling this to help people see the impact on customer service or to help people see the value of teamwork or to help people understand why we need to give specific appreciation to others.

So there has to be some point in it. And I think that focuses the storyteller to get to the main points in the experience that actually make the point that they're trying to make.

And that intention is really important from my perspective.

 

Matt Zaun 

Oh, that is so important. think a lot of times people get themselves caught when they're trying to be entertaining and there's no point, right?

They want to be riveting and they want to dazzle their audience, but if they're not intentional and they don't have purpose, that story doesn't matter.

So I really appreciate you mentioning. Can you speak to who needs storytelling? Who, when you say storytelling and we think of all different levels of business, who needs to be good at storytelling business?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Well, I'll go back to the subtitle of the book. Teach, lead, and inspire. And I mentioned this, Matt, in our preliminary conversations.

If I had to do it over again, I would add sell in there. So think of any role where you need to teach, lead, sell, or inspire.

You need storytelling. And so that can go broadly across an organization. mean, it's easy for us as storytellers to say, oh, everybody needs storytelling.

But that's the way I narrow it down a little bit, is if you need to do one of those things, teach, lead, sell, inspire, you need storytelling.

So anybody who's leading people, storytelling is going to be a key skill for you because this is how we connect as human beings.

This is how we understand as a species or how we make sense of the world is through stories. And so if you want to have that impact on your team.

If you teach lead cell and inspire, you need storytelling to help you to do that.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, it's really a good point. And often we think of decision makers, right? They're on stage and they are talking whether to their staff or the world.

So Steve Jobs comes to mind. mean, Steve Jobs masterful storyteller. He built one of the most profitable businesses in human history because of his storytelling skill set.

But then I also think about someone I recently called at a local company asking about if their product was going to work.

And she shared a story with me about how it worked for another customer. So even people that are answering phones to people sending emails to people you mentioned selling, everyone really needs to be better and more mindful of storytellers.

I appreciate you mentioning that. Now let's talk about mistakes. What are the biggest mistakes people make regarding storytelling?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

I think it goes back to beginning with the intention that they aren't clear on their intention. Can't in the story.

And that leads to a couple of obvious mistakes. In other words, they demonstrate themselves like this, but they start with the intention.

The one mistake is that they ramble on. And you've probably heard this. People are, and this is where people are sharing the experience and there's kind of walking through the story.

But they don't really have a place to go. Instead of getting every single detail in there in search of a point.

And my advice to those people is always land the plane. That no further you're going. So you can actually get to that destination.

So I think it's one of the mistakes that people make. So they wander around because they're searching for a point.

The other one is they get so worried about, well, I need to get to my point really fast. But they have their point and they jump to the point without the lead up to it.

And so it doesn't have the impact on the listener. You haven't taken the listener on that journey. You just got them to the destination.

And so those are the two that I see and it's a balancing point between too long, too short. But they're

The foundation of all of that is do you know what the intent of your story is?

 

Matt Zaun 

That's really important because so the whole land the plane premise, I see a lot of people in positional leadership roles get this wrong.

And why I mention that is because I can think of certain individuals that because of their position, they think they can go into five minute screens when it comes to their story.

And people's attention spans top out way before they get to the point. So I really want everyone listening to this to recognize even if you are in a position, a very high position where you have a lot of people reporting to you and you are up at staff meetings, maybe even having an all company all hands on meeting, you still need to recognize people's attention spans top out at a certain point.

You need to focus on when to land the plane. So can you speak more to that as far as timing?

Maybe the psychology behind the timing when it comes to storytelling?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Yeah. We look at like that two and a half to three and a half minute time frame. I always put kind of three minutes of the target in the middle.

If it's a little shorter, that's fine. it's a little longer, that's fine. But you get much longer than that and you do start losing people in the details.

part of it is all it's even tie into some of the research that we cite in the book from Dr.

Paul Zach, who talks about the chemical changes that happen inside your brain when you're listening to a well told story.

But if you can introduce in that story, relatable characters with a worthwhile goal, the listener is going to be able to relate to those things.

as a result, they get an increase in oxytocin in their brain. Oxytocin is the trust hormone. So think about this.

If you're leading a team, if you're leading a company and you want your people to trust you, we'll set up a relatable story because it's going to increase their oxytocin and they will trust you more as the leader.

And then you want to get some point in there where you have some kind of a conflict. There's something that gets in the way that

This is going to heighten people's attention because it increases a little bit of the cortisol in their brain. So, makes them focus a little bit on what you're saying.

And then you want to get to our resolution in that story because it actually gives people a little bit of dopamine, that neurotransmitter that we get when we check something off our to-do list or we level up on a video game or something like that.

And it's that sense of satisfaction that comes because you learn something from it. You've got a kind of resolution in there.

And so, you want to make sure you get those three components in there, but you don't want to do it.

You don't want to overdo any of those sections or that you start to lose people because they need all three of those to really have the maximum impact of the story that you're telling.

 

Matt Zaun 

So this really does into the structure of storytelling. A lot of people want more of a simplistic structure, which I think you really laid out for us very well.

So, we have the relatable story. So, it's relating to, I'm envisioning a leader at a staff meeting to I think to the team, then you have a conflict with something that gets in the way.

And then after that, there's a resolution. So there's a kind of jumping over that wall or helping them over the wall.

Now what I want to ask you about is the introduction to this. It's really grabbing the audience's attention. So in the world we live in today, we really need to grab people's attention.

And I think because of social media, there are some pretty extreme ways of grabbing people's attention. And I see it diving into the workplace.

So obviously, the better we get at storytelling, we're going to be able to hook our audience even better. But is there any danger with starting a story in a very, maybe, bombastic or almost like a clickbait type way?

What's a good way to grab someone's attention? But that'll be too over the top with it.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

There's a couple of ways that we teach people. One of them is to drop people into the middle of the crisis moment and then back up from it little bit.

So you might start the story with a couple of weeks ago, I woke up in the hospital. Well, all of a sudden, immediately people were like, wait, why were you in the hospital?

And then you can back it up from there. And maybe it wasn't even about you. It was my neighbor got hit by a car and I had to take it to the hospital.

But I learned this while I was there. But I've got your attention that you're in it. The other thing they teach people a lot to do is ask questions.

Ask relatable questions that bring people into their own experience based on the experience you're going to tell. So for example, if I'm trying to make a point about let's say customer service, I might say, have you ever been on one of those customer service calls that you wish you could reach through the phone and just pop the person in the nose?

Yeah, and I think we've all been on that call. And so now you're sitting there going, yeah, yeah, I can remember that time.

And then I might tell you the story. How that happened to one of our customers with our customer service team.

And I'll send you're going to rethink what you're doing on the other end of that phone call when you're taking that customer service call.

So, asking questions to really draw people in is really helpful because they start not just listening to your story, but they start putting themselves in your story based on their own experiences.

So, they'll take their experience that's close to what you're talking about and they will relate it into yours. This also sinks it into their brains deeper because you're connecting into their memories.

And your story is now going to attach and put a little hook onto a memory that's already in their brain.

And then that experience, that point that you're making with that story will last longer with the people that are listening to it.

 

Matt Zaun 

That's so powerful. really like what you said about dropping into that crisis moment. And when we think about really captivating movies,

We're sitting there, often we are put right in the middle and then they'll go back to the beginning. It's a really good way to pull in attention.

But I want to highlight the conflict piece with you. So when we think of business, it's not an army-type conflict.

It's not a good guy, bad guy-type conflict. So what would be some conflicts that happen in the business world for us to be mindful of?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

It could be as simple as losing our reputation or tarnishing our reputation. You know, something that happens that gets in the way of our reputation that we want to have, who we want to be in the community.

Now you could also do that internally. It's something that gets in the way of me looking like a good coworker, like a good team member.

And so it can be as simple as those kinds of things, sometimes it's even an internal conflict. got to make a decision between doing this and doing this.

Who am I going to offend by one of these decisions over the other? That creates some kind of conflict.

If you think about our lives, we run into these little personal conflicts all the time. So it doesn't have to be this huge, like you said, any war or conflict type of the situation.

But just those internal struggles that we have about being human, about being people, and about the interactions that we have with others.

Another thing from a business standpoint, could be, are we going to lose this sale? Are we going to win this customer?

Those types of things create enough conflict that people say, ooh, I want to find out what happens here. And while I'm that, want to circle back to another thing that you said something that reminded me of this.

When we get to that resolution on the story, sometimes we look at that and we go, I didn't have a good resolution.

I actually failed to overcome that conflict. We lost the customer, or I offended this person. Those are still powerful stories to tell because the lesson is still there.

What did I learn by not doing this, or what could I have done So, let's dive into not so much about you in the story.

It's about the lesson. It's about what do we learn from it. That's the hero of the story is the lesson learned.

 

Matt Zaun 

So, let's dive into that a little bit deeper because I think that's really important because we love struggle victory stories.

mean, if you look at Hollywood, there are a lot of really good stories regarding struggle victory. We love seeing someone an underdog overcome.

So, now you're talking about still in process stories. Would that be from an intentionality perspective? that be a leader that makes a mistake and they're being vulnerable with their team saying, hey, here could have been the resolution if I would have listened to you and I didn't.

So, we lost the sales. now I recognize I need to be More open to feedback. Is that where you're going regarding the in the process stories?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Yeah, somewhat and I'll just pick up on the example that you used and it may not even be that the lesson is I need to be more open to you, but maybe that we all need to be open to each other.

In other words, it could come into if I had listened a little bit more, we probably would have avoided this problem or we probably would have had this success.

So think about times in your interactions with each other where we need to take a little bit more time to listen.

And can you do that? And so again, focusing on what is the intent of the story? What is the lesson we're trying to get across there that people kind of lock into their memories so they're going to perform better down the road?

I mean, it's great that we learn from our mistakes, but it's better if we learn from somebody else's mistakes so that we don't have to make the mistakes ourselves.

And so as a leader, that's one of the things you want to do. want to develop your people to learn from maybe some of the mistakes that you've made or mistake.

Thanks to other people who've made. These stories don't always have to be about you. They can be things that you learned from other people.

I tell this story all the time about my sister on a customer service call and how they just totally blew it.

They totally messed this thing up. And it just gets people to thinking, all right, what are my processes doing that's getting in the way that it's actually serving people?

So we can borrow other people's experiences to see those too.

 

Matt Zaun 

So it doesn't always have to be our mistake that we're highlighting. A really good point, very good point. So I wanna talk about where we can find stories that connect in more of the ordinary day to day, maybe even boring life, right?

Because I think it's really important. was working with a gentleman not too long ago and we were talking about storytelling.

And he said, you know, I'm just not a great storyteller. And I said, what do you mean by that?

And he said, well, he said, I was just at a conference where the main keynote speaker had a shark bite and was missing a limb.

He was missing an arm. said, I don't have a story like that, Matt. And my response was, thank God you have all your limbs.

That's really good. And I think where the disconnect is, is we look at all these heroic feats. look at people that win on a big, big level.

They're major overcoming. And those stories are really good for Hollywood, are really good for keynote speeches. They might not even be relatable to our own teams.

And I think we miss these relatable, vulnerable stories that really connect and inspire our teams to do what we'd like them to do.

So can you talk about how we can be more mindful of finding stories just in our day-to-day lives?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

First, I think you're right on with that assessment. It's great to hear these big, fantastic stories. The guy who lost his arm in a shark bite, whatever it happens to be.

But most of Most us don't live that life. And so there are extraordinary things that come out of our ordinary lives.

The extraordinary lives inside of that ordinary. And we can relate to that a lot better because most of us just ordinary people.

There's not very many of us who have walked on the moon, you know, so we don't have to relate that walked on the moon story.

We can just relate the story from our life. tip that I always give people is look for those moments in your day to day life that you have an emotional reaction to something.

That emotional reaction could be startled. It could be fear. It could be frustration. It could be joy. It could be any number things.

But anything you have an emotional reaction to, there's probably something that happened there that's going to have a lesson behind it.

And you may not even know what the lesson is in the moment, but capture that. Take note of those moments that you have an emotional reaction to and then use those as a center point of your story.

Sorry, I'll give you a quick example. Several months ago, I was driving to the airport on Sunday afternoon. And I'm just not really paying attention to what I'm doing.

I'm just driving because traffic was light. And all of sudden, about three miles away from the airport, I look in the rear view mirror and there's a police car behind me.

So immediately, what do I start to think? Damn, I'm going to get pulled over. I don't know how fast I was going.

This guy's going to make me late for my flight. He's going to mess me up. then I went, OK, wait, wait, don't get ahead of yourself.

Maybe he's just back there. And so I moved over a lane. Well, what did the police car do? Moved over behind me.

So what does this do to the little internal dialogue that's going on my head? See, I'm right. He's after me.

He's picking on me. Other people were going faster than me. Why is he going on and on and on?

I'm having this emotional reaction about the moment. Well, I move over one more lane, which is the exit only lane to the airport.

The cop car moves over behind me. Well, we get off on that exit. I'm like, pull me over already.

Quit just torturing me by following me here. The road. Forks, I go one way, he goes the other way.

He wasn't following me at all. He just happened to be going that same direction. But what did I do to myself by letting that story run in my head?

I worked myself up. I didn't impact him at all. I just got myself worked up over it. And do we do that, particularly in the workplace?

Do we sit around sometimes? That person didn't get me what I needed to do. They're just an incense, jerk, and they're trying to make my life miserable, and I'm going to get fired for this.

And we build up this big story. And what we don't do is just sit down and have a conversation with the person about it.

And so there's that lesson that's in there. I had that emotional reaction. And later I look back on it and went, what is the lesson?

And that's the lesson that I came up with is we work ourselves up by the narratives that we get going on inside of our head.

And we can solve that problem if we just talk to somebody. So just a simple, that's a simple, every new little thing.

You can relate to that because you've been driving down to the, down the freeway and had a cop show up behind you.

But it's not a big spectacular thing. There's just a lesson that's embedded within it. And that's what we want to look for.

It's one of those little moments that have those lessons embedded within them.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right, so here's what I don't want people to miss. So as you were sharing that story, I felt that story.

Like, I literally, because I have experienced the exact same thing, I make many trips to the airport. So whenever there's something that could slow me down, I start to freak out, right?

And for everyone that travels a lot, you know, the airline industry isn't the most luxurious industry anymore. Like, you have to be at the airport at a certain time, or he will miss your flight.

So I felt that. Now, there are people listening to that story, and they may think, who cares? What's the point?

How could I use that in business? But I want people to think about this. That story could be used in so many ways with a business, theme, and or twine.

Mark could use that story at a staff meeting. He could get up and say, share that story. And the premise of that story is how everyone on this one team, we were overthinking this, and we got bogged down in details that didn't matter, and we weren't able to complete the deadline because of all these details with overthinking.

He could also use it to enhance marketing. So there's a lot of different marketing premises for social media, for email blasts that could be utilized.

And then also with sales, building rapport, I could understand how you could share that story with a prospect and how they could see, hey, if we're overthinking such and such, it's not going to yield to a certain result.

So that story could be used for sales, for marketing, for company engagement within a meeting. So I think it's really important for people to recognize what's the emotional reaction and then how could I utilize this in business.

Now, I want to ask you a question regarding documentation, and I think it's a really good segue into we have the emotional reaction.

No reaction. How do we get this down so we're not missing it? So many people that listen to me, they recognize this example because I mentioned it quite often, but I really think it's a good example.

I'm a huge fan of Jerry Seinfeld. I think he is a masterful stand up comedian. And one of the things that he does day in and day out is he asks himself, where is the funniness.

And as he's going through an experience. Where's the funny in this? He writes it. He down and then he uses it for material in his stand up comedy acts.

As leaders, we need to ask ourselves, where is the story in this? And we also need to be really good at documenting those stories.

So we could use a story like that for a staff meeting. But often a lot of stories that come into our day to day lives are missed because we're not doing a good job documenting those stories.

So Mark, where would be some ways or where maybe some tools or maybe some. Some ideas on better documentation, so we're not missing some of these stories in our day-to-day that could be used for growth.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

I love what you're saying here, and I love your point there also about how one experience can be used to teach three or four different lessons to three or four different audiences.

You might tell them slightly different to each one to make sure that point gets across. In terms of capturing these things, build your own capture tool, whatever it happens to be.

So maybe it's a set of voice memos on your phone, and you just when something happens, you just turn that on, you just record a quick voice memo around it.

I use my iPad a lot. I carry it with me basically everywhere I go. I have a little folder in the Notes app that comes with my iPad, and it's called Stories for Someday.

And I just take note in there of three or four sentences when things happen to me that I go, I want to remember that.

I want to call that back at some certain time. I'm not sure where I'll use it. I'm even sure exactly the point that I'll make sometimes, but I'll jot it down so that I can always go back to it.

Then when I'm looking for a story, I open that thing back up and I look at it and go, oh, hey, there's this one.

That could apply to this point that I'm trying to make. And then I crafted it into the story to use in that situation.

But it's about being intentional again about capturing those and looking for them. But I'll also say, as you look for stories, you will find them.

They will come up. And particularly if you're looking for a specific topic. If you're thinking, I need something to illustrate the value of customer service.

I'll just pull something out of the air. You start looking and start asking people about that at. They'll just bubble up.

They'll start coming up from everywhere because your mind's focused on it. It's like whenever you buy a new car, all of a sudden you buy that car and then that's

The only car you see on the road, all of a sudden you notice how many of them are out there.

And you didn't notice that before you got that specific model of car, but because you're attuned to it now, you start seeing it.

So if you attune yourself to looking for an experience that can make a point, you'll find it. It'll be there for you.

 

Matt Zaun 

That's awesome. So I always recommend content buckets. People focus on three content buckets. So you mentioned customer service. So it could be customer service.

It could be leadership. It could be technology, whatever it is for people listening. They would set up content buckets.

as they're experiencing something, they could ask themselves, where is the story in this? And then they have the emotional reaction.

They have their capture tool ready to go. And they're able to put that in there. Now, this does take time, but I want people to really think about musical artists that they really enjoy listening to.

And whoever that is for you. One of my favorite artists is Bob Dylan. I really like Bob Dylan as a lyricist.

What's interesting about someone like Dylan, and he's not the only one, Bob Dylan has written way more songs that have been put out and then have been put out into the world.

So, you know, fill the gap with whoever you're, whatever you're a fan of music wise. If they have three albums in the world, more than likely they have double, triple, maybe even quadruple the amount of songs that they have not put out in the world because they didn't necessarily make it.

The reason why I say that is because everyone wants to be a great storyteller. Everyone wants to get on stage and they want to be riveting and they want to connect and they want to be engaging.

And it's amazing that there are times where as we establish this process, we're going to be pulling in a story, but for whatever reason, it's just not there, we're not going to not going to use it.

But we might have to go through three potential stories to get to that one that's going to be really good to share in a staff meeting.

So I really appreciate you mentioning that. Now from a timing perspective, do you recommend people go back to this capture tool and review or what does that process look like?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Yeah, and to take the opportunity to review it periodically, and there may be some in there that you eventually go, man, that one's never going to turn into something.

And as you talked about the musical artists there, it also prompted the thought that people who say, I'm not a good storyteller.

I'm not a natural storyteller. Well, guess what? Most great storytellers weren't necessarily naturally natural storytellers. They just did it a lot.

It's practice. It's work. You mentioned Jerry Seinfeld. He works those comedy bits. He tries them and they don't work.

He tries them again. He tries them in a different way until he gets it exactly right. The same thing is going to happen with these stories that we tell.

You're going to tell story and it's not going to land. And people will go, I'm not sure I get that.

Then you need to make the assessment. Was it the story or was it how The story was crafted or was how the story was delivered.

And so you may need to adjust that or it may need to be one of the songs that never makes it to the album that gets put out to pasture.

And be okay with that because that's how we learn and that's how we grow and that's how we develop.

I want you to listen to listeners to think of anything that they're good at right now that they love to do.

And it could be music, could be sports, could be just a hobby of some kind. I guarantee you that the very first time they did it, they weren't that good at it.

And that got better because they made a commitment to it. They worked at it. They were intentional about developing that skill.

They got feedback and eventually they got better at it. Storytelling is the same thing. You keep working it, you keep practicing it and you're going to get better at it.

 

Matt Zaun 

That is something that we need to continue to tell ourselves because often we'll see someone that's good at story telling.

And tell ourselves, oh, the person was born a great story teller. I can't do that. So it's. Just not going to work or a lot.

There's a lot of people that will get up on stage and they'll be sharing the story for the first time on stage, which you and I both seen that backfire.

So based on the standard comedy analogy, typically comedians, even the ones like a Jerry Seinfeld start out in local venues with new material, then they go to regional, then they figure out the national, the national acts.

And that's when they're booking tons and tons of tickets. They don't just get on stage with these massive stages and share the joke for the very first time.

They need to make sure that it lands. So with that said, is there a certain process that someone should take in the business world before they get up at, let's say, a quarterly meeting and they're sharing something?

Is there a process that they should take before they're sharing that story for the very first time in front of decision makers?

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Yeah, find a way to practice. Find a way to practice at first. And so if you've got a good

Trust advisor or a coach that you can practice with. Great. Use that person to practice. If you don't, grab a family member or just a colleague and say, hey, this is the story.

I'm trying to make this point with it. Let me share it with you. You tell me how it lands.

just have them answer the question, what did you like about this story? What did you think the main points were?

What was the point that I was trying to get across? Because if they find some things they liked in the story and they got the point that you were trying to make, you're probably going to be okay.

The other thing you can do is self-coach yourself a little bit because we all have these little movie studios we carry around with this.

It's called our phone. Turn the video on your phone and just record yourself telling the story. Play it back.

You will find things that you did not know happen. Weird looks you had on your face, words that didn't come out right, that didn't make any sense, that it sounded right in your head.

But when it came out, it didn't quite land. Oats yourself a little bit that way too. But the big thing, and you referenced this, Matt, is avoid the situation where you're standing up and delivering it cold, especially if you're not experienced as storytelling, because you will end up either rambling or missing the main point and it's not going to have the impact that you want it to have.

So develop this like any other skill. Practice it, get feedback, try it some more. Recognize that you're going to fail sometimes and get better as time goes on.

 

Matt Zaun

That's an excellent point. Excellent point. We need to focus on practicing and we can all get better at this.

There are people that I know that have been in the storytelling industry for decades and decades and they're still learning, they're still figuring out how to be better connectors.

So it's something that we need to continue to do.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

Absolutely. are all still working on it. That's the thing I tell people all the time.

 

Matt Zaun 

We're all still working on it. Sure, sure. Now, with that said, you gave us a lot to work with today.

So I very much. I this conversation. were a ton of takeaways. There are a few in particular that I'm going to remember from this conversation.

I really appreciate you talking about intentionality and purpose. We need to be intentional and purposeful regarding our story. It cannot be, hey, this is an entertaining story.

Let me stand up at a staff meeting and share it. We need to have intention and purpose. The second piece I really like when you said, land the plane.

Figure out timing. To get to the point. We need to land the plane. And then the third thing I really appreciate is you breaking down some simplistic but very powerful structure for us.

I like how you said we could drop people right into the crisis moment. And then from there, have a relatable story.

There's an element of conflict and then resolution. I really appreciate that. So those are my three takeaways. Now, if anyone listening wants to get more information on you, what you do, they want to inquire about your services.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

What's the best place they can go to get that information? The best place to start is our website, which is master-storytelling.com.

So you have to have that little dash between master and storytelling. If you run it together, you don't get to the right place.

So master-storytelling.com, we have some free resources out there that you're welcome to get into. There's a little story capture document that helps you think about what are your stories and capturing those.

We talked about that some, so maybe that tool would be helpful for people. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

I do a lot on LinkedIn, so look for Mark Carpenter and master-storytelling. And the combination of those two things will get you to me, and I'd be happy to connect with any of your listeners.

Love to talk about this. I'm passionate enough about it. Talk to me anytime. Ask any questions you want. I'll sit and talk to you about it.

 

Matt Zaun 

Perfect. I will include those links in the show notes. People could just click and find your information there. But thanks again.

Mark, I very much appreciate your time today.

 

Mark Carpenter (Master Storytelling)

It's been a pleasure talking to you, Matt. Thanks much.