240. Transform Your Leadership with Storytelling with Mick Spiers

Unlock the secrets of impactful leadership through storytelling with Andrea Sampson, CEO of Talk Boutique and TED-trained speaking coach. Andrea shares her expertise on how leaders can move beyond mere facts and figures to connect with their audiences on an emotional level, transforming how they persuade, build trust, and inspire action. You'll discover Andrea's "story spine" framework, a powerful tool that simplifies storytelling into essential components like environment, characters, and resolution, making it accessible for leaders at any stage. We also cover common storytelling pitfalls, offering practical tips to avoid mistakes like irrelevant details and disconnected narratives, all while emphasizing the importance of contrast and tension to keep your audience engaged.

Reflect on the storytelling barriers that may be holding you back and find inspiration to overcome them. This episode encourages listeners to embrace storytelling as a skill that can be practiced and refined, inviting you to share your stories and experiences along the way. Don't miss our next episode with John Tarnoff, where we tackle the broken hiring system and explore strategies for navigating career transitions. Stay connected with us on social media and join our community as we continue to explore the transformative power of storytelling and leadership.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Storytelling in Leadership
• 12:47 Overcoming Storytelling Limiting Beliefs

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

Picture this. You're standing backstage, heart pounding, palm sweaty. You've prepared your presentation, but doubt creeps in. You've been told that storytelling is the secret to a great presentation, but you just don't consider yourself to be a storyteller. Now, panic starts to grip your body, and you revert to facts and figures, a safe zone, but the moment you begin, you see it in their eyes. Your audience is shutting off and you've lost them already. Now imagine there's a better way, a simpler way, to build your storytelling skills that captivates your audience, a way to speak with impact, not anxiety. That's exactly what we're diving into today. Welcome back to The Leadership Project. Today, we're reflecting on our amazing conversation with Andrea Sampson, a TED trained speaking coach and CEO of talk boutique about the power of storytelling in leadership and communication, and importantly, how to make it simpler so you can get storytelling to work for you. This episode also built upon the themes that we explored before with people like Richard Newman about speaking with gravitas and on the amazing work of David J. Phillips and his insights on how Emotion drives decision making in presentations, I want to break down the key lessons from Andreas interview, add my own reflections, and Most importantly, make storytelling easier for you to apply in your leadership. So stay tuned to the end as we give some practical tips on how you can start building this into your repertoire. So why is storytelling such a leadership superpower? Well, Andrea shared that storytelling isn't just about engagement, it's a tool for persuasion, trust building and influence. As leaders, our role isn't just to instruct or direct people what to do. It's to inspire action. We talk about it here on the show. The very definition of leadership is to inspire people into meaningful action around a worthy cause because they wanted to do it, not because they were told to do it. And stories are the bridge that enables us to do that. It's the bridge between knowledge and action. People connect with stories, not statistics. You can give people all the logic in the world, but they'll only act if they feel something. Stories make ideas memorable. Our brains are wired to retain narratives better than raw data. It's been like that for all time the history of the world. Think about Martin Luther King, Jr, he didn't say, I have a strategic plan. He said, I have a dream. And he captured people's imagination. He inspired them into meaningful action through his storytelling. Stories shape identity, whether it's personal identity, company culture or customer loyalty, the stories we tell define how we see ourselves and how we see others. So a question for you, how often do you use storytelling in your leadership? Are you relying too much on facts and logic, or are you making an emotional connection with your team, or, in the example of a presentation, with your audience. Now a big challenge leaders face is thinking that storytelling is difficult. This is a very common limiting belief that you hear that storytelling is powerful, but you've convinced yourself that you're just not a storyteller. So Andrea and I discussed how a simpler structure can make storytelling effortless. You've probably all heard of the hero's journey, which is like a 16 point framework, and it's a little bit daunting in its own right, but it doesn't have to be Andrea's story spine framework that she shared in the show broke it down into much simpler structure and much simpler things to cover. So a reminder, it was environment. Where does the story take place? Set the scene. Use some illustrative language in setting the scene characters who's involved, and establish their roles and why they're there. Issue conflict or opportunity. What's the challenge, the conflict or the opportunity that has arisen? Tension, what obstacles or challenges have built up? Up resolution. How is the issue resolved or transformed? And finally, what's the message? What is the key takeaway, or the lesson learned that comes from that story? This is something that you can all use. You can use Andrea's template that she shared with us, or you can just write your own environment, characters, issue, conflict or opportunity, tension, resolution or message. But here's the trap many leaders fall into. They start telling stories that don't connect to their message. So be careful. They hear that storytelling is important, so they start adding stories just for the sake of storytelling, but they pick the wrong ones. So some of the common mistakes in storytelling are irrelevant details, adding unnecessary details that distract from the core message. They're not connected at all. Start telling a story about brushing your teeth or something like this, but you because you wanted to tell a story, but it's got nothing to do with the message. Disconnected stories. Telling a story that doesn't tie back to the main idea or objective lack of audience focus, forgetting to consider what the audience should think, feel or do differently after hearing the story. So before you tell any story, ask yourself this, who is my audience? What do I want them to think, feel or do differently, and does this story support that goal? Now one more tip, and this is going to be even simpler, and this is how you can get started. Start with location. Where were you action? What were you doing, thinking or feeling? What were you thinking or feeling in that moment and then resolution? How did it end, and what was the key takeaway? So even if Andreas story spine sounds a little bit too far removed for you right now, just start with this one location, action, thinking or feeling and resolution. Even simpler, to build your muscles of storytelling, just start building in a few metaphors into your speech, into your daily conversations with people, if you start using metaphors, it's like building a muscle towards storytelling. Another key tip from David J. Phillips is about the importance of contrast. Your knee, your audience needs to feel the tension before they appreciate the resolution. It's the emotional roller coaster that keeps people engaged. If your story is flat or too direct, your impact will also land flat. So building that tension is like creating an open loop where the human brain wants to know the resolution. So you got to build a little bit of tension build your story in the right way, so that when you give the resolution, it hits with impact. So think of a recent conversation where you tried to persuade someone. Did you present just the facts, or did you tell a compelling story, and how did it finish? Did it land the way that you wanted it to? The next key tip is about the emotional connection, and this is where Richard Newman, Vin Yang and David J Phillips teach us a lot about how to make an emotional connection with our audience, and how we need to hold ourselves when doing so. So Richard Newman, in our previous conversation, emphasize the role of gravitas in speaking. Gravitas isn't about being loud. It's about commanding attention through presence, through tone and through body language. Congruence is key. People pick up more of what they see than what they hear. If your body language and voice doesn't match your message, you're gonna lose Vin Yang, a master of speaking and influence, teaches that your trust, and you're gonna lose people. So make sure everything voice is an instrument. Great speakers vary their tone, their pitch, their rhythm, to keep people engaged, just like in music, the right pacing and the right pausing can make all of about your body language and your voice and your tone are the difference in your how your story lands. So question for you, when you're presenting, are you aligning your body language congruent with the message that you're trying to give. Emotion and your vocal delivery with your message, or are you sending a Mick signal where your body language doesn't match what is the key to influence. Studies show that people don't make you're saying and the brain doesn't know what to do with that. Now, how do we bring this all together? The key to becoming a better storyteller is to keep it simple and practice decisions based on logic. They justify decisions with logic, every day. Start small, build your confidence and competence, and before you know it, you too can be a master storyteller. You but they make decisions based on emotion, the power of might begin with just integrating a few metaphors into your speech, then you can graduate to what I was saying before, about location, action, what were your thinking or vulnerability a leader who shares struggles. And personal feeling and the resolution to structure some basic stories, and then challenge yourself to Use Andreas story spine, the experience also fosters authenticity and trust. So make story spine of environment, characters, issue, conflict or opportunity, tension, resolution and message. This is much it personable. Make your story personal, and it's okay to simpler than the hero's journey, and you can do this. If you do this, you'll create more compelling narratives. You'll capture. You'll captivate your audience, you'll capture their share. Hey, I had this challenge in my life. In fact, it's more attention, and you'll create a much more lasting and memorable experience for them, and your messages will start to land. than okay to share. I've had this challenge in my life. You'll become a person of influence. You'll become a person of gravitas. People will gravitate towards you because of your storytelling skills. It's like a muscle. You can build it. People want to know that you've been through what they're You can do this. We'd love to hear from you. What are your limiting beliefs about storytelling? If you have them, experiencing, and you've come out the other end, it builds have you overcome them? And what tips do you have for others in the audience? Share your story. Share your story in the comments that authenticity and trust and storytelling through body or reach out to us. We'd love to hear you and feature your story in a future episode. That's it for today. Now get out there and start practicing that story telling skill and build that language and voice, the way we deliver a story is just muscle in the next episode, we're going to be joined by John Tarnoff. John is an executive and career transition coach, and important as the content itself. he's going to be sharing with us what he calls the broken hiring system and how we can navigate it. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.