You know when you’re reading a blog post or an email and you’re completely enthralled in the story being shared?
That’s no accident. It’s because our brains love a good story. It’s truly irresistible. When you’re doing business online, digital storytelling is necessary as you don’t have the luxury of a face-to-face connection.
Some people are natural born storytellers. Then there are the rest of us who need to work hard to put ourselves out there and offer up little pieces of our lives. (Guilty as charged, here!)
In your business, telling a story has higher stakes so you judge them so much more harshly than if you were out with your BFF for a coffee.
You may decide your stories aren’t interesting, or you worry that you’re going to say the wrong thing.
I definitely find it challenging to share stories in my business writing, because let’s face it, it’s SO much easier to stick to the facts.
The facts don’t get judged in the same way as putting a piece of yourself out there into the world does. Facts also don’t make connections and engage your readers in the same way, so if you want to succeed online, you need to fire up your digital storytelling.
It’s as simple as this: The reward of sharing a story is far greater than the risk. We need to do the work to get comfortable with putting our stories out there.
It’s time to go to storytelling bootcamp. Don’t just wait for your stories to show up and inspiration to strike. Get your stories out of your memories and organized so you have them ready to go.
A few weeks ago, I spent some time with Maggie in Florida and one of the things we did together was work on getting my stories out of me.
When she told me we were going to do this, I was convinced it was going to be a bit painful, but it really wasn’t that bad. Okay, I admit it, it was actually fun! (Hint: A glass of wine may have helped!)
What we did was go through a series of questions and spent 5 minutes on each one just writing down ideas. Every new story was put on a post-it note, which resulted in the storytelling wall (or should I say window?):
Here are the 13 questions we covered – you can either do them one at a time – or have a power session where you work through them all:
Question 1
What jobs have you had and what did they teach you? What were some memorable or teachable moments from each?
Question 2
What BIG challenges did you face growing up and how do they shape where you are today?
Question 3
What did you want to be when you grew up? How have things changed (or not)?
Question 4
What are some different or interesting experiences you’ve had in your life?
Question 5
How did you end up doing what you do? Why do you do what you do?
Question 6
Think of your favorite clients of all-time. What changes did they experience or share with you? What did you learn from them?
Question 7
What’s one thing in your industry that really ticks you off?
Question 8
What do you stand for as a person and in business?
Question 9
How have the places you’ve lived or traveled to shaped your worldview?
Question 10
Who have some of the most influential people in your life been?
Question 11
What’s your most embarrassing moment? Proudest? The funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?
Question 12
You’re writing a column for a magazine called “it happened to me” about something interesting or just plain weird that’s happened in your life. What do you write?
Question 13
What’s your favorite thing about your work? About your life? How do you like to spend your spare time? How do these things all fit together?
Fire up the post-it notes and get going with mapping out your stories! If you want a helping hand with some prompts, grab the Storytelling Shortcut Guide below, or work with Maggie one-on-one for the Story Distillery.
