master storytelling in 9 minutes

Summary

storytelling is the highest-leverage skill in marketing, and almost no one is good at it. here’s a 10-step framework I use, with my own story as the example.

the 10 steps:

1. backstory. where you came from. for me: small-town kid in Alabama, fighter pilot dream, ENJJPT.
2. the goal. what you were chasing. fly fighters, be the best.
3. the external struggle. the thing in your way you can point at. medical washout from pilot training.
4. the internal struggle. the harder one. losing the identity you’d built your life around.
5. the inciting incident. the moment something has to change. the hotel room realization.
6. the false attempt. what you tried first that didn’t work. trying to make the corporate job fit.
7. the new approach. what changed. quitting, going all-in on the side hustle.
8. the climb. the slog. the years of unsexy reps.
9. the transformation. who you are now vs who you were. entrepreneur, husband, dad, builder.
10. the offering. what you give the audience because of all of it.

the trick is that the story is already in your life. the framework just pulls it out in the right order. use this on your about page, your sales pitch, your bio, any place you need someone to remember you.

Transcript

why storytelling matters in business

Story is the most powerful tool to compel the human brain. So if you want to get better at marketing, you want your brand to resonate with more customers, or you just want to be more fun at Christmas parties, you need to get better at storytelling. And today I’m going to tell you exactly how. So I’m going to start by reading my story.

It’s my actual 100% true authentic story, but it follows a 10-step framework. So I’m going to read the story, and then after you kind of hear my story, I’m going to break it down bit by bit so you can actually see how the framework works. And you can also utilize it in your marketing, your messages, your content, wherever you want to tell a better story, Christmas party, so on and so forth.

So I’m going to read it from my screen real quick. So here we go. I used to believe the path was simple. Get a good job, support my family, play it safe. I was driven but stuck inside a mindset that entrepreneurship was not for people like me. Then the dream I’d worked for, being a fighter pilot, vanished.

reading my own 10-step story

Suddenly I had a wife, kids, and no real plan, no savings, no skills, just the pressure to figure it out, and deep down a fear that I’d work myself into the ground for nothing. That’s when I realized I hated being told what to do. I couldn’t work for other people anymore, so I made a decision. I was going to build something of my own.

Learn from those who’d done it, reverse engineer the path. I launched my first product. It didn’t make life-changing money, but it was a life-changing experience. From there, I battled everything. I battled anxiety, self-doubt, stress every single day. The fight wasn’t just with the market, it was in my mind.

But I kept going. Year by year, I scaled. Failure by failure, I learned. And eventually I won. Not just in business, I conquered me, because the biggest wall was never out there. It was in here, in my head. Once that changed, everything did. All right, that is my story, and it follows a 10-step framework.

When I first decided to get better at storytelling, I thought I didn’t have any stories to tell, and you might feel similar, but it’s not true. You just don’t have a framework that can pull your amazing stories out of you. So let’s go over this story framework, which is the 60, 90-second version of my story.

You can expand and make this as long as you want. You could turn this story framework into an entire book if you wanted to expand on every portion of your story. For me, I gave you the short-form version so we could go over it step-by-step. So first one, what is the backstory? And how I opened my story was I had the typical path, right?

step-by-step breakdown of the framework

I had a wife and kids. I just thought that working a good job and doing that was going to be the path. So while it’s true, it follows the framework of giving you the backstory of why you might want to invest in the journey or be interested in my journey. Like, oh yeah, I can resonate with that guy.

He’s very similar to me. That’s step one. What is your backstory? Step two, what is your goal? In my story, I state basically in the second sentence that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t think it was me, but you kind of read in between the lines there. I ultimately wanted to be an entrepreneur, and that was the goal.

So step two, what is your goal? After we know your backstory. Step three, everyone has these external struggles. So what things are working against you from the outside? And I specifically mentioned in my story that I had no savings, I had no skills, and there was a ton of pressure. So all of these are external things, right?

Like time, money. These things are external. I can’t really control those as much. They’re pressure from the outside. So those are my external struggles. And most people stop there. They don’t talk about the internal struggles, which is step four. So step four is the internal struggles. Now, what I talk about is I thought that I was going to work myself into the ground and possibly get no result whatsoever when I started down this entrepreneurship path.

And to be honest, that was a real fear for me. I knew I could work hard. I knew I was driven, ambitious, but I was afraid that I’d work really hard and it would amount to nothing. And I had a wife and kids to support. So I couldn’t, like, waste my time. I had to be productive. And I didn’t believe I could actually achieve it.

That was the biggest, like, legitimate internal struggle that I had when I started. Now, step five, what’s the wall that you hit? There’s got to be some point where you’re just in your situation. You’re like, I can’t. I just can’t do this anymore. Like, there’s got to be some sort of wall. Sometimes it’s a mental wall, some sort of hurdle.

What I ultimately realized working in the military and working for other people is that I can’t work for other people. And that’s what I state in my stories. Like, I just, I want to make the decisions. I want to be the guy. I don’t want to work for other people anymore. And that was really my wall.

And, you know, I could go into that story even further, how it really came about. But ultimately my wall was, I realized, hey, you’re just not cut out for being told what to do and working for other people. So what’s your wall? What did you hit? Six, what’s the epiphany? Like, what’s different as opposed to just, like, deciding, like, okay, yeah, I want to change or I want to do something.

Did you come across something that made you want to change? For me, I started to learn pretty early on that I could hire mentors and coaches and invest in myself and courses and everything, and I could get better. And when I got better, my business got better, everything got better. And so that was my epiphany was like, oh, let’s go all in on self-development.

Let’s go all in on hiring coaches. So what’s the epiphany that moved you forward? Next, step seven, what is the plan? So now that you’ve had this epiphany, you kind of, I hit the wall. I couldn’t work for people anymore. I had the epiphany that, okay, I just need to get better. I need to become a better person.

I need to learn more. I need more skills. I need more money. And so I decided my plan was I was going to launch a product. And that’s what I did. My very first product was an online fitness program for $49. And that was the plan. I was going to launch it and see how it went. If it didn’t go well, maybe entrepreneurship truly wasn’t for me.

So step seven, what is the plan? Step eight, you have to have some conflict along the way. This one’s normally pretty easy for most people to fill out. We all have conflict, right? For me, a lot of my conflict was internal. I talked about having anxiety, self-doubt, stress, the self-belief. These were all the issues I was having.

how to apply this to your marketing and messaging

I just didn’t really truly believe in myself. And that was my biggest conflict. Sure, there were some other things that came up here and there. But when I look back on my story and I try to answer the question of like, what was the conflict? It was me. It was in my head was my biggest conflict. Step nine, you got to let people know what happened.

What was the end result? Well, I talk about year by year. I scaled. I learned after failure and failure. And eventually I won. I was able to scale my businesses. I was able to make money, launch a product, do the things, not have to work for people anymore. And again, I told you the short version of my story.

But you kind of read in between the lines of like, oh, he’s successful now. He did it. He became an entrepreneur. We started with, I don’t think I can be an entrepreneur. To the end result being, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m scaling businesses. I’m doing the thing. That is the end result. Now you think, OK, well, that’s it.

why most people think they don’t have a story (and why they’re wrong)

That’s the end of the story. It’s not the end. The most important part is step 10, which is the transformation. What is the transformation for me? I say it plain and clear in my story. I conquered me. I was my biggest hurdle. That’s the theme. That’s the thread. If you had to ask, what’s this story about?

The story is about a person who has to defeat himself, has to overcome his limiting beliefs in his mindset. That’s my story. I conquered me. And that truly transformed me. Transformed who I was. And that is the 10th and final step of telling a good story. Now, like I said, when I first started this, I didn’t think I had any good stories to tell.

storytelling for brand, content, and connection

But when you sit down, you look at your past experience, your past life, you know, everything that’s gone on, you can look, you can pull these things out. I don’t just have one story. I have hundreds of stories. And I can follow this framework to tell a good story that keeps the human psyche engaged.

We learn by stories. You’ll probably remember my story. It’ll resonate with you to some degree because it’s a true, authentic story. There are parts of it that resonate with you. There are parts that probably don’t. But the story is how the human brain works. We don’t just want data points. We don’t just want to be told step one, step two, step three.

We need to hear the story. And this is very effective in marketing, especially if you’re trying to build a personal brand or brand in general. What’s the brand story? What’s your story? How did you get here? If you can just lay out that story of your brand or of you and start weaving that into your marketing messages, your newsletters, your content, whatever it is that you’re putting out into the world, you will become a better marketer.

You’ll have a better business where people really feel connected to you. This isn’t a strategy. It’s just a framework to be able to tell the stories that you already have. So if you want to get better at marketing, you want to be, you know, better with your branding. You want people to resonate with your brand.

And you want to be more interesting in parties. Just tell better stories.