Everyday Stories That Build Strong Entrepreneur Brands! with Seth McM. Donlin

Episode Summary

You can find Seth McM. Donlin at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethdonlin/
Website: https://www.sethdonlin.com/
Skeptic Story Guide: storyguide.com

#KrisWard
#StorytellingForEntrepreneurs
#PersonalBrandStorytelling

Seth McM. Donlin Podcast Transcription

[00:00:00] Kris Ward: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Win The Hour Win The Day. And I am your host, Kris Ward. And today in the house we have Seth Donlin and he is a storytelling and Personal Branding Coach. And we’re gonna get into storytelling, and I know we talked about this a couple times, but I really like how Seth breaks it down.

[00:00:16] Kris Ward: And you know what? Ah, we can’t escape it. Can we, Seth? The reality of the name of the game is we do have to tell stories. 

[00:00:24] Seth Donlin: Absolutely. To start with because stories something that we’ve all grown up with. As a matter of fact, it’s something that our species evolved with, right? We learn and we remember through story.

[00:00:37] Seth Donlin: And so not making use of that simple kind of neurological hack is really, is really leaving a lot on the table is really tying a hand behind your back when you’re trying to get your brand’s message out there. 

[00:00:50] Kris Ward: It’s really interesting to me because I always say things like, I forgot.

[00:00:53] Kris Ward: I knew that, like I’ve heard this before. I understand it when I’m listening. I really relate to somebody else telling an [00:01:00] example or story and my clients. They often say, I’m very good at giving short antidotes or quick stories to tie down a point, and yet it’s something that I tend to forget when I’m doing stuff online as far as social media goes, or LinkedIn or whatever.

[00:01:15] Kris Ward: And I think part of it is. You hear like when I’m working with my clients and helping them get, whatever, finding them the perfect VA and get their time back and all this stuff, teaching ’em about leadership, there’s something happens and I’m like, okay, let me give you the example of this quick story to tie down this point.

[00:01:31] Kris Ward: And so it seems more. I don’t know, clear or direct, but then to come up with a story on online, I think, ’cause we tell stories or we, these stories are like, the other day I did a post and it was about me being 12 and having this babysitting I, enterprise, I call it. I was very serious about babysit.

[00:01:50] Kris Ward: God help me. I don’t know why somebody let a 12-year-old watch children, but they did back then and I was so serious. I didn’t understand at the time that I had rebooking packages or that [00:02:00] I had discounts. I had all these different combos to make sure I was booked out weeks in advance, and I didn’t know what it was called.

[00:02:04] Kris Ward: And the funny thing was I, the parents would leave out potato chips and stuff like that, and I would never eat them because I didn’t wanna add to their overhead. I wanted them just to be paying for me, even though my mom never had junk food at home. We had pop on Christmas day. That was it. I would not eat that.

[00:02:22] Kris Ward: ’cause I thought no, we have to keep their overhead down. Which is hilarious. ’cause when you got three kids, a bag of chips means nothing. And that story seemed to really resonate with people, but I had to be really pushed to find it or think to share it. ’cause it’s ah, it happened a while ago.

[00:02:35] Kris Ward: ‘Cause I’m not 12 anymore. It just seemed like you, you don’t see value in your own stories. I think. 

[00:02:41] Seth Donlin: Sure. I think that’s true of a lot of people and some of it I think comes down to just training yourself to think in stories? We don’t get me wrong, we naturally, our brain thinks in stories, we tell stories, what you’re talking about is, yeah, we tell stories every day, but when [00:03:00] I sit down to try to convey a mess message, I’m not thinking, oh, I have a perfect story for my childhood.

[00:03:06] Seth Donlin: And that’s because we’re not training ourselves to look in that direction. And I liken it to, if anybody is, has dabbled in photography early or now, or earlier in their life or is musically inclined or something like that, or has a number of friends that are artistic in this way, right?

[00:03:23] Seth Donlin: If you talk to somebody that’s a pot professional photographer or like semi-professional, like a very avid photographer to them, everything’s a photo they take, they talk in photos, they’re like, oh my god. God, this would make a great photo, right? Yeah. If you talk to a musician, everything’s a song.

[00:03:40] Seth Donlin: You have some intimate interaction between a group of friends, the photographers wanting to capture that on film. Yeah. The song the musician is wanting to like, write a song about it or use it as fuel for how did that feel and how does it, and now this is gonna become a song.

[00:03:56] Seth Donlin: So if we wanna use stories, it it helps us to to [00:04:00] become storytellers, even if that’s not what our primary like your primary role is not as a storyteller, but if you want to start using stories, it helps to start thinking of yourself as a storyteller, immersing yourself in stories and practicing, trying to think about, okay, what could be a good story?

[00:04:21] Seth Donlin: A great way to do that. A real, like actionable tip is start keeping a story journal. That’s one of the first things that I do when I work with any of my clients is, I say grab a notebook. It, it could, you can keep it on your phone. It can be in a spreadsheet. Yeah. Or it can just be in notes.

[00:04:40] Seth Donlin: However, you’re gonna keep it. But what you’re gonna do is, however it works for you, middle of the day, end of the day. Usually it’s end of the day, you get home and you think, okay. What were the few little, what were the stories that I told today? Because we all end up telling stories. If you’re working in an office, you leave for lunch, you come back, [00:05:00] quite often you’re gonna tell your coworker, oh my God, you can’t believe what happened to me while I was out on the lunch break.

[00:05:04] Seth Donlin: And you get home and you tell your roommate, or your spouse or your child or whatever, ah, listen to this funny thing that I saw. Or, oh, here was an apathy. Aggravating thing that happened to me. Now that doesn’t seem like a very valuable sto like business related story thing. But you have to get yourself, in the mindset and exercise those muscles of recording all your stories.

[00:05:29] Seth Donlin: And how do you, so how do you record them? You don’t spend a bunch of time writing out the story, you, Jo 

[00:05:35] Kris Ward: No. Lemme jump in there for a sec.

[00:05:36] Seth Donlin: Two or three sentences.

[00:05:37] Kris Ward: Yeah, I think you’re really right. And I really love what you did there. I wanna unpack it for a second. So you really reframed it for me. It’s oh, okay.

[00:05:43] Kris Ward: Yes, you’re right. The photographer, the musician, they’re all looking at this from a different, through a different lens. And now, what I’ve done to your point, is I have what I call a story bank. And so if something happens, I just put three or four words in there, I’ll know what that means, right?

[00:05:58] Kris Ward: I’ll be like, oh, the cat [00:06:00] cried story or whatever and I am working harder on this, and I think what’s really important. Two things happen. One is, it’s so funny now, whenever I tell somebody on my team, oh my gosh, you know what happened? And they’re like, oh, I think that’s a post, Kris. And I’m like, okay, listen.

[00:06:13] Kris Ward: Exactly. Listen to my story first. I was bleeding, nevermind the post. So they have no empathy for anything that happens to me anymore. They’re just like, oh, that would be a good story. And I think also so many of us to your point is these are quick little relatable things that happen where we have seen online sometimes where these big gut wrenching, here’s how I became an alcoholic and then I woke up in my own vomit and now I run a business.

[00:06:39] Kris Ward: And so a, if that was my journey, it’s just not my jam to share that it’s, so I think we also have been misrepresented that stories have to be gut wrenching and my father left me kind of stuff. So I think these little quick story. Quis like me telling that little story about being 12, I was like, I didn’t think this would be a big deal.

[00:06:57] Kris Ward: I did think it’s ironic now looking back that [00:07:00] I wouldn’t eat potato chips that keep their overhead down like nobody but me had un even noticed. So I, I think just having a story journal or a story bank or whatever, just, I think that’s a really valid point. ’cause looking at the ceiling, they don’t come to you.

[00:07:16] Seth Donlin: No. You have to record them. And I, to go back to the point that you were making I make this point all the time, and that like alcoholic waking up in the puddle of vomit is a great example of it. I also talk about I climbed Everest and fell off and had to cut my leg off and crawled.

[00:07:33] Seth Donlin: Yeah. Rescued 12 orphans along the way, and then met an old man who served me tea and I learned for, yeah. And we read these New York Times bestseller books about business and about life, and they all come from like Olympic gold, multi gold medalists and somebody who led all the special forces in Afghanistan or something.

[00:07:52] Seth Donlin: Yeah. And they’re huge stories, and I think that many people get the sense that effective business stories have to be these huge stories. Yeah. And they don’t have to be these huge stories because you hear a lot in social media and it, it applies doubly or triply for storytelling.

[00:08:13] Seth Donlin: Authenticity. Authenticity. Authenticity. Yeah. But one thing that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough in my opinion, is relatability. Yeah. And that journey from alcoholism to owning a business or the climbing the Everest or whatever, winning gold medals. Those are all inspiring stories, but they’re not necessarily relatable stories because they don’t, most of us have never experienced anything like that. Yeah. And so they don’t hit with the same emotional impact because our mind and our mirror neurons have a harder time relating that experience to our lived experience. 

[00:08:56] Kris Ward: And if anything else,

[00:08:57] Seth Donlin: being a babysitter. Or [00:09:00] going to the grocery store or picking up our kid after school.

[00:09:03] Seth Donlin: That’s hugely relatable and hugely mineable for teachable lessons. 

[00:09:08] Kris Ward: Yeah, and if anything else, some of those stories just make you sit there oh, I’m sitting here on the couch eating a bag of chips, and this person climbed Everest, which by the way, I saw just last week, there was a picture of that online.

[00:09:21] Kris Ward: And they’re annoyed and lined up on Everest, like they’re in a grocery store waiting ’cause it’s such a backup. So that’s, I have still no interest in signing up for that, but add all the risks to now it’s, you gotta sit there in the queue waiting for how long is this gonna take? And places to go

[00:09:38] Seth Donlin: I need to get to the chop.

[00:09:39] Kris Ward: Yeah. So I think that’s I find that those big, grandiose stories just discourage you. You’re like, oh, what am I doing with my life? So I think you’re right. I think the, if we leaned into the fact that these things are relatable. Is, I don’t wanna hear. How this amazing story. You started your business and then six weeks later you tripped into being [00:10:00] on whatever, some, the today show and now you’re a millionaire. Oh, that I’m so happy for you. I’m just trying to get through the day. 

[00:10:08] Seth Donlin: Yeah. And one of the things you have to think about is who is your target audience? 

[00:10:13] Kris Ward: Yeah. 

[00:10:13] Seth Donlin: Who is this message for? And what can they relate to? When I was 12, you told a story about your childhood when I was 12.

[00:10:23] Seth Donlin: My best friend and I used to love to hop on our bikes and ride down to the nearest rural route, and we would stand there. Keith would be in his John Deere trucker cap, and I would have this, my uncle’s Vietnam era, world War II helmet on, Vietnam era hel army helmet on. And it was, you could barely see my eyes out from under it.

[00:10:42] Seth Donlin: And we’d stand there on the side of the rural route pumping our fists as the rigs would go by and getting the truckers to blow their air horns for us. Yeah. And we were in heaven. We absolutely loved it. But if you think about that rural route, sure there was plenty of trucks coming by, but there were [00:11:00] also lots of cars, lots of vans, lots of pickup trucks.

[00:11:04] Seth Donlin: More than the rigs that we were out there pumping our fists for. Did we stop pumping our fists? Did we hide the fist pumping? ’cause we were worried about what would the cars and the trucks and the, no, we were out there to, to communicate with the truck drivers and that’s what we did. And I don’t know why I think about that a lot. 

[00:11:22] Kris Ward: That’s so exciting. When you’re a kid, you get a trucker to make a noise. It’s I don’t know, one where we decided that was exhilarating beyond belief. But it is. So go ahead. Yeah, 

[00:11:31] Seth Donlin: that it, and so I think about it now when I’m crafting content for my audience, and if I start worrying about is this.

[00:11:38] Seth Donlin: Is this too narrow? What are other people gonna think? This story kind of excludes other people. They might not get what I’m talking about. I try to remember, I’m like, wait a minute. I am looking to get truckers to blow their air horns. Oh, I know who my truckers are, okay. I’m not worried about the pickup trucks.

[00:11:54] Seth Donlin: I’m not worried about the station wagons. I’m not worried about the, they’re all perfectly good, [00:12:00] nice people, and I love them. But that they’re not my ideal customer and that’s not who I’m speaking to.

[00:12:06] Kris Ward: Okay. 

[00:12:06] Seth Donlin: Now you interrupted me in the middle of that story because you couldn’t help yourself but to talk to oh, I get it. Like why did we love getting truckers to blow their horns so much? That’s because that was a real relatable story that I was telling about being a kid and wanting to get truckers to blow their horns. 

[00:12:23] Kris Ward: And I’m a bad host. That interrupts a lot. There’s that too, but 

[00:12:26] Seth Donlin: I’m not criticizing you for doing it. That was a perfect example of the fact that. I tell that story a lot and people at the end, they’re like, oh, I did that. My, my siblings and I did that. My best friends, and I did that. It’s a really relatable story. I have stories about going to the grocery store. I have stories about, conversations I had with other moms and dads at swim practice, yeah. My daughter’s on a swim team and I’m at the swim practice. These are all things that we can relate to in our lives, and it makes the story more resonant and [00:13:00] more easily remembered because we’re like, oh yeah, that similar thing has happened to me, and I never thought about it that way. I never put it in that context.

[00:13:11] Seth Donlin: Now that you have. That’s a great point. And that makes it easy for me to remember, right? And so that’s where the little stories, the babysitting story, that the getting the truckers to blow their air home stories, that’s where they really perform. And that’s why we want to really mine those smaller everyday stories rather than the big huge life changing stories.

[00:13:34] Kris Ward: Yeah. You’re so right. And that was excellent example of a story to remind us to tell stories. Like it was very hugely motivating me. And the tie down I thought was very good, where sometimes I find that you’ll see stuff online and they’re like, okay, whatever. I went to Sweden, this thing happened.

[00:13:49] Kris Ward: I was in a line at a pastry store. And whatever it caught on fire. And that reminded me about business and how business, you never know how things are gonna, like it’s always this big crossing bridge, [00:14:00] like a really bad commercial from a former athlete that says, and when the puck hit the net, that’s when I went to so and so insurance.

[00:14:07] Kris Ward: You know what I mean? So I think that you’re like, what? 

[00:14:11] Seth Donlin: Yeah. What’s the connection there? 

[00:14:12] Kris Ward: Okay. So I think. Two things you brought up, which are hugely powerful and really, I barely have time to talk to you. ’cause now I’m thinking of all these stories I could actually write. The relatability and the simplicity of it. And then the great tie down where it wasn’t a stretch. Don’t try to make it fit. 

[00:14:29] Seth Donlin: The way that we, the way that you do that is it’s the next step from the story journal. So again with my clients, what I do is I have them create a story journal, and over time you’re gonna build up a lengthy list of story seeds.

[00:14:42] Seth Donlin: And I say, every week go through your list and say, okay, I remember that story. Does that apply to my business? Or whatever I’m writing about, eh, I don’t see it. I don’t see it. You go through the list and maybe you find some and it clicks, and you’re like, okay, great. But then the second thing that you do is you make a long [00:15:00] list.

[00:15:00] Seth Donlin: You, it can’t be like three or four things. It’s gotta be, a dozen, a couple dozen, a few dozen. What are the topics that you talk about in your business? All right and you, so VAs, okay, this aspect of VAs, that aspect, okay. You drill down deep into it, so you get two, three dozen s topics that you would write posts about on social media or create videos about or whatever. Okay. And then you just have a random number generator. Pick one from column A and one from column B. So now you’ve got a story seed and you’ve got a topic and your writing assignment is to make those two things, is to mesh those two things into one story now, like what you were just talking about.

[00:15:45] Seth Donlin: Many, most of the time they’re gonna end up being very forced. Okay. Alright. And they’re not gonna make, you wouldn’t then turn around and pay post that on LinkedIn or something. But the more you do that, the [00:16:00] better you’ll get at actually seeing the connections between the ones that do work. Okay. ’cause as you fo, as you force things to connect, it forces your brain to get creative.

[00:16:10] Seth Donlin: And the more you force your brain into that creative mode of how do I make these two seemingly disparate things connect, the better you get at suddenly you’re looking through column A. You. You get down to number seven and you’re like, oh my God, that fits perfectly with number 14 over there. Boom.

[00:16:29] Seth Donlin: Now I’ve got a story that I can craft and post up on LinkedIn or take onto a stage or go on a podcast and relate, however you’re using your stories. 

[00:16:39] Kris Ward: That makes sense. Okay. Oh my gosh. Alright. Okay, and it so that we talk about sourcing the story, that’s just story journaling or having a story bank and just rec, dumping those there. And is there some, I don’t know, tips on recognizing it’s a story? Will we get better at that? 

[00:16:58] Seth Donlin: Yeah, I think, again [00:17:00] it’s. A professional baseball player spends a lot of time in the batting cage, right? Oh yeah. Even if they’re elite, even if they’re elite hitters, they still spend lots of time in the batting cage.

[00:17:09] Seth Donlin: Yeah. And hey, they go and hire batting coaches too but the, yeah, you just do it. You do it, and you’ll get better at it. And sometimes it. Sometimes you just need to sit with something. I had a, I wrote a post a few weeks back talking about this very idea of combining the column pick, pick from column A, pick from column B, and I related a story seed that I had dropped my daughter off from at school.

[00:17:37] Seth Donlin: I was driving back to my home office and and as I was driving along. I saw three hot air balloons up, up in the sky, and they, and it just was like, if I had been a photographer, it was the perfect image. It was the, they were firm framed perfectly by the trees. They seemed to be flying just perfectly in alignment.

[00:17:57] Seth Donlin: Each was just a little bit higher than the next. The [00:18:00] angle was perfect. The sun was, like shading the road in my view, so I wasn’t sun blinded, but it was pouring onto the, these rainbow canopies of the hot air balloons. It was such a gorgeous photo, and I was like, oh. I have to. So I got home and I jotted it down.

[00:18:18] Seth Donlin: I was like, this is an interesting, I told my wife, I got home. I told my wife, I was like, oh my God, I saw this beautiful thing. I’m like, okay. I’m telling her about it. So it goes into my story journal. So now I write this post on LinkedIn. I’m like, here’s a story idea. Is it gonna work for me in my business?

[00:18:32] Seth Donlin: I don’t know. I don’t see it right now. I’m not sure what I, what lesson I would teach with this story, but it’s in my journal and I’m gonna think about it and then. Sure enough, just a few days later I was like, oh wait, I could tell this. I could use it to teach that. Like suddenly it just came to me that there were like two or three things that I could do and what did I, what I ended up teaching.

[00:18:58] Seth Donlin: With it is the idea that [00:19:00] in a story you need a number of elements in your story for it to be a good story. But you can’t just have those elements. They have to be working properly together. And the part of the story that I didn’t. That I didn’t tell you was that I really wanted to get a picture of it because it was so be of those balloons because it was so beautiful.

[00:19:17] Seth Donlin: I’m in my car and I can’t stop. But I knew that as I got up to the top of a little rise, there was a place I could pull over and get the picture. And so I got up there and I pulled over and just because I had gone not even a quarter mile down the road, and the road had bent a little bit, suddenly the angle was different.

[00:19:36] Seth Donlin: Everything was just a little bit different. And now I could see that those balloons that had been in picture perfect alignment were really not in the same, in from that angle, the same alignment and stuff. So in my story I was like, look it, it still had all the elements. The sun was there, the balloons were there, the balloons were flying in formation, but the formation didn’t work anymore and this didn’t work anymore.

[00:19:58] Seth Donlin: In my lesson I’m like, look, you [00:20:00] have to have. You have to have a relatable story. You have to have an emotionally resonant story. You have to have a, but if they’re not all right, lined up right in, in, in playing their proper role together, your story’s not gonna come together now.

[00:20:18] Seth Donlin: That’s not my favorite story. I don’t use it a lot, but my point, it’s still good though. And the point is there was one that I didn’t think was gonna be useful, and then suddenly I was like, oh, wait a minute. It might be useful after all, 

[00:20:27] Kris Ward: it still shows you how you wordsmith it. Crafted it.

[00:20:30] Kris Ward: My story on those balloons would be a how drunk do you need to be talked into getting into a basket that a balloon is gonna carry you through the sky? That would be my story, because that does not seem like a plan to, that does not seem like a plan to me. What is wrong with your 

[00:20:43] Seth Donlin: brain? I could relate to that story. Yes. 

[00:20:45] Kris Ward: What is wrong with your brain that you thought getting into a bucket and going, I don’t know, like where planes go and then hopefully you land. But it’s very interesting to me as you’re talking it. I don’t know where it came from, but last year a friend of mine that we kayaked [00:21:00] together and she talked me into going to see let’s go kayaking after night.

[00:21:03] Kris Ward: At nighttime, there was a harvest moon, and she’s all into that. And I was like, all right, fine. No problem. So I did write a post about it, and I did the typical crap. I was like, okay, it was a harvest moon and it was more beautiful than you could possibly describe, and a camera could not capture it night.

[00:21:17] Kris Ward: I said, here’s the thing so often in my previous years and why I do what I do is I was, everything that wasn’t work was an interruption to work. And the hell, if you get me out there, the harvest moon, there’s no way. But now as I think about it, during that paddle, during the harvest moon, she was all up in it.

[00:21:33] Kris Ward: So we’re kayaking. It’s dark. She’s behind me and she’s got on her phone playing gordon Light Foot’s Harvest Moon song or whatever. That’s fine. Whatever. She’s all into it. 

[00:21:43] Seth Donlin: At least it wasn’t the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. 

[00:21:45] Kris Ward: No, she’s into the Zen. And she has incredibly sharp hearing. Like sometimes it’s a joke.

[00:21:51] Kris Ward: I’ll be muttering to myself, where’s my keys? And she’ll be like, oh, they’re way over here. And she’s a mile down the road. I’m like, wow. You hear everything, right? So I turn around and I’m like, it’s in the dark and the music [00:22:00] fades out. And I’m like, Hey, Kelsey, look at this.

[00:22:01] Kris Ward: And then she doesn’t answer. And I’m like, Kelsey. And now I’m yelling, right? Because I can’t see her. It’s pitch black and the moon is up there. And I’m like, she hears me all the time. Where the hell is she? And I’m like and it was like a scary movie. Like the music was there. Yeah. Then it faded. Now she can’t hear me.

[00:22:15] Kris Ward: I’m yelling at the top of my lungs. I’m like, wow, all i’m not gonna upset her parents tonight. I’m gonna call them tomorrow and say, we went on kayaking and like I’m just, she disappeared. She’s gone. Soft because clearly gone watch got her. I have been yelling her name and she’s not coming back.

[00:22:29] Kris Ward: I’m like, I guess I go back to shore and we’ll deal with this tomorrow ’cause it’s late now. And then a couple minutes later, which seemed like a dramatic long time. Then I heard something. I’m like, Kelsey? And she’s yeah. And I’m like. What the hell? And she goes, oh, I was swimming underwater. I didn’t hear you.

[00:22:45] Kris Ward: She goes, I got outta the boat, went swimming underwater. I’m like, oh my God. It was like, whatever. 

[00:22:50] Seth Donlin: You gotta warn somebody. 

[00:22:51] Kris Ward: Yes. Like the music feeds out like a bad movie. We’re in the dark. I’m screaming her name, she’s not coming. And I think, that’s a story. That’s the funny part of the [00:23:00] story.

[00:23:00] Kris Ward: And I now, after listening to you could say, oh my gosh, I could tie that into communication. I talk a lot about leadership and communication with VAs, it’s like when the music faded out, I’m just gonna go for a splash. Would’ve been very helpful for me to know. And so now that’s a far more interesting story than me going, Hey, don’t be so busy you don’t enjoy the freaking sunset. Cause we’ve all seen those posts whatever bitch, I got a lot to do. 

[00:23:24] Seth Donlin: But yeah, you could I agree a hundred percent. I think that second story is a way more powerful story. Yeah. And less, the first one isn’t forced, but like you’re saying, it’s just very common, right?

[00:23:34] Seth Donlin: Yeah, it’s been done. But the but the point is that it. Both stories fit and they’re very well made. If we spent five minutes brainstorming we might come up with a couple more of that would fit, right? Yeah. When you get into this mindset and you start exercising that muscle, it’s amazing how often a story.

[00:23:52] Seth Donlin: Suddenly you’ll be like, oh, wait a minute. I could use this a few different ways. Yeah. Now you probably want, you wanna find the best way and stick with that [00:24:00] one. But the point is there’s, there’s plenty of stories in my story journal that never become anything but ones that do become something more often than not, they could be few things. And the right. And it’s just a matter of figuring out which one’s the best one, and then spending some time in polishing that one up and getting it so that it really hits. 

[00:24:22] Kris Ward: Yeah, you have really shine a light on this that I had not seen before. Like we had different versions of this conversation before, but I do think, yeah, it’s a whole new perspective.

[00:24:31] Kris Ward: Oh my gosh. Okay. Alright Seth, where can people find more of your brilliance? 

[00:24:37] Seth Donlin: Sure. Look, if they’re interested in learning more about storytelling, you can go to story guide.com Okay. And download a story guide that I have. I call it the skeptic story guide.

[00:24:51] Kris Ward: Oh, I love it.

[00:24:52] Seth Donlin: ‘Cause it’s a little, yeah, it’s a little bit of not that people are skeptical about the value of stories, but a lot of times people are skeptical.

[00:24:59] Seth Donlin: Of [00:25:00] their ability to really be a good storyteller, an effective storyteller. And so the guide is there to try to get you over that mindset and help you be able to be a little bit more effective storyteller.

[00:25:11] Kris Ward: I think that too, I think a little bit of, you don’t think you’re a good storyteller.

[00:25:15] Kris Ward: In my family, my mom came from a very big. You better be able to tell a story. You better be able to tell it quick and it better be funny ’cause you’re gonna be talked over in a second. So in, in whatever, that’s one thing I think that, I can be humorous or tell a tight story when I’m speaking, but learning how to write that out is another whole thing.

[00:25:32] Kris Ward: And then I also think to your defense, I think. There’s been so many stories told poorly that then we all just pull back and go I’m not doing that. And so you’re just, throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don’t know what that means. ’cause who in the hell would just, oh crap, I lost the baby when I threw the bath water out.

[00:25:48] Kris Ward: But anyhow, that’s a story where we came up with that phrase. Who did that. And you know what? They didn’t deserve a baby. Anyhow so I think you’ve given us all a really refreshing perspective on [00:26:00] this could be done a different way and it could be done our way. 

[00:26:04] Seth Donlin: Yeah. And it, look. You told stories when you were a kid. Some of us were more confident than others and got, and some of us were more shy than others and so on. But as kids, we told stories. We told stories to our parents, to our siblings, to our friends, to our teachers. Like we made up stories. Adults couldn’t stop us from telling stories. Yeah. And we begged for stories. We begged to be read stories and told stories and to listen to stories and stuff like that. So yeah. When you think about using story in your business, you’re not learning a new skill. You’re just, you’re rusty at riding a bike, but you haven’t forgotten how to ride a bike.

[00:26:40] Seth Donlin: Okay? You just need to you’re not Olympic, you’re not ready to go out and route to France, yeah, exactly. 

[00:26:45] Seth Donlin: Yeah. But you know how to ride a bike and now it’s just a matter of getting comfortable with it again and learning a few things that you didn’t know when you were a kid that’s gonna take you from, a casual bike rider to.

[00:26:59] Seth Donlin: Not a [00:27:00] pro, but to somebody that, yeah, is a very good bike writer.

[00:27:02] Kris Ward: Confidence.

[00:27:02] Seth Donlin: Yeah. Yes. Competent.

[00:27:03] Kris Ward: Oh my gosh.

[00:27:04] Seth Donlin: High competent. 

[00:27:05] Kris Ward: Okay, everyone please share this show with a business buddy because don’t have them banging around by themselves trying to tell poor, silly stories. Give them a hand, please. So share this episode and again, Seth, thank you so much and everyone else will see you in the next show.