Storytelling: What's True To You?

TRANSCRIPT

The thing that stuck with me after the time I spent with Lance Miller, the 2005 world champion of public speaking, was we were talking about how to open the audience's mind so the audience is prepared to receive your message. And he said two things.

0:18

He said you need to talk about what's true to you and tell them how you apply what's true to you in your life. That's the process you go through from the beginning of a speech to the end of a speech. And I got to thinking, we've seen that in our club recently.

0:39

So today we're going to talk about form, or we're going to talk about content. Not about form, just about content. And what I've done is I've graphed, charted three speeches. Le Ann recently gave a speech called Swings and Misses. Zac gave an excellent speech called Evaluate to Motivate.

0:57

And then there's Lance Miller's speech that he won the World Championship with called The Ultimate Question. And the way you begin a story, or the way you begin a meeting, the way you consider whatever your audience is, whether it's one person, or 10 people, or 1,000 people,

1:19

You try to put yourself in the minds of your audience and think, what does normal life look like for this person? What does normal life look like for this person? And then hopefully you have something to say that's going to flip it. There's some negative thing going on. And you've got some positive solution to that.

1:41

And you're going to flip this negative situation to a positive situation. So let's consider that through the lens of these speeches, because they all track the structure of a good story. Normal life, Leanne's speech, swings or misses. Normal life, family enjoying a ski trip. Positive. Negative. teenage son dies in a skiing accident.

2:10

That's about as negative as it gets. Zac's speech, not nearly as dramatic a situation. Evaluate to motivate. Starts positive. Zac's at work, giving a presentation, they take a lunch break, and then it's the negative. His boss is like, Zac, what's the deal with you? When you talk, you don't really exude confidence, like your colleague here.

2:37

So he completely humiliated Zac. And Zac is like, what do you do with this? Well, Zac's solution was to join Toastmasters. That's how he responded and applied to that humiliation in his life. Lance gives a speech. Lance is a guy growing up in Indiana.

2:56

He's in his mid-twenties, living at home with his parents, feels like his life is going nowhere. And he not only doesn't feel validated by his family, he's in a family business, they have a little dairy there in Indiana. He not only doesn't feel validated by his family, He feels like they're always picking at him. It's just negative.

3:13

And he says it in his speech twice. I feel like my life is going nowhere. So he takes control. He moves to California. And he thinks everything is going to change. But he didn't change himself. He just changed where he lived. He changed his roommates. He has a job. He's not in control of his life.

3:30

He's very dissatisfied. What does... The skiing accident, being humiliated by your boss, and the positive validating comment that Mr. Miller gets from the receptionist he just happens to walk into. What do those three things have in common? They're all unexpected. And we just heard a speech from Jianxia about something unexpected.

3:56

We do not know yet how she may apply that in her life. I think we know how her daughter's going to apply it in her life. She's going to take that trauma and she'll probably become a driving instructor. That's my guess. And maybe start a franchise. Who knows, right? Right.

4:14

But each of these speakers, Le Ann, Zac, and Lance, the unexpected happens every day. Many times we have unexpected things, right? Usually involving someone calling, asking how to change their settings. That often is the unexpected thing that throws me off track. But every now and then something unexpected happens. That is life-defining. And it's not something you control.

4:40

And it's not something you ask for. And we learn about you, the hero, based on how you respond to this unexpected thing. Now, Lance Miller, in his speech, he comes right out and says at the end, I am the validator. He turns himself into a superhero.

5:02

And he spends the rest of his life, literally the next 20 years, touring Toastmaster Clubs. encouraging Toastmasters, validating Toastmasters. And his audience was, in fact, his 2,000-person audience at the World Championship was, in fact, comprised of people or all part of an organization that is based on encouragement. Validation is just another word for encouragement.

5:28

Great choice of topic. Le Ann has done something similar. She's turned herself into a superhero when it comes to helping us understand how to console people who are dealing with incredible grief. And the speech she gave here a few weeks ago was by far the number one post on our site. Not even a close second. And Zac's speech...

5:58

again, about a topic that is smaller, not nearly as earth-shattering. But Zac is now a master evaluator. He's one of the best. He took that experience, and over years in Toastmasters, he's layered and honed and refined a system for providing evaluations that are next level. Everybody knows that about Zac.

6:24

So in their own way, each one of these three people turn themselves into a superhero. But what they all have in common is that they're going along, normal life, something unexpected happens that really resonates with them. And interestingly, in the case of Le Ann and Zac, normal life starts positive. In the case of Lance, normal life starts negative.

6:51

What makes it a transformational story is that by the time you get to the end, you're talking about the opposite of where you started. So if you start negative, you have to end positive. If you start positive, you have to go through the negative, find the opportunity in it, and turn it into a positive.

7:14

These are things you think about when you have a meeting or a speech or an event in your life that really matters. And the way you prepare yourself to optimize the opportunities in those events is by showing up here and starting with a speech about putting your car in neutral, which does not have the transformational turn.

7:40

But Jianxia will be better prepared the next time she confronts a stressful event because she came here and talked about that experience and felt that pressure of putting her body up here. That is why we're here. And I want you to think about this because every story, every book, every novel, every poem, everything you love follows this format.