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Commitment to love

Can you commit to love with the same intensity that a hater commits to hate?

 Can I?

Can we?

I find that to be an amazing challenge, personally.
So … thinking it through, musing …
Hate is an easy emotion, automatic for many of us.
It saves us from hurt, from working through whatever brought it up – fear, anger, hurt, betrayal.
But love – has to be intentional … and then … just as easy!
Turning an emotion outward, just the same, rather than letting something eat away inside.
Turning out an emotion that is safer, and healing as well.
Tell ourselves that story … of hurt, fear, anger, betrayal… turning out love.
Tell ourselves the story of a hero with the strength to do that rather than giving in to the old story of revenge and destruction.
Tell the story of a beloved friend or advisor who takes the hero, battered and hurting and full of hate, and quietly tells them his own story of replacing the self-loathing and carnage caused by revenge and destruction, with an amazing inner strength that came from realising that love and cooperation is so much more powerful and productive.
 
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Those who tell the stories rule the world. Which will you choose?

Those who tell the stories.

It’s a powerful statement this.

There’s a mystical, mythical element to it, being a native American saying.

I find it interesting that Plato said much the same thing “Those who tell the stories rule society.”

 

Two such disparate cultures and societies recognising the power of story.

Just about anyone who writes about story, talks about story, ends up using this quote.

And certainly at the level at which most people think about this statement … anyone who tells the stories will make money in business, and rule the world that way.

Story is a currency recognised the world over.

It is a powerful marketing tool, the difference, sometimes, between a profit and a loss.

But looking at it a different way – looking at the leaders, the rulers, those who rule the world.

They lead, they rule because they are able to tell our stories for us.

We need a story to make sense of life.

We need a story to make sense of our culture.

We need a story to make sense of our world.

We need someone to lead us forward by telling our story, what is really happening, how things are going to be.

When there is a movement for change in our culture, a mass discontent with the way things are, in our world, it will succeed because someone is able to lead it forward by articulating for that mass of people, what is really happening and how it will progress, tells the story about it.

What story are your leaders telling?

Let us choose the leaders who tell the story of our highest aspirations, not our lowest common denominators of fear and greed, ego and power.

Let us then buy from the marketers who tell the story of our highest aspirations, not our lowest common denominators of laziness and competitiveness.

Futurist Rolf Jensen said “The highest paid person of the 21st century will be the storyteller.”

Let’s choose whom we pay to tell our stories, and choose well.

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5 Ways you can make leadership easier and more effective with story

 

Every day you put yourself on the line as a leader.

Don’t you?

Every day you feel the weight of responsibility.

Don’t you?

Every day you need your team contributing to the organisation.

Don’t you?

Of course you do.

You don’t, you can’t, protect yourself at the expense of others.

You don’t, you can’t, pass off the responsibility and, worse yet, blame someone else.

You don’t, you can’t, bully your team into working.

Because it’s so much easier and more effective with story.

 1.  After all it’s free and it’s quick.  Think about the bottom line in this.

You don’t have to pay a consultant/trainer/motivator to come in to explain the organisation culture,

to motivate your team,

to train in how best to get the job done,

to communicate the bad news,

to establish your credibility.

2.  You have a powerful persuasive tool, that guarantees instant engagement.

You don’t have to use bullying.

You don’t have to pull rank.

You don’t have to have enforced motivational days that your team recognise for what they are – a day to relax and ignore.

3.  You don’t have to keep repeating yourself.  Your messages become memorable.

The basics of your organisational culture are retained.

The training is remembered.

The motivation is embedded.

The engagement ensured that.

The story structure ensured that.

The stories you chose ensured that.

4.  You can be real

natural

authentic

even vulnerable … within limits.

Real, natural, authentic, vulnerable (within limits) makes you more likable, more respected, more believable, more credible, more persuasive

and it’s easier,

especially if bullying and/or pulling rank and/or using endless theory and statistics are not your natural bent.

5.  Your team, your customers, your prospects can make sense of your organisation.

They will know automatically what your culture is like,

what your brand really stands for,

what it is like to do business/work with/rely on you.

They will know your why.

All without sleazy or incomprehensible marketing.

And they will know it at a very deep level.

 

 

If you are a leader, Your story matters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business

“Every great leader is a great storyteller,” says Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner.

According to master storytellers Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, storytelling is a lot like running. Everyone knows how to do it, but few of us ever break the four-minute mile. What separates the great runners from the rest? The greats know not only how to hit every stride, but how every muscle fits together in that stride so that no effort is wasted and their goals are achieved. World-class runners know how to run from the inside out. World-class leaders know how to tell a story from the inside out.

In The Elements of Persuasion, Maxwell and Dickman teach you how to tell stories too. They show you how storytelling relates to every industry and how anyone can benefit from its power.

Maxwell and Dickman use their experiences—both in the entertainment industry and as corporate consultants—to deliver a formula for winning stories. All successful stories have five basic components: the passion with which the story is told, a hero who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his or her eyes, an antagonist or obstacle that the hero must overcome, a moment of awareness that allows the hero to prevail, and the transformation in the hero and in the world that naturally results.

Let’s face it: leading is a lot more fun than following. Even if you never want to be a CEO or to change the world, you do want to have control over your own work and your own ideas. Ultimately, that is what the power of storytelling can give you.

You can buy the book from Amazon or Abe Books

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“Always lead with a story,” they said. Not always the best advice for speakers

“Always lead with a story”.

I wonder who gave him that advice?

It sounds feasible, even powerful.

Stories ARE powerful.

They engage, build credibility, create an emotional tone, set the scene.

And all of those things are what is needed from a speech opening.

But they are not the only options for a speech opening, and sometimes they can be damaging.

Find out why and what to do about it in this article I wrote for the Pivotal Public Speaking blog … http://wp.me/p2V4KT-T7

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Your story matters. Add bubbles

 

Your story matters.

It matters because you matter.

It matters because it can serve you.

What happens, then, if you add bubbles?

What are bubbles?

Fun?

Imagination?

A symbol of something else – dreams, beauty, the ethereal?

What happens if you add that to your story – fun, imagination, dreams, beauty, the ethereal?

Your story changes.

Now it has an element of fun/imagination/dreams/beauty/the ethereal – whatever it was that bubbles meant to you.

Now …

What does it mean to you if you think your story has that element – has always had it, or maybe will have it from now on?

Fun where maybe there was none.

Imagination where maybe you saw none.

Dreams – oops they were always there.  What if you recognised them, gave them validity and used the fact, for yourself, that they were there?

And …

What does it mean to someone else if you add that element to the story you tell about yourself.

What will they think if you let them know you have fun in your story,

if you let them know there is imagination where maybe they saw none,

dreams that you hadn’t even recognised for yourself, but that hold significance for that person?

Your story matters – add bubbles!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.  ~ Joan Didion


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The story principles Nike uses will work for you too.

 

 

This is marketing.

And

it’s a story.

 

And there’s

one word

behind that marketing,

one word

behind that story …

“Grit”.

 

Yes it’s Nike.

Yes they probably pay their creative/advertising team huge wages.

 

But those two principles can be applied to all marketing, everywhere.

And you can apply them no matter what your marketing budget.

 

What is your product/client story?

What is the one word behind your story, behind your marketing, behind your brand?

 

After that it just remains for you to find places to tell that story.

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The danger of a single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.

Adichie’s newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

Adichie builds on the literary tradition of Igbo literary giant Chinua Achebe—and when she found out that Achebe liked Half of a Yellow Sun, she says she cried for a whole day. What he said about her rings true: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”
“When she turned 10 and read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, about the clash between Igbo tradition and the British colonial way of life, everything changed: ‘I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.’ She has been writing about Africa ever since.” Washington Post

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Your story online – Are you contributing to global change?

If there is only one message in all that I teach/coach/mentor, or even think, about branding and brand storytelling, it is the everything counts – everything communicates.

 

So … you changed your Facebook profile image to rainbow style.

 

 

 

This is what mine would have looked like, had I adopted it.  I didn’t, not for any particular reason, just didn’t.

I tend to be suspicious of things like that, hence this article, I think.

It all fascinates me.

But stay with me …

Maybe you wanted to communicate, “I support Gay Pride”  or maybe,  “I support equality of marriage rights.”

 

 

Did it occur to you that maybe you were part of an experiment, or a study; that maybe your behaviour could be part of a study that would provide data on how to create a social movement?

I remember Mark Zuckerberg being quoted as saying he wanted Facebook to be a force for change.

Perhaps he really did … and does.

The concept is awesome, to me, absolutely awesome!

That underneath the frippery of so much of our social interaction, and underneath the striving to stand out as a business and to attract business, and underneath the efforts to communicate a hope for something better in our lives, there is the massive potential for change.

 

Under the frippery, the business striving, the individual ripples,

there is a giant wave of potential for change.

 

 

Did you read the recent article in the Atlantic?  It discussed this possibility, citing a published report …

In “The Diffusion of Support in an Online Social Movement,” Bogdan State, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, and Lada Adamic, a data scientist at Facebook, analyzed the factors that predicted support for marriage equality on Facebook back in March 2013. They looked at what factors contributed to a person changing his or her profile photo to the red equals sign, but the implication of their research is much larger: At stake is our understanding of whether groups of citizens can organize online—and how that collective activity affects larger social movements.

The article is a fascinating read- there’s that word again, fascinating, but it really describes my reaction!!

Were you, in fact, indulging in “slacktivism”?!!

On this, the broader scale, the possibilities inherent in social media just fascinate intrigue me.

The fascination feeling of intrigue interest – began for me, with that suggestion regarding Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions and was heightened when the changes in the Middle East were linked to social media activity, especially on Twitter.

What will happen?

What are we all doing, unconsciously?

What is possible?

What change?

For good … or for bad?

We really are a global community!

What vision is now so much more possible/realistic/achievable?

The Atlantic article concluded with these words

Even seemingly small online actions—clicking the “like” button, changing one’s profile photo—are being tracked and analyzed. Just like McAdam’s research on Freedom Summer shapes our understanding of support for marriage equality, Facebook’s past research on marriage equality has helped answer a question we all face when deciding to act politically: Does the courage to visibly—if virtually—stand up for what a person believes in have an effect on that person’s social network, or is it just cheap, harmless posturing? Perhaps the rainbow colors across Facebook will become part of the answer.

And I return to the smaller scale – you and me – and the original thought — EVERYTHING COMMUNICATES — but now we know it communicates in ways we may never have envisaged.