How to overcome your storytelling doubts

Is my story good enough???

If you’ve ever worried about not providing enough value to your audience, the easiest way to conquer your fears is by learning from the best.

Welcome to our podcast, I’m Rachel and in this video, I’ll will tell you about storytelling strategies used by six-figures public speakers.

So, what can you do to become a more confident storyteller?

Let’s be honest, us content folks are perfectionists.

We want people to like what we put out there. We want to be seen as those who know what they are talking about and share information that’s useful and interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, this approach totally makes sense, particularly in the age of saturation on YouTube. You have to create videos that pack a punch to stand out and make people engage with your content.

On the other hand, this mindset can also be counterproductive and make us doubt ourselves. In some cases, we put stories, which are ready to get published, back on hold because of it.

What could earn us more engagement and fans goes to waste.

Evaluating your content is actually pretty hard so, today we'll take a little shortcut and talk about how the best in the game do it.

Let’s start with Lisa Nichols.

This master storyteller, who came from humble beginnings and started her business as a single mom on benefits, nowadays runs a business empire.

Her advice to speakers struggling with insecurities is to consider their relatability. She says that you do not only contribute value to your audience in content but also in connection.

In other words, you bring value by understanding your audience and what's going on in their world.

If your stories speak to that, you are doing your job as a speaker.

Evan Carmichael doubles down on that. A venture capitalist turned YouTube content creator and public speaker, he is on a mission to help people believe in themselves more.

Evan puts emphasis on the emotional aspect of storytelling.

“Whenever you feel a strong emotion, film!" he says.

Why is that a good idea?

Most of the time you speak from your head but to make your stories truly resonate with people, you need to speak from your heart.

By speaking freely, simply when you want to get things out of your chest, your stories will have a lot more energy. Facts and figures can be added later, should you need them.

Evan also says best stories are born from situations when you are helping people.

Try to think about the time when you were in this position and, more often than not, you’ll find some powerful stories, too.

Sharing your own experiences of working towards a goal is also a powerful tactic. You can talk about your willingness to try and mention things that you have done to accomplish your goal.

The key is to figure out which story is the right one to tell in a particular situation.

To figure this out, it is useful to test your stories first.

Start by telling them to people in your circle and ask them what they think.

This is your chance to iron out the imperfections.

Encourage them to tell you what they disliked about your story or what did not make sense.

You can also spot this by critiquing your old videos. Rewatching your content after some time lets you see it through fresh eyes, and it is a good opportunity to polish your style.

Brené Brown, The New York Times best-selling author, draws people in by showing her vulnerability. Even though she started her career as an academic researcher, her talks are not full of facts and figures. They're quite the opposite.

Brené talks about what many of us prefer to hide for the fear of looking inadequate.

She uses several storytelling methods to use her vulnerability as a way to connect with the crowd.

The first we’ll discuss is a movie time story.

Brené uses this format to talk about a challenging time in her life and lessons she learnt about herself and the world by going through it.

This technique works because it helps your audience to picture the experience you are sharing with them and understand how it felt.

Once they are tuned in, Brené keeps them hooked by highlighting her lightbulb moment when she got curious about a new way of doing things.

This prompts people to do the same. They keep paying attention because they want to know what she learnt.

So, what’s the lesson here?

If you make your audience curious about your own curiosity, they will find your story intriguing and worth their attention.

Lastly, to highlight the morale of the story, Brené uses ‘a man in a hole’ technique.

She starts by talking about her old comfort zone and why she decided to step out of it.

Then, she follows by mentioning the challenges she ran into along the way and how she managed to overcome them.

Finally, just like a man emerging from a hole, she drags those painful lessons out of the dark, so that we can benefit from them, too.

This makes us feel rewarded and we are more likely to resonate and remember the lessons from the talk.

So, these are all the expert tips I have for this video.

Let me know what you think about these gems of knowledge, which ones did you try and what worked or didn’t.

By sharing your feedback, you can reflect upon your own technique and support the community, so it’s a win-win.

See you in the comments section and until next time!