The 3 Pillars Of Strong Corporate Storytelling with Steve Multer
Jan 13, 2023
Do you want to communicate more effectively? Chief Storytelling Officer Steve Multer has delivered thousands of live talks and broadcast presentations that connect multinational corporations to millions of customers. In this episode of Cash In On Camera, Steve is breaking down the 3 pillars of strong corporate storytelling so that you can improve your presentations and make a bigger impact on your business.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll hear…
▶️ [1:47] Here's the thing that I think sometimes Earlier stage entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants, struggle with is that they don't feel like they have stories yet that are worth telling. They don't have enough experience, or at least they think it's a perception, right? And your perception's your reality. But they feel like, "I don't have enough good stories. And why would anyone care about this?" Aside from the fact that they don't often have the ability to connect a story to help people understand a theory or a thought better. So I think it's really this idea that people don't often value the stories that they have built. So how important is it that you, yourself, as the storyteller, have had that story be something that you've personally experienced or that you have a history with?
▶️ [4:12] Pablo Picasso talks about this in terms of all children are artists. The trick is to maintain being creative and being an artist as you get older. The same thing happens in trust in your own story. We lose the joy of performing in front of others because we learn to become afraid of it. If we say the wrong thing in class then the teacher says, "No, wrong", in a public space, or kids make fun of us. So they laugh at us and, as we get older and older, the stakes of that fear get higher and higher. We emerge into the corporate world and somebody says, "I need you to go out and speak on behalf of the brand." Now all of a sudden that fear is so deeply ingrained that FNE or fear of negative evaluation, that we no longer trust our own story. And what I try to do is help people to understand everyone on the planet is a natural storyteller.
▶️ [7:04] The audience-speaker interaction is so unique and so positive. Audiences want speakers to succeed. When you go in to make a sales pitch, the person that you are speaking with, that you are having that communication with, they want you to give them that magic bullet. That thing clears the obstacle out of their path. They are hoping that you are going to succeed if you trust in yourself. Now, there really is no difference between us having that beer and you getting on stage and simply telling your story as you just said, the good, the bad, and the ugly because that's what makes you human. And one human connecting to another human will always succeed in strong storytelling, and that is what will lead to a business relationship. Too many people put the cart before the horse.
▶️ [10:36] Passion is the most amazing thing in any story we tell, and in any communication and connection that we have with another human being. It's also one of the hardest things to achieve when we speak with passion. No matter what our topic is about, whether it's about our family or our friends, or travel or owning a boat or flying airplanes or doing artwork, or it's about our product or our service or solution or team or business. When we speak with passion about it, we inspire passion in other people. They want a part of it. They wanna feel a piece of that. It's subconscious. It's not that you have to be this enormous, passionate human being, spilling out and smiling and going crazy, that puts people off. But if they can sense, "Boy, that person I'm speaking with really genuinely believes in what they do and what they say and what they're about." We all want a little piece of that. It excites us. So when we speak with passion, we inspire passion in others, which then spurs them to proactivity. They want to do something about it in order to achieve a little bit of that passion. It just can be very hard for a lot of people in corporate industries to find, which I'm sure you've understood in a lot of conversations that you've had. “Where's the passion in my job?” Right?
▶️ [13:35] The good speakers know it doesn't matter. What they connect with is the human being who's speaking to them, not to the data, the metrics, and the numbers. So if you're speaking, for example, in a conference environment and every 30 minutes a new set of four talks kicks off, the average attendee at that conference is going to be so hyper-inundated with metrics, KPIs, and content. They simply don't have the bandwidth. The smartest person in the room doesn't have the bandwidth to retain it, but they will remember the speaker that made them feel passionate. Right? So this goes back to the Carl Buer quote that people often ascribe to Maya Angelou. They may not remember what you told them, but they will always remember how you made them feel. Passion makes them feel and that's the most important thing because then next week when they're back at their desk, remembering back to the talk they heard a couple of days ago without the blur of the conference, in their minds they can say, "Oh, Sheryl gave a fantastic talk. Let me go back and remind myself of the numbers that she gave me", and they can go on the website and get it there. That's when they're going to do that kind of business. But in the room, in communication, the passion really counts.
▶️ [16:58] Yeah, I love it. I think of keynote speaker trainers who talk about getting your audience engaged right from the very first moment that you open your mouth on stage. Right. It's like you want people nodding their heads. You want people saying yes. You want people to be in it with you. And I think that's what I'm hearing you say is that building that connection is a really key component to storytelling and whether corporate storytelling but I think that these pillars also apply to marketing and, other ways of communicating stories. I mean, they're really universal, I think, but obviously very effective in the corporate work that you do. So I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about the work that you do and also your book. Congratulations on launching your book.
▶️ [20:52] So, One of the things that I love about the work that you do, I've watched so many of your videos and you and I have had an opportunity to talk and I've watched your interviews. You are a big fan of utilizing technology that is actually available today. So if we think back 20 years ago to where we were, so for example, even if we just go back, well, let's go back to 1999, since that's the Sure. The target date that you use, right? What did we have in 1999? We had an AOL Instant message room. MSN Messenger. We had Yahoo Messenger. We had things like live journals, right? Facebook doesn't drop until 2004, and here we are, and it's such a blip of time later. It's one generation. We think these things have been around for a long time. We have these tools, but these tools have started to overwhelm us. So my particular tip, what I would tell everybody is two things can work so beautifully to your advantage no matter what your goals and targets happen to. Number one of those is using the technology that's available to you, but a lot of people don't know how to do it.
▶️ [23:11] So that's why I love that. And I love how you put that because I think a lot of coaches and consultants and people who move into this space and wanna do this type of work, they do it because they feel a calling in their heart to wanna give back and to want to pull other people up, and they are service-minded people. So what you've just shared, that strategy is really in the alignment of being kind instead of getting bogged down with, "Oh, the technology and I'm not up on this and I'm not up on that." Just fall back on just being kind and helpful and serving others and good things will happen in your business.
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