Today I am going to show you how a client of mine, we’ll call him Mike, came to me with a story and how we made it more concise, emotional and effective.
Mike helps highly successful businessmen generate more wealth without sacrificing their family.
He came to me with a story of his truth.
He has a wife and two kids.
He works very hard, makes great money and travels a lot.
When he’s working, he feels guilty because he misses his family.
When he’s with his family, he feels guilty because he’s thinking about work.
While Mike does a great job of managing this, we always want to do better for ourselves and Mike is no different.
In working with his his clients, Mike comes across story after story of father’s not having a great (or any) relationship with their grown kids.
It’s so painful.
Painful enough to scare Mike a little straight too… and see where he can do better for himself.
He wants to offer this perspective for the new fathers. A chance for them to see what they may be sacrificing in the—not so far off—future if they don’t begin to make changes now.
Below is the original story Mike came to me with and my edited version.
Read them both through first and as you do, check in with your emotions before reading my tips. This practice will help you become a better storyteller.
The goal with stories is to make people feel something.
That’s how you get them to feel seen, heard, and understood.
When you do this, you build trust.
People will only pay you if they trust you.
**Note: I like to help my clients with a “shot list” if they need it and want to make the voice over style content that I make. I do this by adding a brief shot idea in [brackets bold and italicized]
My Goal
My goal in working with my clients is to never project my feelings onto them. They need to speak THEIR truth, not mine. The process is always a collaboration. I am constantly asking them, “what would you say here?” or “how does that feel for you?” I’ve gotten pretty good at sniffing out any stickiness or resistance in my suggestions or if the words aren’t landing on the page correctly.
They need to truly feel good, energized and excited about what we create together, otherwise we’re only creating a disconnect from them, their content, and their audience, which puts them in the same boat they were in before. Low engagement, plateaued audience growth, and overall drained.
A big part about what I love about this process is, as we continue to work together, I get a better sense of what it is you’re truly after. What you are really trying to say. When I get tingles in my body or I start welling up with tears before you do, I know we’re on to something.
That’s what happened during this process and it’s why I wanted to share it with you.
It’s incredibly rewarding to be apart of this process and I’m so honored you let me be apart of it, even just through these emails.
Step 1: First Person Point-of-View (POV)
His original script starts in first person, “I want to be friends with my two little boys when I am older.”
Then it shifts back and forth between first, second and third person saying “you” then “parents” then back to “I” throughout.
For a refresher on POVs, here’s a graphic from Learn Easy English on YouTube
Of course, any story can be told form any point of view. However, I highly recommend when making content, to tell YOUR story.
Sharing a story from first person perspective does 3 things:
- When you are vulnerable, compared to what most people think, your audience won’t think you suck and don’t have your shit together. They will actually see you as a leader because only someone with immense confidence would share a vulnerable story so publicly.
- Second person gives angry parent energy like, “you should do this!!” and “go clean your room!” which has kinda been the vibe of coaches the last decade on social.
Instead, first person gives the audience a chance to relate to you and place themselves in your shoes without getting on the defense. They think, “Ah, Matt totally gets me.”
- You will notice, when you begin telling the story out loud, you will begin to FEEL it. Think of the difference between saying, “his mom died” vs “my mom died.”
A crucial part of telling a story is to get emotional. Just like a great actor gives their character a background story so that when their character’s mom dies, it feels like its happening to them and they can tap into those emotions. If they didn’t do this, movies would suck.
Do the same when you tell your stories… and luckily you don’t have to act. Just RELIVE it. Feel into those emotions and let them be expressed.
So, for Mike, we began by switching all the 2nd and 3rd person pronouns to 1st person. As we did this, each line naturally had to evolve.
Step 2: Show Don’t Tell
Yup, the classic advice from our grade school days.
Now that we are in the first person, I want to visualize your story.
What I tell all my clients is, “If I was watching a movie, what would I see?”
[In the rewrite above, I highlighted the details I added in orange]
Since we are using video, we can utilize that to literally show details and that will make it more powerful. Obviously with my style of content, I utilize this a lot, but we also do it with words.
For example, you can say, “I felt deep regret and am lonely” and that’s okay. But if you say, “I will be sitting in my children’s childhood home flipping through our photo album from, “Disney Land 2003” and can feel my eyes welling up with tears,” well now… I can see it and feel it. (I thought of this as I wrote this newsletter. Could be a nice add to the rewrite.)
Take Mike’s example at the end. Instead of getting a call from the kids when they’re older, which I can kind of picture. Instead I can SEE the grown up kid looking out at his back yard with dead grass and you can see the dad looking out at his grass which is a deep rich lush green so happy that he’s able to give his son advice.
To do this, all you have to do here is be honest.
You want your kids to call you when they’re in their 30s?
Take me there.
What do you call your dad about or wish you could call your dad about?
Take some time and think about one of those days. What moment in your life do you wish you could have called them for advice. Could be small like how to cook a Turkey on Thanksgiving or big like, I don’t think I”m in love with my wife anymore.
The more bold and honest you can be about your truth, the better it is.
You do this effectively by getting more specific and sharing your emotions.
Here’s another example of this inside my membership:
One member who is a coach for moms teaching them how to create generational emotional wealth shared this, “In order [for the child] to NOT threaten the connection to the parent, the child shape shifts and often abandons self (authenticity) to maintain the connection. Authenticity is SO important to me because that was my lived experience. I felt like i had to shrink to fit into a box that was acceptable and often hid aspects of myself. I never felt like i was allowed to be just me> I had to perform, achieve, to ’look the part’”
My feedback is, “I want to know what you did to look the part? Wear certain clothes? Sacrifice friendships to study hard so you got As so your parents loved you?”
If one of those is true, then I’d get even more specific.
Let’s take the clothes for example. What kind of clothes did they like you wearing? What clothes were your friends wearing and how did that feel?
So you may say something like, “As a kid in the 80s I wouldn’t even buy bellbottoms in high school even though that was the style. My parents despised it and I tried so hard to please them that I only worth ankle length skirts. I got teased hard for it, but that wasn’t as bad as the fear of displeasing my parents”
You can see how (1) I can totally picture this in my mind and (2) how much more emotional it makes it.
Specifics and Emotion.
Step 3: Edit. Delete. Read it out loud. Repeat.
Edit
Adding emotions and specifics can be difficult when you’re not used to it.
That’s fine! It’s new for you. Expecting to master anything when it’s new is a lil crazy.
I have listened to almost every episode of David Parell’s podcast, “How I Write.”
Every guest, including David, has a different way they like to write, but the one similarity I notice every writer has said is how important editing and deleting is.
None of them nail what they want to say on the first try and most of them overwrite. So there is no reason for you to feel like you should have nailed one of your posts on the first go.
Look it back over.
Notice where you can show rather than tell. Ask yourself if you can picture this thing and if not, get more specific.
If I say, “I felt stuck.”
You can’t picture stuckness unless you choose to make something up.
- Stuck in the mud?
- Stuck in a bad relationship?
- Stuck in making money?
Instead you can add a sentence or two of imagery to make me feel it. “I sat down at my kitchen table to prepare my schedule for the week and when I opened my Calendly, there were no sales calls schedule for the 5th week in a row. Fuck. I panicked. Not again.”
That was the big focus for Mike.
Delete
A story (or any video) that drags on is baaaaaad news.
We’ve all experienced it when we’re like, “when is this going to endddddd?!?!” and then you swipe to the next video.
I talk about this in my “Content is like Cake” reel.
Your story could be amazing, but if it goes on 20 seconds too long, your audience will get frustrated and that’s all the feeling they will remember you by.
Then, the next time they see your face (content), the first thing they remember… isn’t actually a memory, it’s a feeling. They will feel that frustrated/annoyance/anxiety and then they will remember how they didn’t really like your last reel. Therefore they are less likely to watch this one (even if it has the perfect hook) OR it has to be REALLY fucking good to change their mind.
It’s the same effect where, when a Theo Vonn reel comes up on my page, I like it within the first second. I just know I’m gonna love it and laugh because he has proven over 50 other reels to make me laugh.
You definitely don’t want to be on the other side of that.
So, delete, delete, delete.
We didn’t really have to do any of this for Mike’s story. He did a great job. But it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see from my clients.
1️⃣ Delete things that don’t move the story forward.
We can get into a habit of trying to include too many motifs.
A motif is a dominant idea. If we have too many ideas our reader gets confused.
For example, Mike may find himself talking about how he wants his kids to call him when they’re older but then he feels the need to tell his audience how important he knows business is and to not totally disregard that.
Whoaaaa deep breath, Mike!
If you say too many things, you’ll lose them.
Know that your content is an ecosystem.
One post doesn’t stand on it’s own.
Just like in a relationship, you don’t fall in love from hearing someone talk for 60 seconds. You got date after date. Similarly, your audience will learn more and more about what you stand for post after post.
If Mike feels like he NEEDS to talk business, he can either do it in his caption or just make another piece of content and post it tomorrow.
And if Mike is worried about people commenting because they think he’s a bad businessman, LET THEM COMMENT! You can have great conversations in the comments or move them to the DMs and build a relationship.
2️⃣ Delete things that are redundant
Most of us blabber on unnecessarily.
Since Mike didn’t do this, here’s an example from a current client.
This can easily cut this IN HALF:
“that changed everything for me” and “it changed my life forever” is the same thing.
Sounds obvious now… but you probably do this all the time.
Delete it.
Then reread it.
Does it still make sense?
Great!
Doesn’t that feel good!
Read it out loud
Absolute game changer.
Don’t just lazily read it out loud though.
Perform it!
- When you perform what you wrote, you can’t speed through it. So you’re going to notice where you drag on. Begin deleting that stuff.
- Some things are going to sound awkward when you say them out loud. Revise them to make them sound more natural. This isn’t 10th grade five-paragraph essay on the Boston Tea Party. Talk like you would to your friend.
- Practice your 5 presentation skills. Pacing, volume, tone, pauses and physiology. You can read more about those here.
Repeat
This is your first, second, third, 100th impression of you and your business to a stranger.
Take it seriously.
Repeat this process as many times as you need to to get it to 90% good. Then post it.
Nothing is ever perfect and nobody’s going to remember this in a month.
Time to move on.
I hope it was helpful to see this.
Thanks for being here!!
Matt
P.S. If you’ve been looking for help with your content, my membership will be opening doors in a few weeks to my waitlist ONLY. Click here to join the waitlist.
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