 Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. It's Leigh Ann and welcome to Tuesday Tea. We are talking about storytelling today and I'm quite excited about today's topic or rather even just this month's topics. If you took a look at last week's Tuesday Tea, we welcomed Karen Miller from Fredrickton and she shared with us her story and it was really about showing up authentically in your role, whatever your role may be. And today we're talking about storytelling. It's just this great season of talking about how we can find our voice and how we can express it. So the blog post and vlog that launched today on my blog over at LeighAnnColderwood.com as well as on my YouTube channel is about storytelling. And I find this topic fascinating because personally I have always struggled to tell a compelling story. I'm not a speaker or a keynote speaker. I'm not even really good at email copies. So those skills allude me and so telling a story is not easy for me to do. Getting on video is easier for me I suppose to do but then actually communicating a story that's going to elicit an emotion in you, that's where I struggle. And so I could definitely use some coaching in this area. I know there's tons of great coaches out there and it's on my list of something to learn and implement in 2021. But I did stumble across a few great storytelling resources and one of the resources that I stumbled upon really created a very simple framework of telling a story. So I started playing around with this framework and I saw some things that worked and maybe some things that wouldn't work for sales professionals. And so that's what this blog this week was about was looking at storytelling as a sales professional and how you can find those stories to share with your audience. So the first thing with storytelling for a sales professional is with any other profession is to kind of look back at your life and I mean your entire life. I think the biggest misconception people make about stories I'm backing up here but I think the biggest thing that trips people up about stories is they think the story has to be business related or inspirational or motivational in their life. The thing is no matter where you pull your story from there's going to be some lessons there. So when you're taking stock of your stories look at stories outside of your professional circle. Look at things that happen to you personally as well and look at things that happen to you as a child as a teenager we all know we've got those stories there as a young adult and for me now as a middle aged adult there's a lot of stories and a lot of great things that have happened not only to me professionally but also personally. So taking stock of those stories is as easy as just taking a spreadsheet and starting to doodle things that created moments in your life from ages zero to 10, 11 to 20 and so on and so forth. So the example I used in my blog was about riding a bicycle. I think it's something that all of us can attest to and can relate to because a majority of us at one point in our life had to try to ride a bicycle. Now if this wasn't a moment that you remember as being transformational in your life maybe it was something else. Maybe it was walking to school for the very first time by yourself without your parents. The one I'm going to pull for today's example was when I first started in sales 13 years ago. So this is a story that I've pulled from my mid 30s. Was I mid, yeah it was mid 30s. Never done sales before but super excited about this new kind of industry role that required some sales. So that moment was very transformational for me. In fact, the story around that moment was me doing some sales training with my boss. He was in Houston so we flew down to Houston. Me and my fellow colleague from Alberta we flew to Houston to do this team training and sales training with our boss who was great. But I was not great. In fact, I was actually pregnant at the time. I knew I was pregnant. I was three months pregnant. Can fly and do all those things but little bit emotional and so that kind of fed into the training. So I think that's one of the reasons it was such a transformational moment for me is expecting a new son, starting my sales training at a time in my life when I'm not sure I should be even starting some new skills and going through that training with my boss and here's the transformational moment. We went through the scenarios. Sorry, what's it called when you role play? Oh my goodness. So we started going through these role plays for calling on potential clients and I started to cry. I couldn't even do the role play. Nevermind move on to the next step of the sales process which was to engage them into further dialogue. So that's one moment from my life but my point is when you're looking at moments in your life they could be from the professional realm but they could also be from a personal realm as well because what's going to happen is it's going to take us to the second stage in the process. So the second stage in storytelling is to acknowledge the feelings that came up for you as you were going through that transformational moment. And again, for the example on my blog about riding a bike there were lots of feelings of self-doubt. There were lots of feelings of anxiety because you wanted to impress your parents with this new skill of riding the bike. For me in my sales training there were a lot of feelings of I'm too old to be starting such a brand new skill and so there was a ton of anxiety there. There was obviously a ton of disappointment in the way I even handled my behavior during the role play. So taking stock of the feelings regardless of what your story is that's what's going to get us to the next step. So once you've doodled your story or your story ideas start to doodle the feelings that accompanied that story. Things that you were feeling when you were going through that transformational moment. And then of course, the third step is to acknowledge the outcome of that moment. So for many of us who were learning to ride a bike the outcome was we actually did learn how to ride a bike. And so all of the feelings that then weld up from that all of those feelings of disappointing our parents and feeling deflated because we kept falling those were all replaced with feelings of pride and feelings of success. And yes, I can do this. I can do this. I've practiced, I've practiced, I've practiced and now I can do this. For me, it was getting over that hurdle of those role play sales calls. And wouldn't you know it after I practiced a few times it probably wasn't any better but I stopped crying. And that for me was very transformational because it was about just being able to do it and not have this visceral reaction to doing a cold call. So there was success in that. There was success in me getting through the role play and not crying and breaking down and then being on the road to practice again and again and again until it became smoother because practice makes perfect. And then of course the fourth step now that you've come to the outcome and you're riding your bike or you're getting through the role play sales training without breaking down and crying. The fourth thing is now to apply the feelings from that outcome into how that can help your community. So again, you go back to the bike riding example the lesson that you can give anyone with that example is that practice does get you to the end goal and those feelings of disappointing people it's not about the person, it's about your performance and just being a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday. Which is ironically almost the same outcome for my sales training example where I'm never going to be a master sales caller. We're gonna leave that to the Grant Cardones of the world but I'm a heck of a lot better than when I was crying in my boss's office 13 years ago. So that's a lesson that I can impart and the wisdom that I can give to another person through my story. So it's one way to walk into a sales training let's say for an example and give someone the A's and the B's and the C's of conducting a sales call but it's another to tell your story about how you first started out at sales so that you create a connection with your audience and that's what story we're telling really is about, right? It's about creating connection and we tell stories everywhere, we tell stories to our children we watch stories on TV play out, we read stories both in fiction and in nonfiction literature stories are everywhere and there's a reason that they're everywhere it's because people can make a connection and they can relate and they can learn from the story you're telling. So I'd love for you to drop a comment or a question in the chat if you have questions about storytelling or even if you have a story that you would like to start telling your community but you're just not sure what the next step is in telling that story. Drop me a comment in the chat would love to talk to you further about how stories can impact your community and impact the person on the back end. Like I said, this is all on the blog post that you can find at liankhoulderwood.com we're gonna do a ton of storytelling through this season more so because I need the practice as well but I'm encouraging you to also step out and tell your story. It can be verbal like I'm doing now it can be on video like I'm doing now or it could be as simple as a social media post or maybe it's just even a draft to yourself and starting to journal your stories to yourself so that you have a record of the transformational moments in your life that made you the person you are today. And then when you're comfortable with that story and even just telling that story as a reflection of yourself I encourage you to start sharing that with someone who may be able to grow or change or learn from the story that you're telling. So that's today's Tuesday tea it's not a long one because it's really only four steps. Remember the four steps. One, look at the transformational moments throughout your life both personal and professional and start to write them down. Number two, write down the feelings associated with that moment of transformation or even sorry when you're going through that moment itself. Then number three, acknowledge the outcome that came out of that moment. What was the end result? And of course the feelings associated with the end result how is that the lesson that you can now pass along to your community or even the lesson that you can hang on to yourself the next time that you find yourself in that situation. So I hope you've enjoyed this chat about storytelling lots more to come about storytelling and when we launch into the personal branding course in a couple of months we're gonna have a whole unit on storytelling and how to create a compelling story that you can share with your community. Any questions at all, please feel free to reach out via the Facebook group or drop me a DM in the YouTube or Facebook group. Love to hear from you I'd love to hear of the challenges that you're having around storytelling. So I can ensure that I get you the resources you need to get to the next step. Have a wonderful, wonderful day everyone. Thanks for joining me. Bye for now.