The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 430: Matthew Dicks - Change Your Life Through The Power Of Storytelling

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Matthew Dicks is a Bestselling author, a professional storyteller, and a teacher. He is a 52-time Moth StorySLAM winner & a 7-time GrandSLAM champion. He's recognized as one of the greatest storytellers in the world. Notes: Every great story is about a five-second moment of our life. The purpose of every great story is to bring a singular moment of transformation and realization to the greatest clarity possible. "Let me tell you about my vacation to Europe" is not the beginning of a story, despite what many seem to believe. This is merely an attempt to review the itinerary of your previous vacation But if someone said, "While I was in Europe, I met a taxi driver who changed the way I think about my parents forever," that is potentially a great story. "People are not attracted to people who do easy things. They are attracted to people who do hard things. It's hard to be vulnerable. That takes courage. And that's why we are drawn to it." Being vulnerable opens people up. The beginning and end of a story: Beginning - Promise that what I'm going to say is worth your time End - The fulfillment of that process How to put a great story together? Start at the end... The five-second moment. "What are you aiming at?" You have to know that to craft the beginning. Use a thesis statement -- "I used to be... and I realized..." Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs. It's about love. How to open a story: Try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible. DON'T start by setting expectations ("This is hilarious, "you need to hear this," "you're not going to believe this.") Requirements of a personal story: Change - your story must reflect change over time. It can't simply be a series of remarkable events. Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes. Your story only -  not that of others The dinner table test - Be human Homework for life — 5 minutes at the end of each day. "If I had to tell a story from today — a 5-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day. What would it be? Homework for life slows time down... Humor -- It keeps your audience's attention. "The goal is not to tell a funny story. The goal is to tell a story that moves an audience emotionally." "A written story is like a lake. Readers can step in and out of the water at their leisure, and the water always remains the same. An oral story is like a river. It is a constantly flowing torrent of words." -- "To keep your listener from stepping out of your river of words to make meaning, simplification is essential. Starting as close to the end as possible helps to make this happen." During a talk at a school in Brazil, Matt was asked why he shares so much of himself? (Writing novels, stories, teaching, blog posts, podcasts). And he thought for a while and then said, "I think I'm trying to get the attention of a mother who never paid me any attention and is now dead and a father who left me as a boy and never came home." Your first job as a speaker (at home, on stage, or at work) is to be entertaining... Advice: When you graduate college, it's the end of your assessed learning. What do you want to study next? It will be on you to track. It won't be assessed by others... What do you want to learn next?

You don't have to have these extraordinary moments. I hope you don't. I don't hope that people are homeless or had guns to their heads or went through windshields. I don't want that for anyone. What I want is for them to find the little moments, the ones that are far more relatable, far more connective to other people and tell those stories instead. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawth.

Thank you so much for being. here. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, Welcome to Management will help you become a more effective leader. Text, learners to 4-4-222. Now on to tonight's featured leader. This one is a treat. The great Matthew Dix, best-selling author, professional storyteller, and a fifth-grade teacher. He is a 52-time Moth StorySlam winner and seven-time Grand Slam champion. He's recognized as one of the greatest

storytellers in the world. A few of the topics we discuss the definition of an excellent story, including the component parts and how you can put this into action immediately. And then how to better open and close a meaning at work using stories and why it's vital you do so. And then Matt shares one action step you can take to make you a better storyteller and help you live much more fulfilling life. Ladies and gentlemen, I can't wait for you to hear this one. It's Matthew Dix. All right, Matt, to start, I want to talk about five second moments. And you have said that Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs. What is Jurassic Park actually about? It's one of my favorite things to talk about what movies are actually about.

So if you've seen the first Jurassic Park, it's actually a movie about a man who can't be with the woman he loves because she wants to have children and he does not. And that becomes very apparent at the beginning of the movie, as most movies are sort of foretold at the beginning when Alan Grant, I think is his name. He's the protagonist, the male protagonist. He's an archaeologist and he's digging up some dinosaur bones and they discover a velociraptor, or at least the skeleton of a velociraptor. There's some kid at the dig site. There shouldn't be a kid there, but it functions for the movie. The kid looks at sort of the fossil and says, looks like a giant chicken.

Alan Grant takes this fossilized velociraptor claw that he has and he explains to the boy how this dinosaur would rip you open from the inside and devour you while you were still alive in a really horrific way. And then the woman he wants to love, Ellie, she says, why did you do that? And he says, you know, children are terrible. I've told you, they're smelly, they're expensive, they're stupid, all of these things. He says, you want one of those? And she says, well, not that one, but yes, I would like one of them. And that's it. That is the movie. The movie is two people who want to be together but can't agree on children, a very normal, common, relatable problem. And that's it. that people have when they're out in the world trying to find the right partner.

And so throughout the movie, it's not surprising that Alan Grant ends up in Jurassic Park with two children, that he has to sort of take care of and love and preserve and protect. And, you know, the end of the movie, that five-second moment that I describe all movies and all stories really ultimately have, that doesn't actually take place at the end of the movie. You know, Alan Grant grows closer and closer to the kids as the movie goes on. You can see him actually become physically closer to them. He just, he holds them, he protects them. So the end of that movie takes place in a tree at night. They've just been feeding some plant-eating dinosaurs. And he's got both kids in his arms like a father would hold, you know, his children. And the boy makes a joke,

as he's been doing all throughout the movie. And Alan Grant has his biggest laugh of the movie. And then the girl, the little girl says, what if the bad dinosaurs come back, the people eating dinosaurs and he says don't worry i'm not going to go i'm not going to go to sleep tonight i'm going to protect you and she says you're going to stay awake all night and he says all night long and he pulls them as close as you can bring two kids to you and as he does so that claw that he threatened the boy with at the very beginning of the movie that falls to the ground you know that the symbol that this is no longer relevant to him the thing he had in the beginning he's let it go because the thing that is in his arms that is what now matters to him and now we know that he can be with the woman he

loves because he has fallen in love with children. He understands their value and their beauty and all of those things. But if I said to you, Ryan, want to go see a movie with a guy who fundamentally can't be with a woman he loves and he has to find a way to love children so that he, you know, he can be with that woman. You would probably not want to see that movie. But if you embed that story around dinosaurs, suddenly it becomes entertaining. So, and I'm not sure if you know this or not, but when they constructed that film, when they

wrote the movie. Which part is first? Do they say, we want to make this great huge picture with dinosaurs. Wait a second. We got to add in this little five second moment of a love story and they got add in the kids. Like, do you know how that's constructed? I'm curious. I don't know in that regard. Now, that movie is based upon a book, which I actually read as well. And that love story is not as clear in the book as it is in the movie because Spielberg got his hands on the movie and said, we can't just make a movie about dinosaurs. That has been done before. The goal is to like leave a movie and think in your heart and your mind, that was really good. And that's how you feel when you leave that movie.

You go, wow, that was a really good movie. A lot of times the thing that the movie is about, you know, especially in movies like these, you're not even really sure on sort of a front of the brain level what the movie's about. It's the back of the brain that's sort of talking to you and explaining to you, you know, why you love that movie. So I suspect in that case, because they had the IP originally, they had the book, I think they started with dinosaurs. as they started with the way to bring dinosaurs back

and then Spielberg got involved and said, well, we need to make the movie about something else. Which he does throughout all of his career. Every movie is really about something else other than the thing, the alien, the dinosaur, the monster, whatever he's making a film about, there's always something underneath that is much more important. How did you come up with like,

I've never thought of it that way. I love that movie. I vividly remember the scene and watching the theater when you saw the dinosaurs like the first, time and the music. I mean, I can, it was awesome. It still is awesome. It still holds up. How do you deconstruct it in this manner to figure out this five second moment? Like, that's what the movie's actually about. It's a good question. You know, I've been doing it like all my life. When I was a kid, I wrote to Steven Spielberg. I had just seen E.T. And I loved the movie, but it has a terrible

scene in it. Just one of those, why did you do that to this movie scenes? It's a scene with frogs in a laboratory. There's just too many frogs. It's ridiculous. It's over the top. And I was so frustrated when I saw it that I wrote a letter to Spielberg and I gave it to my mother. I just realized like a year ago, she didn't send that letter. I was sitting there going, oh my God, how could she even find his address? But she told me she sent it. But essentially it was a letter saying, I love all your movie, your movie, Stephen Spielberg. But you seem to have one stupid moment in every movie. So if you'll just show me the movie ahead of time, I will tell you what the stupid moment is and we can clear it out and you can have movies. So from the time I was a little kid, I was sort of not just watching movies, but trying to figure out how they work. And even today, when I hear stories, whether they're told out loud

or I'm watching a movie or a television show, I instantly break them into pieces rather than seeing them as a continuous unit. And I think it's that ability to see a movie in its parts that allows me to do that work, finding what the story is really about. So, Matt, the purpose and the reason that I reached out to you, one, your book Storyworthy was highly recommended by multiple friends from different spaces. So friends that didn't know each other. So whenever that happens, I'm usually going to, I'm definitely going to buy it and I'm usually going to read it.

And the reason I think this is such an important skill is from a leadership perspective, when I envision the leaders and coaches and bosses in my life who I've most wanted to commit to, the ones who have impacted me the most, they were incredible communicators. And usually from a communication perspective, they were awesome storytellers. I didn't really deconstruct the makings of storytelling or what makes a great storyteller. I just know how I felt when they told their stories. and it inspired me and made me want to do great work. Maybe we want to follow it, maybe you want to commit.

And so the purpose of this conversation for me is to personally learn to be a better storyteller and hopefully help other leaders become better storytellers. And I didn't start with that. I started with some action because I know that's part of great storytelling is like, let's go right now. So instead I tried to model what I've learned from you already without having ever spoken to. So I love for you to share some of the commonalities among the world's greatest storytellers. And you, by the way, are certainly one of those.

You've got all the awards. I think I've read so many different places of how many awards of storytelling competitions that you won. But I love for you now to think about some of the commonalities among the world's greatest storytellers. Sure. Well, I think it starts with that idea of what you call the five second. moment, which is sort of the fundamental understanding as to what a story is. I think the problem with most people when it comes to storytelling, especially when they're telling stories about their own life, is that they become reporters of their life. They feel like if I tell you what happened to me,

then I'm telling you a story, but that is really not a story. That is just a report on the events of a person's life. You know, the worst version of that probably is the vacation story. So someone returns from vacation and you say, how did it go? And they spend the next 30 minutes reliving their vacation at your expense, you know, or you come home from work, you say to your partner, how was your day? And again, they start to relive their day. These are not stories. This is just a reporting of what has happened. The problem is that as we go through our lives, we tell stories. And the people we speak to most, the people who we tell stories to most are the people who love us. There are our families, our friends. And so they have infinite patience for us. So what happens is we become bad.

storytellers because we have people who are willing to put up with our terrible storytelling. So what we have to do is to start thinking about ourselves from an audience perspective. What would the audience actually want rather than this report on my day or this bad story? And it comes down to fundamentally understanding what is a story. So when we talk about that five second moment, what I'm really saying is that a story is always going to be about change. It is about either transformation. I used to be one kind of person like Alan Grant.

used to be one kind of person. He used to be a person who never wanted to have children. And then some stuff happens and then you become a different kind of person. Or it's about realization. I used to think one thing. Actually, Alan Grant, we could say Alan Grant used to think children were expensive, stupid, and dirty. But then some stuff happens and he discovers he realizes something new. That is essentially what a story is always going to be about. Every movie you've ever watched, or at least every movie worth watching is always a character is one thing. And some stuff happens, which is the movie, and at the end we end up in a new place. And I call these places five second moments because I do believe that fundamentally, almost all the changes that we talk about in stories

take place almost instantaneously. That's not to say a lot doesn't lead up to the moment of change, but there is a fundamental moment in your life where you thought one thing and the next second you decided you thought a new thing. It doesn't take place over 30 minutes. It really does happen and sort of, wow, I think a new thing. Or you suddenly look at yourself and you go, I'm a different person. Like, look at me. I actually am a better person or a worse person or, you know, a more enlightened person, whatever it is.

That's the stories that people want to hear. Those are the stories that do the things that you described, which is make people like you, believe in you, trust you, want to follow you. That's what a story is about, as opposed to just reporting on your life in a minute-by-minute account, which really is an awful thing to do to any human being in the world. Once we understand what a story is, that helps enormously because now we know what to look for when we're going to speak and when we're going to share things. And you've written about the requirements of a personal story.

And so I'm going to surface them. I'd love for you to expand. Is that cool? Sure. Yeah. So as you mentioned, change. Your story must reflect change over time. It can't simply be a series of remarkable events.

Stories that fail to reflect change over time. are known as anecdotes. Two, your story only, not that of others. And three, the dinner tests. Can you expand on those three components of a personal story? Sure. So we tell our own stories rather than someone else's story, because when you tell your own story,

it inherently contains vulnerability. It's not hard to tell the story of someone who's not in the room. You know, I could tell you the story of my grandmother, who's no longer with us, and I risk nothing. and telling you other than perhaps stumbling into a bad story, being a bad storyteller. But to gain someone's trust, attention, to connect with them deeply, you have to share of yourself. And as soon as you start sharing of yourself, whether it's something deeply profound or sort of light and

fluffy, if it is of you, it will inherently contain vulnerability and that authenticity, that truth that we're looking for. One interjection here. When I, and I want you to expand on this too, but when I, ask for feedback after giving keynote speeches. My speeches, especially at the beginning, I'm getting a little bit better now, but at the beginning,

there was this combination of other people's stories that I would tell in my own. And so the question I'd always ask is, what is the most memorable moment of my keynote speech? What's the most memorable moment? And if you have 200 people that respond to that, you've got a pretty good sense of what they remember. Yeah.

And over and over and over again, it was always the personal stories, always. Even if the stories that were telling were awesome ones about the Wright brothers or other things that were happened in history that are inspirational. But my stories with a combination of mess ups and failures along the way and some triumphs are always more memorable and more enjoyable, it seems, for the audience because there is vulnerability. It is personal as opposed to this person in history that accomplished something great that won through hardship. It's interesting to learn that. Well, you know, what happens is if you're telling a story about the Wright brothers, even though we know they existed, it really might as well be fiction when you're telling that story.

It's no different than telling the story of like Jack and Rose on the Titanic. You know, those characters didn't actually exist. But there's an equivalency. There's just these are people who I'm never going to meet, who will not be in this room, who I'm hearing a story about that, frankly, I could just read a story about later, maybe even a better story than the one you're telling about the Wright brothers, but you're the only one who can tell your story, the only one who can express that vulnerability and that authenticity through the telling of it.

Now, there are ways where you could tell a Wright Brothers story that could contain vulnerability, and I can teach you how to do that. There are ways to talk about other people in a way that also will talk about yourself. But in the end, the stories that people remember are the ones that are about ourselves, the ones that have that vulnerability. I'm going to take a risk by telling you something, and that means something to people. The third bullet point of that was the dinner test.

What's that mean? Oh, so that is the idea that whenever I'm speaking, whether I'm speaking to 2,000 people or two people, I should be speaking in a way that what I am saying on stage is similar to sort of a cousin to what I would be saying if you and I were having dinner. And what I'm really trying to express is there should be a level of authenticity, even informality when it comes to telling stories or performing on stage.

It's the difference between someone opening their story by just saying something interesting, moving a story forward versus someone opening with a sound, for example. People, you know, when I go to storytelling competitions, people love to start with, boom, the door opened. And I always think that's so weird. Like if you and I were having dinner and you said, how was the day Matt? And I said, well, let me tell you. Boom, the door opened. You would never have dinner with me again. That would just be an awkward thing. And yet for some reason, people do these awkward things on stage where they treat what they're doing as some sort of elevated infantile art when really what we want is connection. We want to feel like someone is being themselves. And you can't be yourself if you open with sound or, you you open with unattributed dialogue, which is the worst, I think. When someone starts their story with, Jack, it's time to come in for dinner, my mom yelled, right?

I think, are you writing a book or are you speaking to me, right? Again, at dinner, if you said, how was your day? And I said, well, let me tell you, this is what happened with my wife, Alicia. Matt, can you come in here and look at this laundry? My wife said, right? Again, you would never have dinner with me again. So the dinner test is the idea that we want to make our audience feel like, They're just listening to us in almost the same way they would if we were having dinner.

Obviously, they're not going to interrupt us. It's clear that we're more prepared than we would be for a conversation over sandwiches. But there has to be a level of reality to it in order for people to feel connected to us. In one of the ways, a big way that I think this could be life changing. I recently did this exercise with leadership circles that I run. And it was awesome just to see the response. But one of the initial questions is like, I'm just not a good story. retailer. I don't think I could do that. And first, that's false. And second, there is a way to

get better at this. And you've written about this. You've spoken on stage about this. And your TEDx talk is really good about this, this idea of homework for life. And I love for you to expand on what homework for life is as well as how it's impacted your life. Sure. I think it's the most important thing that I teach. Homework for Life is essentially the idea that we all have great stories to tell. When someone tells me they're a bad storyteller or that they have no stories to tell, I always let them know you're not as special as you think you are. Like everyone in the world has stories to tell. I have proven it thousands and thousands of times you are not a unicorn. You're just being lazy or frightened. And that's fine. We can get over laziness and frightened

people, but please don't think you're a unicorn. So for a homework for life, I'm an elementary school teacher. for 23 years. So homework is an instinct of mine. I naturally assign it. So I assigned this to myself about 10 years ago. I was telling stories on stages all over the world and I was starting to run out of stories. You know, my list of potential stories was running a little short and I was worried that I was going to become one of those storytellers who rolls out the same 12 chestnuts every night. I always want to have a brand new story whenever I'm competing. And so I decided to give myself this homework first, which is at the end of the day, I simply ask myself, what is, is the most storyworthy moment from this day that has taken place.

The framing that I create for myself is, my family has been kidnapped and they will not be returned to me until I tell you a story about something that happened over the course of this day, even if the day has nothing truly story worthy in it, nothing at least that I see immediately. I find the moment that I would use if I had to tell a story and then I write it down.

I don't write the whole story down because that's insanity. Those people are called journalers. They're very good. As soon as they get dumped, they take the journal out and they write thousands of words. But as soon as they find love again, the journal tends to go back in the drawer. I like to create simple, repeatable tasks in people's lives. I like to think of homework for life like brushing your teeth. It's actually going to take about as long as brushing your teeth does.

Hopefully you're not skipping that. So you're not going to skip homework for life. So what I use is a spreadsheet. I have a two-column spreadsheet. It's very simple. It's the date on one side in the A column. I stretched the B column. my computer screen and I allow myself to use that B column and I fill that column with what the

story was from the day. My goal was if I get one new story per month, 12 new stories per year, that would be amazing. Instead, what I discovered that I did not expect to discover is our lives are filled with stories constantly, that I don't have a special life. I don't have an extraordinary life. I just have a normal life like everybody else, but it's filled with stories. Because the truth is It's terrible, but we live our lives as if our memories are meaningless. We toss them aside like they have no value whatsoever. We just walk through our lives and people say meaningful things or we notice things, we realize things, and then we just discard it.

Like the worst thing you can do is take your age, whatever it is, and subtract 12. So for me, I'm 50, subtract 12 is 38. Now imagine that year of your life. You went around the sun, 365 days. How much can you tell me from that year of your life? You know, if you didn't have a kid or you didn't move, you didn't get fired, right? You probably don't have a lot to say, right? Now, if I gave you enough time, you could hunt, you'd go through your calendar, maybe you'd find some things to say.

But you went all the way around the sun. And for a lot of people, they have no recollection of that year of their life at all. That's how we live our lives. That's not actually a reflection of our lives, though. That's just simply our stupidity, our unwillingness to. to take a moment at the end of the day, reflect upon that day, hold on to it with something, some moment that was worth remembering and then finding a way to record it in a simple and easy way. So what I discovered over time is my days are filled with moments, that the one moment a day

has now become multiple moments a day that are often recorded. And my goal for 12 stories per month, I now have a list that is 732 items long, which is to say 732 story ideas that I have never even touched that are still waiting to be touched. I've become a person who used to be afraid of running out of stories, and now I will absolutely run out of time before I ever get to tell my stories. And this is not just me. This is thousands of people all over the world today. Without an exaggeration, today I've already received an email and a tweet from two different people who are doing homework for life. They got a couple hundred days in, both of them, and they're reporting to me the value.

of the process. And that happens to me, honestly, just about every single day I hear from at least one person who says, I've been doing homework for life and it's changed my life. So you're not a unicorn. You can do it too. You actually have to just treat it like brushing your teeth. You're going to do it every day until it finally kicks in and you start to see the same things that we see. How about the fact that everyone says, I've said this, God, it's going by so fast. Time goes so fast. man, before you know it, it's already, it's already half the years over, the years over already. It's amazing how fast it goes. And you have stated that homework for life slows the days down. How does it do that? Well, it doesn't allow a day to slip away. You know, my days really do move by one at a time.

I have two kids. And I am told constantly by parents of older children that you're not going to believe that suddenly they're going to be 18 and you're not going to know where the years went. I know exactly where the years went because I'm recording every single day. And much of my homework for life has moments with my children. Today I went sailing with my son for the very first time in his life. And he said three amazing things while sailing. All three statements will become lines in my homework for life plus a line about taking Charlie's sailing for the first time.

The truth is two years from now, if I don't actually take that time to record it and to sort of lock it into my brain and maybe tell a story about it someday, that moment will be lost to me. And I could ask Charlie and say, do you remember the first time we went sailing? And he won't remember. Now, he has an excuse. He's nine. I don't have an excuse to forget that moment.

And yet I will forget that moment if I don't do something about it. So time does go by slowly for me. And when parents say, I don't know where the days went, I say, I know where they went. You just threw away every memory like it was meaningless. All the parents that always say, you're not going to believe what my kids said. I got to write that down. how many parents actually follow through and write that down, almost none of them. So homework for life, even if you're not looking to tell stories and you should be looking to tell

stories, but even if you're not, the way that it can change your life by slowing things down and allowing you to see the things that right now, if you're lucky you see, but then you toss away like they're trash. Let's get practical. I love it. Let's get practical for a second, Matt. So I want to speak to the avatar who emails me a lot. And that is a person who is leading a team within a business, some sort of, let's say,

mid-level management job. Let's say they're the VP of sales at a company in charge of $500 million in revenue. I say this because this is me a few years ago. And they're saying, yeah, I have a town hall coming up. We have our national sales meeting coming up. And I got to write something new. I got to inspire the troops. Right.

You've heard this before. In fact, I think you mentioned me if you were talking to a person like this just before you and I connected here on Zoom. Yes. What are, so let's say a person's listening and they're just, they're, they've self-identified as being terrible at this. It's so bad in the fact that they don't even attempt to tell stories to their team. They just kind of share the facts and the numbers and say, here's what we got to do and they go forward. What's some of the general pieces are starting places for a person like that to become a much better storyteller? And why is it really important for them to even to even be better at this skill too?

Well, Kevin Smith, you know, the filmmaker, in his autobiography, he wrote that every time you're in front of human beings, whether it's two or 200 or 2000, your first role is to be entertaining. And I fundamentally believe that. It's the same rule I apply to my teaching when I teach 10 year old kids, my fifth graders. If you're not entertaining in front of a group of people, they are essentially not listening. And if they are listening, they're rapidly forgetting every single thing. thing that you say. We don't remember exposition. We don't remember expository writing very well because it doesn't engage us. So if you want to be a leader who is going to inspire, be remembered, and really

get people to believe in what you say so that they will do the things you need to do, you have to tell stories. I work with this guy, his name is Boris. He owns a company. And he started doing homework for life on my advice. You know, he began working with me. Same thing. He wanted to be able to tell stories at these, you know, Monday morning meetings with his factory workers. He wanted to connect with the people on the floor better. You know, he wanted to inspire his, all the people that work with him much better. So he starts doing homework for life. And then once per month, I meet with Boris and we go through his homework for life.

And we identify possible stories. At first, all I did was teach him how to tell personal stories. And it was great. He became very good at telling personal stories. And then, you know, after a few months, we talked about how we can take those personal stories and use them in business. So he tells the story about his son striking out in the baseball game to lose the championship and how devastated he is as a father to watch his son strike out.

And as his son like leaves the field, he looks at his son and he realizes, my son is not as devastated as I am. Like he's already moved past it. He's going to like receive, you know, congratulations of sorts from his teammates. You know, it's okay. It's fine. And he watches his son just sort of like put this failure behind him and move on and take on the next challenge.

And, you know, I help him realize you have a sales team. There are moments when your sales team does not get the big account that they were hoping to get, that they worked for months to get, right? How do they react when they fail to get that account? Do you then lose a week of productivity? Because now everyone's down. Everyone's feeling bad. You know, everyone's feeling awful about themselves.

Well, tell them the story of your son. Tell them how he struck out. He lost it for the team. He took three steps away from home plate and he had already put his eyes on the next thing, the next challenge. I said, can you see how that story will impact people? And it's going to be a lot better than just saying you need to put your failures aside. You need to look ahead at the next challenge. You've got to prop yourself up like the company needs you.

That's meaningless. That is said 10,000 times over the course of the year. But a story about a boy striking out in a baseball game told really well, told in an entertaining, vulnerable, connective way, that is going to move people. That is going to convince people to do the things that he wants them to do. I want you to fail quickly and then move on to the next thing, just like my son did. And he's done that so many times. And now some of the stories that he's told have become sort of part of the culture of his

company. So they will, instead of saying this needs to be one of these kinds of moments, they'll use his son's name instead. They'll say, like, this is a Thomas moment. Like we need to do the same thing that Thomas did. And you start to build that culture. So the value of homework for life, the value of just looking for stories in your life and then marrying those stories with the goals that you have in your business, whether it is to sell

something or market something or, you know, get funding for your company, whatever it is. That's the stories that convince people that you know what you're doing, that they can trust you, that they should follow you. How did you learn all this stuff? I do not know. Really? I really don't. I mean, I'm a novelist.

So I've been writing stories for a long time. I started writing when I was 17 years old. You learned it by doing it. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I was getting kicked out of my house when I was 18, graduate from high school, and then you're out on your own mat. And so at 17, I have this moment in an English class

where I suddenly realized that writing might save me, that writing might be able to help me change my future. And so when I'm 17, I start writing, and I have not missed a day. since I was 17 of writing. Like every single day of my life, I've written something. And so I started publishing novels

about 12 years ago. So that helped a lot. I also just was always a person who was willing to share his stupidity. I understood that when I told people about the stupid things I did, they laughed and they got closer to me. So if I was at a party and, you know,

a football player walked in and I was like, well, I can't compete with the football player, but I still want to go after that girl. I realized eventually, actually, it didn't take that long. If I stand next to that girl long enough and I say enough things to make her laugh, essentially to tell her stories,

that sometimes she would stop looking at the football player and she would look at me. You know, my wife was once asked, when did you first fall in love with Matt? My hope was, I took one look at him. How could I have not fallen in love? She said, no, it's never been that. She said it was a night at Chili's.

We went to dinner as friends. She used to be a teacher. She still is a teacher, but we used to teach together. We went to Chili's before a talent show to grab a meal. First time we ever ate together sort of outside of work. And she asked me questions. And if you ask me a question, I'll tell you a story. It's just how I operate.

And she said, that's when I fell in love with Matt. She said, we didn't start dating right away. But that was the moment I thought, wow, he is entertaining to listen to. He shares stuff that most people don't share. And he seems very interesting. So it was storytelling that got me the best spouse. And I think that is sort of how I learned it is I've just been a person who, you know, understood early on that if I tell good stories, people will like me.

And I sense from reading about your personal story is that there's a lot of pain in your background and your upbringing and food insecurity and your parents. Is that, do you think you've used some of that pain and you could share some of your upbringing if you like? and that and that has been kind of fuel for you? Yeah, I think so. I was in Brazil a few years ago. I was speaking to like a thousand kids.

I told them some stories about my life. So, you know, I get kicked out when I'm 18. I grow up in poverty anyway, so I'm poor all the way through my childhood. I get kicked out at 18. I'm moving with some guys. I manage McDonald's restaurants until I eventually get arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit,

which leads to homelessness, a horrific armed robbery. that leaves me with a lifetime, truthfully, of PTSD, and really a disastrous few years where I honestly didn't think I would ever live in a house again. And I used to struggle to eat every day. So all of that happens. I tell stories to these kids in Brazil. And then when I take questions, one of the kids says, why do you do this? He said, you write, you speak, you write a blog every day for the last, you know, 17 years. Why are you putting so much stuff into the world? No one had ever asked me this before, but this 15-year-old kid, insightful. And in front of them, I said,

I think I'm trying to get the attention of a mother who is now dead and a father who is not dead, but will not speak to me. And then I paused for a moment. The whole room went quiet and I said, I think I'm having one of those five-second moments. So let's all just sit here for a minute, will I decide if what I said was correct? And it was. Now, there's other reasons I am certain that I do the things that I do. But fundamentally, and I checked it with my wife because she knows me better than I know me, she said, of course you're trying to get the attention of your parents, Matt, because they never gave you any attention as a kid. So it turns out I'm a 50-year-old man who stands on stages all over the world telling stories about his life, still trying to get the attention of parents

who still do not pay any attention to me. Do you sense though? I think that I'm always trying to, and this may be like robotic, but I'm trying to extract the learning both for myself and for other during the course of these conversations. And I just became more connected to you in the last 30 seconds. The listeners are feeling the same way. And that's awesome. I'm really appreciative of you for sharing. From a leadership perspective, though, wouldn't you rather follow a person like that?

Wouldn't you rather follow a person who's willing to share that? Now, we don't all have that same story. We all have our own stories. And some of them are great. Like, I personally have two incredible parents, two incredible brothers, all still exist, are very much in my life, and are probably the primary reason for the good things that have happened to me. So it's not the same, but we all have things we can pull from. And I feel like you can, from a leadership perspective, you can create closeness with the people

you're leading or the people you're telling stories to by having this willingness and this guts to be open and authentic and real versus the people who you can tell are putting on more of a facade. and they're not real. And that's the learning I'm pulling from this moment right now. Yeah, it's easy to say nice things about yourself. It's easy to prop yourself up. People are not attracted to human beings who do easy things, right? We're attracted to people who do hard things.

We're attracted to people who are courageous. And the truth is, it takes an enormous amount of courage for most people. Honestly, it doesn't not take a lot of courage from me. For whatever reason, I've always just been an open book. But for most people to stand on a stage, to speak. speak openly to, you know, colleagues or to employees or even to your, to your loved ones, to be vulnerable requires courage. And it's a hard thing to do. And that is why people are drawn to it. I worked with the CEO of a big hospital years ago when she had to speak to about 3,000

of her employees. And the story that she settled on that we worked on together was the story about how the hospital botched her husband's knee surgery. The hospital that she is the CEO of botched her husband's knee surgery. And, you know, she was a little concerned about telling that story initially. But to her credit, she said, yeah, that's the story I'm going to tell. So she went up and she told a 15-minute story about how that knee surgery went very poorly and, like, became infected. It was a real serious situation. And that's as much vulnerability as you can expect from a CEO.

My business failed my husband, right? So two days later, I get an email from her and she said, I have never had. so many people stop me from my car to my office to either tell me how much they appreciated in my story or to tell me something about my hospital that I did not know before. It's that idea that when you share a story, what happens is you essentially open yourself up to everything. So I am the bearer of more secrets than you could ever begin to imagine. People tell me stuff. Strangers who I have never met before they even tell me my name, they tell me some of their deepest, darkest secrets of their lives.

And those are strangers. Can you imagine what would happen if you actually were willing to be a little vulnerable to colleagues, to employees, even to clients, customers, vendors? You know, if you allowed people in, what you can get in return is astounding. But it requires courage, requires hard things. Again, it's not easy to say nice things about yourself. Although in today's world, when I look out into the land of politics and business, I see a lot of people saying nice things about themselves.

And it is not inspiring in any way whatsoever. It is not hard. It is not courageous. It's frankly just stupid. And when I hear someone speaking highly of themselves, I often think how sad it is that they must do that, that there must be so little inside that they must, you know, there's so little of them inside,

so little confidence, so little good feeling about themselves, that they must say nice things in hopes that others will. also believe them. So I just believe in doing the hard thing at all times in life. With that said, it has to be real. I think some people could take this advice the wrong way and start manufacturing hardships that didn't exist. So I think I just want to point out that that has to be legit and real for it to to to, to, I think, connect with people. And as we said, I grew up playing sports, Matt. And I think my brother and I talk about like the best coaches and we're like, he's easy. He's he's, was the best because he was real. And nobody follows the coach that you could tell. It's like

he's not a screamer, but all of a sudden he feel like he has to scream. So he yells. You know what I mean? So I think at the core of everything, it's got to be authentic and real to you. Yeah. And the thing that people often mistake is that something extraordinary has to happen in order to have a good story. You know, I admittedly have stories about being homeless and in jail and on trial and all those things. But those are actually not the stories that I tell the most often. They're the hardest to tell. and they are also the least connective. Because if I tell you the story about the time I, when I was 17, I went through a windshield of a car,

died on the side of the road and had CPR performed on me to bring me back to life. All of that happened to me. People don't connect with me on a going through the windshield and dying on the side of the road level. That is a harder story to tell. Now, you can find a way again. I teach people to tell those stories

in really connective ways, but it's a much heavier lift. A better story, or actually a story I would much prefer to tell is sort of, there was a moment when my, daughter had a teacher who was not nice to her. But because I went to parent teacher conference that year and I saw this teacher's 30 minute presentation, I was so impressed by her presentation. I came home and told my daughter, I said, I love your teacher. She's so good based upon a 30 minute

presentation. It took my daughter three months to finally come to me and say, dad, this teacher is not nice to me. She was afraid to tell me because on day three of the school year, I was impressed by presentation and told my daughter, I loved her teacher. Right. And so my daughter suffered for three months because she didn't believe that she could come to me with this problem. Right. Now, that is not homelessness or a car accident or a robbery or jail. That is a small thing. That is a small, rotten thing that happened in my life. And that is a story that I can tell. And if you have a kid or you have ever been a kid, which is everyone, you understand that story. You understand that story. You understand in either the moment that you didn't go to your parents because you didn't think you could and you

remember that and you feel it and feel connected to me or even worse, you are a parent and you remember the moment that you let your child down. And that's the same kind of story that opens me up, allows me to be vulnerable, authentic, and brings people closer to me. So you don't have to have these extraordinary moments. I hope you don't. I don't hope that people are homeless or had guns to their heads or went through windshields. I don't want that for anyone. What I want is for them to find the little moments, the ones that are far more relatable, far more connective to other people and tell those stories instead, because those are the ones that I prefer to tell. The little ones are the better ones. They're easier and people just understand them better.

Let's talk about the makeup of an excellent story. Most notably, I'll just, I'll make it much more simplistic and you can expand and go deeper and take out some of the, the keywords, especially ones you write about like elephant backpack, breadcrumbs, hourglasses, the balls. I'm just going to say beginning, middle, and end. Most people don't think this through, so they're not good at it. Some are naturally gifted or they figured out or they've got a lot of reps. And so they don't know why they're a good storyteller. They just are like, we know those people. A lot of them are like really old though. And I say this lovingly, like a grandparent and like you love their, I remember my grandpa telling me a story from Pearl Harbor. And like where he was floating

out, I was like, you know, I could, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't get enough. But that's kind of rare. So how about for the normal person who hasn't lived 80 years of life that they want to go into their, whether it's their team or their family or at their next, the next holiday with their family and be a great storyteller? Can you focus on the beginning and the middle and the end of a great story? Yeah. You know, what you said, though, is really true. I, I wasn't quite sure why I was doing well in storytelling either until I started teaching it. And honestly, if I wasn't an elementary school teacher for 23 years now, I might have not been able to dissect the process either. You know, I created a curriculum, but I have been trained

to create curriculum. Not only have I been trained to create curriculum, but I've been trained to create curriculum that is small, easily dissectable pieces. So I treat storytelling like long division. You know, you teach long division to fifth graders. You understand how things have to be broken down into very small, repeatable parts that can be practiced over and over again. I treat storytelling the same way. I break it into small, repeatable parts that can be practiced many, many times. So you're right that a lot of people, a lot of the really great people in all fields aren't quite sure why they're great unless they become teachers of it. And you can't become a teacher of it unless you have that, that fundamental understanding. So all of that was very true. The first thing I want to just dispense with is

the idea that a story is a beginning, middle, and end. I hate that. Let's just take the middle out. Okay. Well, I often hear a story is being defined as something with a beginning and middle and end. And I think, well, my Snickers bar has a beginning and middle and end, but it's not a story. Like, you can't help but have a beginning, middle and end. If you have three words in your story, you inherently have a beginning, middle and end. So it's a bad definition. So I just, I like to throw it away and say that that doesn't help anyone to say it has a beginning, middle and end. But beginning and endings, I'm all about those because those are the most important parts of stories. That is your prime real estate. The beginning. is the promise that what I'm about to say is going to be worth your time. It's your opportunity to engage your audience to create sense of wonder, get them interesting what you're about to say. And the ending is the fulfillment of that promise, that like, look, I did it. I promised you at the beginning. I'd use your time wisely. And here we are at the end. And I did. So that is really important. And I think you're right that most of the time when someone tells a story, what they do is they say the first thing that they think of. And then

they say the next thing they think of. And that's why stories are bad. Storytellers are essentially just decision makers. We just think a little bit before we speak. You know, it's why I always encourage storytellers or anyone actually in the entire world. I say, please try to be the last person to speak in every room that you're in. Because that allows you to gain information so that when you actually do speak, you will be the most impactful speaker in the room because you will know everything that has been said already, and now you can sort of utilize that when making a decision about what to say. So wherever I am, I try to be the last person to speak whenever possible. So as storytellers, what we do is we just think a little ahead.

We just decide what we're going to say before we say it. And that is great news for people because that eliminates complaints about I don't have quite the facility of language. My vocabulary is limited. You know, I come from another country. English is my second language. None of that matters. There's a woman in New York named Danusia.

She is from Poland, and I think English is her third language. I have a much better handle of English, grammar, and vocabulary in the English language than she ever will, and she kicks my ass on the stage because she makes great decisions. Even if her nouns and verbs don't agree, she's still amazing. So it doesn't matter. You can throw away all of your concerns about I can't write. None of that matters. It's just decision-making.

So when it comes time to tell a story, the way we do this is we start always at the time. the end. You always start with that five second moment, that moment of realization or transformation. What happened to me that I now want to tell people, right? I had a moment where I realized my daughter suffered for three months with a teacher who was mean to her because of something I had said after a parent teacher conference. That's my moment of realization. That's what I'm aiming at. Once we know what we're aiming at, the decision making in our story becomes very simple. because now we know what has to be in the story and what doesn't have to be in the story. Now I know I have to get you to the moment when I was sitting on my daughter's bed and she said,

Daddy, I have something to tell you. And she looked so frightened that she was about to disappoint me. I need to get you there. So now I have to think, what do I need to tell you in order to get you there? To get you on the bed with me with all of the information that I had so that when you hear my daughter speak, you can almost feel the same thing I felt. So then I ask myself, where do I have to start? So beginnings and endings are in a conversation with each other. They are the opposites essentially of each other or an approximate opposite. So if at the end of my story, I come to the realization that

I've let my daughter down, that a teacher who has been mean to her has been mean to her for three months because of me, right? This teacher who was not nice to her. That's the end of my story. If that's the end, what's the beginning of my story? The beginning of my story is I think that teacher's extraordinary, right? And I think my daughter's really lucky to have her. In the beginning of the story, my daughter is so lucky to have Mrs. So-and-so. At the end of the story, I realize, oh, my God, this teacher has been mean to my daughter, and she has not said a word to me for three months, right?

If we just think that, now, I've written a whole book. There's 900,000 other things I could say about storytelling. but if you just take that beginning and end idea and make a decision before you speak, what am I trying to say? And then what is the opposite of what I'm trying to say, create that frame for a story, which no one really does in the world, unless they're sort of a professional storyteller. If you just do that, you're going to be enormously impactful with people when you're telling stories.

Because suddenly you'll have a point. You will start in a logical, excellent spot and end in a very satisfying spot. what most people do is they start with the first thing they think of. So if I was to tell you a story about something that happened on my vacation, maybe I actually had a moment worth sharing, the bad storyteller says, well, we went to the airport,

right? Even though the thing that happened was on day six of the trip, the mind says, well, I'll start at the beginning of the vacation, which is why we often find ourselves listening to storytellers and think, where is this going? We had a flight delay and it was terrible and we hated it.

My kids complained and you're like, that has nothing to do with anything, right? Right. The worst part is you're like, oh, this is a story about a bad flight. And then eventually they get off the flight and they're still going. You're like, what about the, why did you talk for four minutes about the flight? So if you just have an idea of the beginning and the end, you really are going to be starting out much better than most people. I use a thesis statement now. I tell people you have to have a thesis statement for every story that you tell. And the thesis statement basically says, I used to be a person who thought my daughter's teacher was fantastic and she was lucky to have her. And then some stuff happened. And I realized the teacher was not fantastic. She was not lucky to have her. Worst of all, she waited three months to tell me. Right. And if you can do that, now you have the perfect confines for a story.

You're not going to sort of go off track. You're not going to start saying things that don't belong. You're going to have a path to a good story. And that's really better than what most people are doing today. So let's say you've been out for seven days. You want a family vacation to a great beach. And you come back and you're the leader of your team. first thing obviously that said to you is, so how was the vacation? And let's put you now as the

manager, Matt. What do you do? What do you say? Well, I just went to Martha's Vineyard for three days. I just got back yesterday. So I get back and they say, how was Martha's Vineyard? Because I'm doing homework for life, I already have a moment to share. You know, I already have gone through my vacation. If I don't have a moment to share, I say, it was great. Nothing really happened. How was your weekend? I flip it immediately because I'm a good listener. Listening is extremely important. But if I have a moment to tell, a moment from that vacation, I'm going to isolate that moment only and nothing else. I'm not going to talk about taking the ferry over to the vineyard. I'm not going to talk about taking the taxi to the hotel. I'm not going to do any of that

nonsense. The story I probably tell is I'm sitting at a fire on the first night. We have a bottle of champagne because the hotel staff found out that it was our anniversary, so they gave us a bottle. I don't really ever drink. But on this night, I've decided to drink half the bottle of the champagne. It's the first drinking I've probably done in two years. I just decided I'm going to drink with my wife. I often don't. I'll let her enjoy half the bottle with me. And we're having a beautiful moment when my wife turns to me and she says,

you know, the last two years, all the work you do in storytelling with all these corporations, you've changed our lives. It's the nicest thing someone could ever say to me. And as I turned to her to say something back, thinking what's the perfect thing to say back to her? this man sits in the chair next to us. He's drunk and he is aggressive and he has completely spoiled the moment. He's stolen my chance to say something beautiful back to my wife. But worst of all, he just begins speaking to us about his sons and how they're in the regatta.

And instantly, I know I hate him because he has sons in a regatta and he's complaining about how difficult it is to follow his sons on their sailboat as they, as they, as they, tool around Cape Codden and tuck it. Right. So I would do something like that. I would tell the story about how I had a beautiful moment with my wife spoiled by an idiot who sat there for the next hour and talked about himself. And I quietly just drank my champagne. And what was once a celebratory drink became sort of like a, I'm going to just drink my sorrows away with this champagne and silence this man through a bit of inebriation.

So I'd do something like that. So I want to focus on the opening. And there's a couple themes I've pulled from your work that I want to surface and then we're going to follow up on. And one of them is a mistake. I've definitely made. And I have a few friends I'm thinking of that that's still regularly made this mistake, but I definitely do too. And that is by setting expectations, quote, this is hilarious or you need to hear this or you're not going to believe this. right so let's let's just let's let's let's go on that first and I'll hit the second point in a second

how why should we not set expectations to begin a story and for my friends who do this to me I hope are listening right now because I know I do it too so there's two reasons why you should not do it the first is as soon as you set out expectations you will never achieve them if you say something's hilarious the bar for hilarity is an exceptionally high bar that you will never achieve I'm sorry it's just not going to happen that you're not going to believe this well we are going to believe it unless you're going to tell us you've been beamed up by aliens, ultimately we will believe it. So those are bars that are unachievable.

They also spoil the surprise. The best way to ruin a joke is to tell me I'm supposed to laugh, because now I'm primed for the joke, which is a terrible thing to do. But I think the worst part of all of it is if you hear someone say, you're not going to believe this or this is so funny, it's a sign that you're not quite confident in what you're about to say. You're either not confident in the content.

you're afraid it's not that funny, but if I say it's funny, maybe they'll think it's funny, or even worse, I think what happens a lot in this life is that it's hard to hold people's attention. And because we feel that no one really wants to listen to us, if we say something, like, you're not going to believe this, we hope that now they're going to pay attention to us for the next four minutes, rather than working on telling a better story, the kind of story that will gain that four minutes of attention through actual craft, through, you know, the skill of telling good story, we try to supplement that with these statements that are ultimately

meaningless and probably demonstrate more weakness than strength in the content we're about to present. And I love it. I know that's harsh. No, it's true. I've done it. And like I said, I have friends who do it. I think the point you hit on is really accurate is like you're, you're, you're unsure or

uncertain that it's actually that good. And I think, as you said, you haven't really been thoughtful about it if you say things like that. The other point is, and this is a great movies are good about this. And I think stories can be too. And I tried to model this at the beginning. But try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible. What does that mean for a storyteller? When you start telling a story, people want to feel like the story has actually started. And most people don't start their stories. They often provide information that will be required possibly for the the understanding of the story. But that's not how movies work, right? If you've seen Apollo 13,

you know, the Tom Hanks film, in order to understand what happens to those astronauts and what happens in that movie, you have to understand how 1960 space travel works. But the movie does not begin with Tom Hanks saying, before the movie begins, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to give you a quick five-minute lecture on 1960 space travel so that the movie you're about to see will make sense to you, right? That's not how the movie works. Instead, we just launched the movie, and we teach people the stuff they need to know as the story moves along. But most people don't tell stories that way. They say things like, let me tell you a little bit about my mother, right, which is a sentence that has never, has never like required a second sentence because no one wants to hear anything about

your mother. You haven't launched your story yet. The idea is we want to sweep people into our stories. We want them to feel like it's already going and they're almost trying to catch up. And so we start with forward movement and location. And it's one of the easiest things you can do to become a better storyteller is to just train yourself to always have forward movement in a location. Now, forward movement can be just a verb. The story I started with, the story that I just told you about the fire, I'm sitting at a fire, right, at nighttime. Sitting is not really forward movement, but it's what I was doing and it's a verb. So I'm going to take it. Now, ideally, if I was crafting the story, I might start with pouring. I would say, I'm pouring champagne into my wife's

flute, you know, the glass as a fire roars in front of us. Maybe something like that might be better. But if you just train yourself to do location and forward movement, you're instantly going to activate imagination with the location, because that's what locations do. They instantly activate imagination. And the forward movement, the verb, will say just use a verb of any kind, that's going to make the audience feel like the story has already begun, that they're in the story already rather than getting that preamble to a story, which so many stories have. We eliminate the preambles and we launched the story with action. Okay.

How about opening, you got a few more minutes? Yeah, I got all the time you want. Okay. Opening a keynote. Now, I've worked with coaches. I've tried to get way better at this. I've transitioned from telling a brief bio when someone gave me a terrible intro and I felt like, oh, no, they gave me a horrible intro.

I got to reintroduce myself, which is an awful opening. For someone who's a professional keynote speaker, and I, Actually, let me scratch that. For someone who gets up and speaks in front of people, what are some great ideas for opening your talk on a stage in front of a group? Whether you're a keynote speaker or you're at your town hall or even your team meeting, what are some great ways to start to open a speech? When I'm asked to speak, like next week, actually, I'm going to be giving another TEDx talk. What I always try to do is I open with a story. I open with a story in the same way I might open a storytelling competition at the moth or a place like that.

So I'm going to step out onto that orange circle and I'm going to begin with location and action. I'm going to say something to the effect of I'm standing in this place, doing this thing, and I'll tell a story. The story that I'm going to tell is going to be attached to the idea that I want to share. Or in the case of an inspirational speaker, I do that as well. the story I'm going to share is attached to the inspirational message that I'm about to share. I start with a story always for a couple of reasons. The first is it's entertaining. You tell a story you're going to entertain an audience.

They're automatically going to like you a lot more. Also, when you tell a story about yourself, you're going to automatically be vulnerable, which means you're going to open your heart and mind to them, and they are going to open their heart and mind and be better prepared to hear your idea, hear your message, hear the thing that you want them to believe. Also, by using a story and connecting that to the idea, I am going to be memorable, 100% more memorable than anyone who does not speak with a story, who does not really open with a story. If you're dropping little stories into your talk, that's perfectly fine. It's delightful.

You know, most of those stories tend to be somewhere between 20 seconds to 40 seconds long. But those aren't the ones that stay in people's hearts. If you open your talk with a, let's say, a two to five-minute story. entertaining, connective, vulnerable, authentic. At that point, you have them in the palm of your hands. If you've done a good job telling a story, they are now prepared to hear anything you have to say. And when you do that magical thing,

which is the story I just told you, has everything to do with the idea I'm about to share with you. When they can see those two things suddenly come together as one, that is the best way that you can speak to an audience. The way you do that is you do homework for life, and you end up with a list of 700 potential stories, right? So years ago, I was asked to close a conference on human trafficking. They said, can you be our closing speaker?

And I said, yes. And then a couple of days before the speech, the woman called and said, have you done some research on human trafficking? And I said, no, I have done no research on human trafficking. And she said, well, you have to speak in two days. And I said, well, I'm not going to talk about human trafficking. They just went through three days of human trafficking. I'm going to close with something different, but also. it will work. And she was upset, but what are you going to do? So I show up and I tell a story.

I tell a story about being a teacher and working with children and helping a shy child come out of her shell. And as that child comes out of her shell in this sort of miraculous, entertaining and hilarious way, I suddenly realize that I have let an enormous number of shy kids go through my classroom without opening their shell. The realization that I just did a magical thing for a kid. But before that kid, I let all these other kids down. I let all these kids pass through my classroom without ever opening their mouth. And I figured it's their fault when it was really mine. And then I explained to the human trafficking conference that when we deal with people, like I deal with people as children and you deal with people in human trafficking, we have to act

at all times. That we cannot allow people to say the boat is big and it's slow to turn. When we're dealing with people like those shy kids, if I fail to act, I have let people down. I have hurt children. And if you fail to act in the realm of human trafficking, it's even more devastating. So I just connected those two ideas. I sent a message of you must take action now, that you cannot wait, that you cannot allow people to tell you that budgets or time or bureaucracy is going to stop you from saving human lives. Right. And they loved it.

And she said, I don't know how you managed to tell a story about a little girl. and it happened to be about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You told a story about Monty Python and the Holy Grail and as you're telling it, I'm thinking, what is this guy doing? He's ruining our conference. Why is everyone laughing? And then you suddenly made us cry

by talking about the importance of prioritizing human beings over anything else. That's the best kind of speech, which is the story, married with the message in that amazing way that the audience never sees it coming. So that's what I would recommend for all speakers is start by talking about yourself. The best storytellers in the world tend to be a little self-centered, but in a really positive way.

Because so often in life, we are trained to worry about everyone but ourselves. We worry about our kids, our spouses, our colleagues, our business, our community. We don't take time to think about ourselves. We don't actually spend five minutes saying, who am I? How did I land here? Why did that make me cry? Why did that make me laugh? Why is that bothering me?

We just move past it. My go-to, how can I make someone cry in one of my workshops is I say, I give you permission from this point for the rest of your life to spend 15 minutes every day in a quiet space thinking about yourself and not thinking about other people because you deserve to have time spent with yourself. And people cry. They cry because they realize, I have just spent the last 23 years worried about my partner and my children and my business and my mother. And he's right, I don't even know myself. So when you can tell a story about yourself, when you can really be honest and authentic and vulnerable and then connect it with an idea, I think that's the best, best way to go. Is that how you close?

Like what's what about the closer? It's a good point. So the close for me, it's typically one of two things. I tell a story and I stop the story if it has a natural stopping spot before I get to the end. So story stops. Like a cliffhanger? Yeah, sort of like a cliffhanger. Not a real cliffhanger because that annoys the hell out of people.

sort of like a, you know, a natural stopping spot that feels okay. And then I share the idea and then I close the story. More often, I tell a story. I share the idea and then I close with a much smaller story. Also, though, a story that reinforces the idea that I just taught in a different context. But I began and end in story because that is what people remember. People remember story. They'll remember that story about the Monty Python and the little girl came out of a shell.

And they'll remember the little story at the end. and they'll remember the idea because of it. The idea won't fall away. The idea will be there as well, but now they have a movie in their head that represents the idea I was trying to share. And that's, I think, how we're most effective. Wow.

Matt, we might have to do a round two. I have one more question before we run today, though. You had a little break in your book storyworthy about what to say during a commencement speech. And so you can pick any, I think it's 13 things you name, but you can pick anything or none of those. I'm curious for the person who is a recent college graduate earlier in their career. They want to leave a dent in the world.

They want to leave a positive impact in the world. They want to help people. They want to feel fulfilled and significant and do great work for people. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? To a person who's graduating at this point? Yeah, recent college grad. Yep. I would say that I think the most important thing in life is to view the graduation from

college as the end of your assessed learning. But it is the beginning of all the learning you will do that is no longer going to be assessed by another human being. I hate the thought that I've graduated from college and now I have to go to work. I like the idea. I've always lived by the idea of I've graduated from college. What's the next thing I have to study now? I'm not going to be guided. I'm not going to be tested on it, but what is the thing that I'm going to study next? So I would in college, you know, if I was doing commencement speech tomorrow, I think the message I might say is, what's your next area of study? You know, so for me, example, I invest. You know, I invest in the stock market. I know an enormous amount about finance and economics and the way money works.

I learned none of it in college. It became something that I studied after college. And it's been one of the most valuable assets in my life. It helps me in my business, when a dealing with corporations. It's made me money. It's helped grow my children's college accounts. All of these amazing things have happened through 10 years of study before I ever invested a dollar in the stock market. So that was my next area of study. So I think that college graduates, high school graduates, they should identify their next area of study that will not be monitored by another human being, but will be monitored by themselves and that they should decide like end points and what they want to learn and goals.

And they should reassess those things all along the way. Thank you so much, Matt. Man, I really appreciate investing your time today. I definitely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress. As I again, I'll mention the book story. And you have multiple books. Storyworthy is the one that was referred to me by multiple people. I had high expectations and you surpassed them,

not trying to mess this up for other people. recommend reading that book if you want further on that. Anywhere else you'd send people to go? My wife and I produce a storytelling podcast called Speak Up Storytelling. And so we produce shows throughout New England, live storytelling shows. And what we do is we take a story from that show and we deconstructed each week. We've actually been on a hiatus for about three months, but there's 110 episodes that you can go catch up on. But essentially we take a story, we talk about what's working well, what's not working well. And then I do a homework for life segment every week where I show you one of the things that happen in my week, how it might

become a story. So that's very helpful for people. They've described that as sort of like coursework. You can go and learn about storytelling one podcast episode at a time. Love it. And the to do leaving this episode is certainly homework for life. It can be done in the same amount of time as brushing your teeth in whatever fashion. I like to use my phone personally because it's with me a lot. Bullet points real quick. Makes it so much easier. But your homework for life has definitely changed my life. So I really just want to acknowledge that and say, thank you, man.

And I love getting to know you today. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. I'll come back anytime. Matthew Dix, as you can probably tell us, had a profound impact on my life. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I did, having it. A few of my key takeaways. And this is the one that I think has impacted me the most. The homework for life exercise. Take five minutes at the end of each day and answer the question, if I had to tell a story from today,

what would I say? And write that down or type it out. Whatever is easiest for you, I tend to put it on my phone in a Google Doc using bullet points. That's how I'm able to do it and make it a consistent practice. And then the requirements of a personal story,

one, it must reflect change over time. Two, it must be yours, not somebody else's. it needs to pass the dinner test. Be a human being. Talk like you would with your friends. That's how compelling stories are told. And then another part of my notes, people are not attracted to people who do easy things. They are attracted to people who do hard things. It's hard to be vulnerable. That takes courage, and that's why we are drawn to it. If you're in a leadership position, your team will be more drawn to you and want to be more committed. We want to be more committed. committed to you if you become an effective to storyteller, if you are more vulnerable, if you show courage to do that, if you work on this, this is a skill that can be developed. And that's why I think this conversation is so important. And once again, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I want to say thank you so, so much for continuing to spread the message and telling one person at a time, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with me.

Matthew Dix. It will make you a much better storyteller, which will then in turn make you a much more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, and because you write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you are continuing to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk of the soon. Can we? Thank you.