The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 501: Paul Smith - How To Tell Stories That Inspire Change and Produce Results

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. Join 10''s of thousands of other Learning Leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Paul Smith is one of the world's leading experts on organizational storytelling. He's the author of multiple best-selling books including Lead with a Story (which is now in its 11th printing, and published in 7 languages around the world), Sell with a Story, and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell. Notes: "Decide what values you want your organization to have. Then find and capture stories that illustrate them. Remember, if you don't have strong company value stories, you probably don't have strong company values." Fill your story with surprises to pique your audience's interest and memory. Often the best way to spread a company's values and culture are through stories. Use stories to forge strong relationships between diverse team members. Stories can be used to inspire employees, even when times are tough. – You could spout nonsensical motivational phrases about "giving it 110 percent" – or you could tell an inspiring story. A successful story is comprised of only three ingredients — you need context, action, and the result (CAR). As NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, "The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor." Your job is to help the other person make a decision. To do that, they need to rely on both logic AND emotion. "Your first objective in a sales call should be to get buyers to tell you their stories, not the other way around." The James Watt story – Keep 1 or 2 small vital pieces of the story and save them for the end. The aha moment. The surprise makes it more memorable for your audience. Asking better questions… Instead of saying, "What keeps you up at night?" Ask… "Tell me about a moment…" You can also use this when walking home from the bus stop with your children. Instead of saying, "How was school today?" Ask, "Tell me about your day at school…" "We generally don't tell our personal stories at work because we work with strangers. They remain strangers because we don't tell our personal stories. You have to break the cycle." "Sometimes getting your employees to be more creative isn't the problem. The problem is getting their less-than-imaginative boss to give them the space to invent. Innovation isn't a linear process. Inventors need the freedom to play with ideas to see what fruit they will bear. A well-meaning boss might think he's doing his job by keeping his team focused on the most productive areas to explore. But when you insist on knowing what the fruit will be before allowing the play, many of the most revolutionary discoveries might stay undiscovered." "Many of life's failures are people who didn't realize how close they were to success when they gave up." The most effective stories play on people's emotions. – We can take an example from Texas, which in the 1980s was ridden with so-called "litterbugs." The government tried its best to combat littering by appealing to emotions, and publishing advertisements that showcased a person weeping at the sight of environmental destruction due to litter. While touching, these ads had no effect. The worst litterers were people with little concern for the environment. So, the government changed directions, What did they do? (Don't mess with Texas) Literally. The slogan was developed by the Texas Department of Transportation for an anti-littering campaign. "It's not just a prideful remark, trying to pick a fight," says Jeff Austin III, commissioner of the Texas Transportation Commission. "It's don't litter in Texas, don't mess up Texas." There are three types of learners: 40 percent of us are visual learners, 40 percent are auditory learners and the remaining 20 percent are kinetic learners. Stories attract all three – a story's imagery influences visual learners, the vocabulary appeals to auditory learners, and the emotions and feelings connect with kinetic learners.

Hey, it's Ryan. I have a quick ask of you prior to this episode. If you have received value from this podcast, the Learning Leader Show, over the past seven and a half years, I would be very grateful if you would write a review and rate the show in Apple Podcast. And I set up an easy link to do it. It's Ryanhawk.net. It's my, name, Ryanhawk.net. It will shoot you straight to Apple Podcasts where I'd love it if you would spend invest a minute or two and write a thoughtful review and rate the show hopefully five stars. This really helps spread the message to people who have not yet heard it. And as you know, it is a goal of mine to impact as many people as possible. So Ryanhawk.net write a thoughtful review and rate the show hopefully five stars. All right, here we go. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global.

I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 66866 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 for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence,

will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Paul Smith is one of the world's leading experts on organizational storytelling. He's the author of multiple best-selling books, including Lead with a Story, which is now in its 11th printing and published in seven languages around the world.

Sell with a story and the 10 stories great leaders tell. Sensing a theme with this one. During this conversation, we discuss how to effectively engage your audience's emotions when telling a story. And then a better set of questions to ask others to learn more about them faster. and then how to bring your company values and culture to life instead of just words on your wall. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good. It's Paul Smith. All right, Paul.

It's great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thanks, Ryan. It's good to be here. I'm happy to have this conversation. And I love talking with a fellow current Ohioan, so it's good to see you. You're just down the road in Cincinnati. I'm up in Dayton.

So we could have potentially done this one in person. But to start, I want to get into immediately with a key idea from your book, Lead with a Story. This is actually key idea number eight in that book, which I think all leaders should read. And it says, the most effective stories play on people's emotion. And I want to take us back to the 1980s. And there is a real issue in the state of Texas with what they call litter bugs, meaning people were constantly littering all over the place in the state of Texas. And they tried a lot of different things and couldn't get people to stop.

So the government eventually then changed directions. And this is something that you talk about. Can you share what came out of this problem and why now it's been a roaring success? Yeah, well, they, as you said, they were having problems in Texas with people littering mostly the highways. and they tried all kinds of things to get people to stop, and none of them were successful. And finally, they did some research to find out, you know, why don't people in Texas care about litter?

And what they found, I'm not sure they found an answer to why they didn't care about littering, but what they did find was what they did care about. And it turned out what people in Texas really care about is Texas. And so they changed their ad campaign for, being focused on, hey, stop littering because littering's bad, to don't mess with Texas. And that was literally the ad slogan that came out was don't mess with Texas. And littering, by the way, is messing with Texas. So, you know, I think as you said before, we were going on air, you know, most people think of

those don't mess with Texas as this thing that, you know, big tough guy Texans would say. And they do, by the way. They certainly do now. now that that has become the catchphrase, you know, from 50 years ago from Texas. And it worked phenomenally well. Now, they did other smart things too. They had Houston Astros baseball players and they had Willie Nelson and other people, you know, on these campaign ads. But the main idea was they attached their problem to something that Texans did care about because it turns out Texans didn't care about their problem.

And it's simply associating their idea with the thing that Texans did care about. about, which was Texas, is the thing that worked. How I love the story. It was an aha moment for me because I, like I said, I heard about this. Obviously, we've all heard, don't mess with Texas. I didn't know that it stemmed out of littering. And it's brilliant. It really is.

When you think about this playing on people's emotions and understanding what they care about, how do you relate this key idea to someone, let's say in the corporate world, a VP of sales at a Fortune 500 company, for example, of, okay, I need to get my team inspired to achieve this really big stretch goal, which is super normal in that world. What do you share with that person to play on emotions to inspire their team? Yeah, so I think the first thing I would say is I would probably change the way you just articulated that. And I don't know, maybe I wrote it that way in the book. And if I was to write it again today, I wouldn't write it that way. I wouldn't say play on people's emotions because I think that sounds manipulative.

And I have a whole chapter in Cell with a story about how to avoid emotional manipulation because I think that's a bad human tactic or an unfair human. It's probably effective, but it's an unfair human tactic. I think I would say engage people emotionally. You need to engage people emotionally because people use emotion to make decisions. You know, I think I mentioned in one of those books, you know, we have a word for people who, don't use emotions properly when they make decisions. Do you know what that word is? A sociopath?

Exactly. So a human being, it's a legitimate need that people have to have something emotional to engage with when they're making decisions. And so to answer your question more directly, for that VP who's trying to engage their organization in some new sales program or whatever you said, I think the lesson from this story is, if they don't care about your idea, figure out what they do care about. And maybe even more particularly, if you're making a big change in the company, surely it's good for somebody. Otherwise, you wouldn't be going through the change, right? Find out who it's good for.

Is it good for the shareholders? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the community? Is it good for the employees? Is it good for a certain subset of employees? Is it good for your customer? Is it good for the end consumer? Why are you making this change?

There's some set of human beings who benefit from this change. Figure out who that is and then tell their story because human beings care about other human beings. And so they need to see how this change is going to positively affect somebody and then they'll care about helping you achieve it. I reference one of my favorite bosses. His name's Brian Miller. And I haven't worked. He was actually the boss of my boss. So I didn't even work directly for him, but he would lead our quarterly town hall meetings.

And every one of those, he would open with a really engaging story about a person and what happened in their life. And then he would always tie it to how it impacted us, to how we could kind of be the hero of that story and then go on and inspire us to achieve, again, this big goal. It was a real skill. And I still remember a number of those. stories and I don't remember any graphs or any numbers or any of the statistics but I do remember those and he's top of mind because I just celebrated a birthday recently and Brian called me out of the blue which is which was awesome you know and I'm I love to ask ask you Paul since you know written the books on these things for that person who is in that role who gives quarterly town hall updates

that instead of just you know clicking the clicker and showing the chart of okay we've increased 13% this quarter. Great job team. Which people are like, okay, cool, whatever. How can they engage and open with stories to relate them more to their teams as opposed to just showing the boring graphs behind them on the PowerPoint? Yeah. So, well, I think what your boss, Brian did there, is fabulous. And that's certainly a way to do it. Um, is to tell stories about, you know, how this is good for them, the people in the room. There is a better way, though. And I, I wish I remember exactly who did this research. It might have been Adam Grant at Horton, but they basically took a bunch of salespeople, and this was actually an outbound fundraising organization. And for 10 or 15

minutes before every shift, they brought a third of them into a room, and they told them stories about exactly what Brian was telling his people, stories about how what you're doing today is going to help you, because you're going to earn a lot of money today, and it's going to help you build money so you can go to college because these are mostly 18 19 year old kids and you know or it's going to help you get buy your first house or whatever and then another third of them they told them stories about how what you're doing today is helping somebody else not you we're not going to talk about how this is good for you at all but we're raising money for whatever it is you know uh you know special olympics or whatever you know so they would tell stories about the people whose lives were

benefited based on the money that they were raising for these charities today. And then the third group, they brought them into the break room and they did nothing. They just said, take a break and we'll start working 10 minutes. So that was the control group. And what they found out, of course, the control group had no change in their productivity and making sales before and after this test. The group that was told stories like Brian was telling people about how this is really good for you and it's going to help you, their sales went up like 10%.

But the group that they were telling stories about how what you're doing today is good for these other people went up like 30%. So storytelling helps for sure. Stories about how this benefits you definitely helps. But it turns out stories about how what you're doing helps other people is even more impactful to people's performance because it turns out, as cynical as we often are, it turns out, on average, human beings care more about doing good for others than they do about doing good for themselves. And so those are more often the stories you want to tell. I heard a story about that where in an interview process where somebody was trying to convince another leader to leave their company. And he told me the story that instead of saying like our company pays this and the 401k and the benefits, they said, here's actually what our product does.

And that particular product helped a mom who had given up their kid for adoption get reconnected. It was like a public records type thing that was much more in depth and it was hard to do. And he told the story about this mom and her quest to find her child and the fact that she eventually did and how they reconnected and they have a relationship to this day. And he goes, if you come here, you will help more people do that. That's why I think you should come here. And the guy was like, oh my goodness. So yes, the money and all that's important. But that way of selling somebody, he said it had never been done before to me.

And how could I not do it? I was so convinced. And so it's just so powerful to think, I want people to kind of rewire how they sell or how they lead to engage emotion. And as you said now, that that science really just made me think of that story of how what you're doing could potentially help somebody else. Right. Yeah. In fact, I think it was Steve Jobs when he was trying to essentially recruit his replacement from, I think it was Coke or Pepsi. one of the two. And he said, look, do you want to keep selling sugar water to kids or do you

want to come with me and change the world? That was a short story and that it worked. I mean, people want to be part of a bigger story. Key idea number nine in leave with the story is fill your story with surprises to peak your audience interest and memory. This makes me think of Neil Ford, who I had on recently, where at the end of all he tells like two to three minute stories on TikTok and they're absolutely awesome. I highly recommend you check them out. At the end of all of them, there is usually a surprise or an aha or a twist. You know it's coming and you just wait. You're waiting for it and you're on the edge of your seat.

How does somebody develop this skill? Because I think most of it mess it up almost all the time. Yeah. So there's some really easy techniques to do it. First, let me just explain why it's important. It definitely makes your stories more interesting as you've found out from this guy on TikTok. but there's a real practical reason to put these surprises in your story. Because it literally makes your story more memorable.

I mean, when somebody gets surprised, there's a little bit of adrenaline that's released in their system, naturally. And adrenaline is shown scientifically to make the memory consolidation process, the process by which we remember things, faster and more efficient. So you're literally triggering a physiological change in your audience that will make them remember your story better. So there's a very practical reason to do this. It's not just because it makes it more entertaining. Anyway, one technique,

in fact, I'll just, I'll demonstrate it for you here real quick, and then I can explain how it worked, right? And you probably, if you read several the story, you saw this one. So there's a young boy named James, right, nine-year-old kid. He's in the kitchen with his mom and his mom's sister. Well, while mom and auntie are sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of tea, James is standing over at the stove watching the tea kettle boil

and he's just fascinated with it he's watching this jet of steam come out of the tea kettle and he's got a spoon he holds it up there into the jet of steam and watches his little drops of water condense and trickle down into a cup

he's got sitting there so he didn't make a mess in his mom's kitchen anyway just watching the cycle go over and over and over again just fascinated with it well eventually his mother gets frustrated with him and she kind of barks at him she's like James go do your homework ride your bike

read a book go out of side and play. I mean, aren't you ashamed to yourself, just wasting your time, staring at the tea kettle boil? And as you know from reading the story, you know, 20 years later, you know, young James Watt grows up to invent the steam engine, ushering in the industrial revolution that we all benefit from today. And all based on that fascination with steam that he developed at the age of nine in his mother's kitchen. Now, you know, the first time I read that story was in a book titled James Watt. You know, it was a biography of

the inventor of the steam engine. So of course, it was no surprise to me that the, the story in chapter one about James, you know, the little nine-year-old boy was about James Watt who would grow up to invent the steam engine. But to most of your audience listening, unless they happen to be a history buff,

that was probably a surprise to them at the end. Oh, that was James Watt? And ask yourself why. Here's the technique. Why was that a surprise at the end? And the answer is very simple. Because that didn't tell you his last name. Now, also I didn't tell you the year.

So really the technique was you take one or two small, but vital pieces of information that belong at the beginning of the story and you don't give it to your audience until the end of the story. Presto, surprise ending. So, you know, as you know in that book,

I take people through here, the questions that you need to answer in a particular order to tell a story, right? And question number two is, you know, where and when did it take place? Well, I told you where, mom's kitchen. But I didn't tell you when.

So I only partially answer that question. Question number three is who's the main character? Well, I told you James, but I didn't tell you James what. So again, I partially answer the question enough to satisfy most audience members, but then I finished answering the question at the end. Now, if I didn't answer the questions at all, if I didn't tell you where or when, didn't tell you who the main character was, that just ruins. People just, they don't like those stories.

You're frustrating me. You're just telling it in the wrong order. I don't even know who you're talking about. But if you give them enough to satisfy them that that question's been answered, but really finish it later, you just create a surprised ending. And you can do that with almost any story. Absolutely. This is something that I think to get good at it,

practice it when talking with your partner, for example. Because you tell your partner stories every day, probably, like the story of the day or it sounds weird. I tried to do this because I've read it in your books and heard it from other storytellers of what are a few key pieces of information that you can hold to the end to where you look at their face. And this is somebody who hears you talk every day. so they can get annoyed or tired of it, where you could still kind of, ah, ha, you know.

And I think that's a great way to rep this, to practice this, because the people who are best at it, like most things in life, they're doing it regularly. It takes practice. It takes intentional thought before you just ramble off the story. And I think that's important for leaders to think about. So there's another one that I really like when it comes to your company's values and culture. And I work with a couple guys, Bert Bean and Sam Kaufman at Insight Global. They are so good at this when talking about the story of how their initial shared values were created in the people

that were in the room and the space they were. They flew out to Utah, this offsite. There happened to be a legendary leader who unfortunately had cancer, who was near the end of his life. That was there. And just the way they told these stories blew me away. And that's why those shared values are so brought to life because they're not just words on a page. They're, their stories and about the moment they were created and why they were there and the people that were involved and all of that. Can you share more about why these company values and the culture need to be told and retold through stories instead of just hanging them up on your wall? Yeah. So, well, first of all, I mean, these culture and values certainly start with the behavior

of the founders and the leaders in the company. But typically only a few people actually see those things happen. They happen during a meeting and there's seven people in the room. And there's 7,000 people that work at the company. So there's whatever, 6,993 that didn't see it happen. So if you want to inculcate the organization with the values that were demonstrated in that meeting with seven people, somebody's going to have to start telling a bunch of people about what happened in that room. So that's why storytelling is the vehicle that will communicate,

because you have to tell them the story of what happened. But you also want to make sure to tell stories that will both foster the behavior that you want and also dissuade the behavior that you don't want. So you need both positive stories of, look, this happened, and that shows you know how we want you to behave in these situations. And here's another situation where somebody was faced with a tough situation. And they did not behave the way, you know, is in fitting with our corporate culture and values. And so here the, and you can see through the story, the negative ramifications both on the company and the person who behaved that way.

So maybe the person got fired, but maybe the company, you know, the stock dropped 15% because of, you know, or whatever. Or, you know, a bunch of people got hurt or, you know, because people weren't valuing safety enough. You know, people need to see both the good and the bad. Both types of stories, successes and failures will produce the culture that you want. Like I said, there's so much more memorable so that if you're trying to understand, okay, this is the way we behave here. This is what we value most. It's more memorable to hear about a person or an example of how that was in action. I think two leaders, it's on us to relentlessly tell these stories over and over.

and have a portion of all of those town halls where you're sharing examples of people living out your values, right? Not just saying the values, but this person lived out our values by doing this, right? If we say we value helping other people, well, I'm sharing a story to open about how somebody helped another person and they, and then remind them they lived out this value. I think that is a big way to continually reinforce what your values are and how people and your company are actually living them. Yeah, in fact, let me say one other thing about that. For the reason why stories are uniquely well qualified in these culture and value situations, and that is because you can always put on the wall, like you said, here's the list of

our company values. You know, we value safety, we value productivity, we value leadership, you know, whatever. And every company's got a list of those things that they value. But they all sound great. And everybody goes, oh, yeah, those are great things. Yeah, I do all those things. Well, values are just words on a piece of paper until somebody is in a situation, a real, messy, complex, subtle situation at work where one or more of those values come into conflict with each other. That's when you find out which ones are the most important.

Like there's always this conflict between safety and productivity, for example, at a manufacturing company. look, we can we can run these lines safely or we can run them fast. Which do you want? You know, so you need stories about people who negotiated that territory between two very valid company values and how they made the tough decision to go one way or the other way or find some clever compromise. Those are the situations that can only be described in a story. You can't just say, here's our values and they're in this.

order of most importance or whatever. It's the messy real-life situations that people find themselves in where the list doesn't help you. But having had all these case studies of where people ran into these messy situations does. In fact, I recently developed a whole training course just based on that philosophy. If you need collecting a bunch of stories and having people decide what would I do in this situation, what would we do at my company in this situation? And another company who has different values, we may do something different. But you need these situations for people to kind of go through. I'm curious, how did this become an area? I know you've moved to some other things that we're going to talk about that you're doing currently, but this was a

big chunk of your life, lead with a story, sell with a story, the 10 great stories great leaders tell, parenting with a story. So many of these topics of life that were focused on storytelling, how did this become the niche area that you focus so much time on? Yeah, well, I was, I was probably 15 years into my career before it even occurred to me that storytelling was important. And once I did, that kind of frustrated me because, you know, they didn't teach me that in college. They didn't teach me that in business school. They didn't teach me that at Accenture. I was there for a couple of years. And they didn't even teach me that at Procter & Gamble. I was there for 20 years. And so I went out to try and I figured this looks like something I need to be good at if I want to

be a good leader. So I started reading all the books I could find on it and still didn't know how to do it. And so I started interviewing leaders who I thought were particularly good at, you know, first inside the company and then then outside the company. And I found myself learning a lot more by just listening to the stories that I thought, you know, great leaders were telling. And at some point along that road, it occurred to me that I'm probably not the only one who wants to know this. And so it stopped being my own little selfish learning journey and became an idea for a book, you know, that first book lead with the story. So all of that, that research turned into that first book and that first book, you know, just sent me on a totally different

career path. After six months after that book came out, I, you know, quit my job and, you know, became a full-time researcher and author and speaker on storytelling for leaders. And, yeah, that was 10 years ago. So it definitely changed the trajectory of my life. But it was born out of my own desire to learn how to be a better storyteller. Were you surprised by how your initial book was received. Yeah. I mean, I certainly hope that that would be what happens, but you can't be reasonable and expect that to happen. You know, I think, you know, 99% of books that are published, you know, sell a few hundred copies. So, you know, I think that first books now and it's 11th or 12th printing and it's in seven or eight languages around the world. So yeah, it definitely exceeded my expectations.

And, but this is the career path that I was hoping to have out of that. So I'm very grateful. Do you have a favorite story? You know, people ask me that all the time. And it's like asking somebody with 300 children, which one's their favorite? So, you know, I have several favorites, and you've probably read a lot of them. I typically say, well, do you have a favorite of mine? And I'd be happy to tell it. Yeah, well, what's one that's top of mind that you think about the most?

I get asked this about a guest on my podcast all the time. And it's really hard. but I usually can bust out a couple and why. I'm curious. Yeah. So in the 10 stories, great leaders tell that you mentioned, I only have 10 stories.

Okay, so I've tried to narrow it down from, you know, 200 favorite stories down to 10. And in that one, the one that a lot of people respond well to is number nine, which is a leadership philosophy story. A story that people tell about their own leadership philosophy

to help people who work for them understand what kind of the leadership to expect from them. And the example I gave in the books from a guy named Mike, and he was a West Point guy. So his first leadership opportunity was in the military. In fact, specifically, his first leadership opportunity was in a, he was a tank platoon leader, and they were going through a training exercise out in California on a 10-mile long, five-mile-wide battlefield with these tanks. So they're real tanks on a real field, but they're not going to shoot live ordinances at each other,

course. So they got their gun turrets outfitted with little laser pointers and they got receivers on the tank so they know who got virtually shot. So it's basically a giant game of laser tag but with real tanks on a real field. So he happens to be assigned to be the guy in charge of the first tank that's going to go into battle

on his side of the field with 399 other tanks in wedge formation behind him. So 400 tanks on one side versus 400 tanks on the other side. So the night before the exercise, he sits down with the commanding officer, of course, and they go look at a map of the terrain. They figure out where the high ground is so they can have the best odds of winning the exercise. Next morning, the exercise

starts. He's in the tank. They're racing it onto the field. They get to the first place where he's got to make a decision. You're going to turn right or turn left. And honest to God, he just has no idea what to do. Apparently, a battlefield looks different when you're looking at it through the crack and the hatch of a tank bouncing up and down at 40 miles an hour than it does on a map in a conference room. So Mike's got a decision to make. This first leadership decision, do I turn right or left? Well, the first leadership decision then is, the second one is, how do I make this decision? So he's got two choices. He can either stop the tank, get the map out, turn the light on, figure out the right thing to do, or his other option is he can just guess. Well, Mike chooses option to, he just yells out, driver, turn left,

even though he has no idea if that's the right thing to do. So the driver turns left. Well, a few seconds later, the light in his tank starts flashing, which means you just got shot by a laser. You're technically dead. Okay. So that was the wrong decision. So they had to stop the tank, pop that and get out. Those guys are done for the day. Well, a few seconds later, tank number two turns left right behind him because that's their job, follow the leader. Well, their light starts flashing. Okay, they're done. Tank number three turns left. Their life starts flashing. Well, the guys in tank number four saw three tanks just get virtually shot and killed, right?

They realized that was a mistake. And so they turned right. And then 396 other tanks turned right. they took the high ground and won the exercise. Now, Mike made a mistake that day. He turned left when he should have turned right, but he learned a valuable leadership lesson from it, which is this. Sometimes it's better to make the wrong decision quickly than to make the right decision slowly.

Just imagine what would have happened if he had chosen option one. He stopped the tank, turn the light on, get the map out for, you know, I don't know, 30 seconds. For 30 seconds, there'd have been 400 tanks lined up sitting ducks, literally getting picked off one at a time. But because he made a quick decision, even though it was the wrong decision, they won.

Because business and life and war are all similar and that, you know, if you make a mistake, sooner or later it'll become obvious. That was a mistake. And you can monitor and adjust, which is what 396 other tanks did. Now, it's certainly not always the case, but you know, and you've seen this in your business life, I know I have, that we get stuck in this analysis paralysis where for months we'll agonize and do more research and do more analysis to make a different. decision. Meanwhile, our competition is still moving forward. So sometimes it's better to just

make an educated guess, see if it works out, and if not, try something different. And so that story lets people know how he has become the decisive leader that he is today. Right. And he's more decisive than most leaders as a result of that experience. And he shares that story to set expectations of people that that's the kind of leadership they can expect from them. But they also learn a little bit of a leadership lesson. Maybe I should be a little bit more decisive of a leader. Now, he could just tell them, I'm a decisive leader. Maybe they'd believe that. Maybe they wouldn't. But what does that even mean? The story does a much better job of communicating more. We're all going to remember how to be a more decisive leader's ourselves by that story. Like, I will. Others listen to this will

too. They'll listen to this story about Mike and the tank commander and messing it up, actually. And the fact that, yes, technically, I guess in real life, it would have, obviously, this is a drill. But the fact that being decisive, having a bias for action in this case is this leadership philosophy. And it's so much more memorable when told that way as opposed to saying, just like I think of like being in an interview for a leadership role. If you're like, I'm decisive and I'm, you know, you list off the big words that are important. Or you say, this is a story. and you just launch into the story and you're good at it, you're going to have that interviewer on the edge of a seat waiting to say,

where's this going, you know? Right. If you tell it that way. But imagine instead what most people will do, and they'll totally butcher this, is they'll do it in the opposite order. They'll tell them the conclusion, the lesson they learned, and then the story in that order. They'll say, well, I'm a decisive leader.

And I learned that when, you know, I, I turned. turn left instead of right in this exercise and we, you know, that was a big mistake. Let me tell you what happened. Well, I don't care to hear what happened. Now, you've already told me, you know, you told me the lesson, you told me what you learned from it. Like, it's just not interesting now. I mean, you've got to do it the other way.

You got to tell the story and then let the lesson, you know, present itself, you know, at the end. Yeah. Yeah. And keep some suspense too, like we talked about earlier. When it comes to sales, right? I grew up in the profession of selling. We're all in sales every day, by the way.

Reg, rather if you carry a bag or you have a quota, we're all in sales. And you quoted Professor Jonathan Haidt. The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. How does that relate to a sales professional? Yeah, I think he might have explained to that more. Somebody else may have explained this more when they said that humans are not, you know, logical thinking creatures capable of emotion. We're emotional creatures capable of logic.

So I think that's better said than maybe that quote that I used because humans do both. We are absolutely, we can be logical and we can absolutely be emotional. So we can definitely do both. But it turns out that we're mostly emotional creatures that are capable of occasionally being logical. But not many people are logical all the time and occasionally emotional. We think that we are, and that's because our logical processing happens in a conscious thinking part of the brain, and our emotional processing typically happens in a subconscious part of the brain.

So we're not aware of the constant emotional processing that we're doing, but we're more aware of the logical processing that we're doing. And so the reason that's important in storytelling, whether it's for sales or anything else, comes back to, we need to engage people emotionally to help them make decisions. So salespeople's job is to help people make a decision, right? The buyer. Your job is to help the buyer make a decision about what to buy. And in order to help them make a decision, you've got to give them both.

You've got to give them some logical reason to buy what you're selling. And you've got to give them something emotional to engage with while they're making that decision. And stories are just uniquely well-qualified. to deliver both of those things, whereas your sales pitch typically is only good at the one thing, the logical reasons. But the story can help you deliver the other side that the sales pitch doesn't. The other element of selling that you've, I pulled from my notes that I think is really important that average to poor sales people never do is, I think, curiosity and listening. And you say this by your first objective in a sales call should be to get the buyers to tell you their stories,

not the other way around. Can you share more about that? Yeah, if you didn't, how would you know which of your stories to tell them? Right. So the reason it's important to get salespeople to tell you stories are the same reasons it's important for you to tell them stories. Because you will understand a problem better if they tell you a story about it than if they just tell you what their problem is.

Just like they'll understand your solution better if you tell them a story about it, than if you just tell them your solution. For example, if you were to ask one of your prospects, hey, what's your biggest problem right now? You're going to get short answers. Like, oh, warehousing. Warehousing is our biggest problem. Well, what are you going to do with that?

Like, you don't know what? You don't know enough about the problem. Instead, and here's the technique to get them to tell you their stories, ask them questions that requires a story for an answer. So you should say instead, tell me about the moment you realize. your biggest problem was your biggest problem. That question requires a story for an answer. So they'd have to think about that for a minute, which is good.

You want them thinking. And then they'd say, well, I guess that would be a couple of months ago. We got this huge order from our biggest customer. And it was an emergency order. They needed it like shipped out the next day. And we went out to the warehouse and we did not have the product that they needed. So we had to schedule a special production run, which cost a lot of extra money. And we had to run 24-7 to get it.

it done, but we did. And then we had to expedite the shipping and we got it there just on time. And then we went out to the warehouse and we found the product that they needed sitting right where it should have been all along. And we didn't need to go through any of that trouble. So now you know what they mean by a warehousing problem. What they have is an inventory location management problem, right? They don't know where the stuff is in their own warehouse. But you need to hear that story before you can really help them if you were in the the warehousing business, right? So asking them questions that require a story for an answer, as opposed to short answers, are the way to get them to tell you the stories that you need them

to tell you so that you can be the best salesperson you can be. Great opener for a question. And I think of this with kids. This was brought up on my podcast, I think a couple years ago. I wish I could remember the guest. But instead of asking your child when they get off the bus, how was your day at school or what did you do at school? You say, tell me about your day at school. This tell me about is so much better, especially with a kid, but I think it works in sales, it works everything. And I've noticed, I do this, especially with my eight-year-old daughter, Charlie, get her off the bus. I try to be there as much as I can. And I say that, and it doesn't give her an out to say, good or, you know, recess or whatever, but it's tell me about so

she knows now and she's ready that there has to be more. more than that. And I think you can do that in any conversation. I mean, somebody tells you something that's interesting or you're curious about. Tell me more about that. Yeah, like to tell me about is a great story. Tell me about instead of instead of like what keeps you up at night, which by the way, I think if you say that question as a salesperson, you're immediately going to trigger to that other person bad salesperson because that question's old and outdated and there's so many better ways to ask it. Like you just said, tell me about a moment, not what keeps you up. And I were like, oh, God, I got to do this again with this sales guy. I hate this sales guy. You know what I mean?

So I think just how you phrase it is can really change the whole dynamic of the conversation to get the story from them so that you can then figure out the hopefully solution and you can share your story in that regard. So I really, really like that. A successful story is comprised of only three ingredients. And the acronym is CAR, C-A-R. And those ingredients are context, action, and the result. Can you unpack that acronym for me? Yeah. And the fact that I need to unpack it is exactly why in my third book, Sell with a Story, I gave you a more detailed list because I, well, I think it was good to start with something simple like that. I got a lot of questions over the next few years of, Yeah, well, what goes in the context, what goes in the action, what goes in the results?

So the idea behind it is just that's the structure, the most basic structure of a story, right? Because if somebody says beginning, middle end, well, that's just not very helpful. Well, what goes in the right? But context is the beginning. The action of the story goes in the middle, and the result goes at the end. So to unpack that, I'll give you the new structure that I teach today. and it's basically eight questions that your story needs to answer

in order to have the structure right. So it starts with what I call the hook, which is why should I bother listening to the story? You've got to give your audience a reason to listen to your story or they might not. But once you've given them that hook, the reason to listen to your story, then you're going to answer questions like

where and when do the story take place? Who's the main character and what did they want? And those three, first three, questions are part of the context. Why should I listen? Who's the main character? Where and when did it take place? That's the context. The action then is what was the problem or opportunity they ran into, this main character, and what did they do about it? So those two questions are really the action of the story. In fact, question number five, what did they do about it? That's the majority of the story. That is the action of the story. Then you get into

what was the problem they ran into? What did they do about it? How did it turn out in the end? That's the result of the story. But you're not done telling the story because you need to help people derive some action from this. So what was the lesson from the story? What did you learn from the story? And what do you think I should go do now? That's the last question. Question number eight. So that's your opportunity to make a recommendation. So I said those three questions go into the result. How did the story turn out in the end? What did you learn from the story? And what should I go do now? So if you answer those eight questions in that order, you're going to have a story come out that at least is in the proper order and is in the right structure and doesn't confuse people.

Now, you're going to need to engage them emotionally and there are different techniques for that. And you're going to want to create those surprises that we talked about and their techniques for that. But as far as the structure of the story goes, those are the eight questions that really unpack that context action results. What are the best ways for people to make this? Because some of it see like, man, there's a structure. There's eight questions. God, there's a lot of stuff, Paul.

I don't want to seem like a robot. How does somebody naturally become really good at this without even like consciously thinking about the questions? But just and not. And also obviously the surprises and the ahas, which are huge in these things. How does somebody get good at that without becoming too robotic? So, yeah, the best way is, and this may sound counterintuitive, but if you use that same structure every time, and if you tell the story right, it won't sound robotic, okay? The way you make it not sound robotic is to not memorize the script of the story, memorize the gist of the story, and by that, I mean, memorize the answer to those eight questions. Okay, that way every time you tell the story, it will come out sounding extemporary.

contemporaneous and conversational. You know, it'll sound like the first time you've ever told the story, because it will be the first time you've ever told the story exactly that way. People who memorize their stories, those are the ones who sound that way. They sound robotic. They sound, because what they do is they write out a script of their sales pitch or their story, and they memorize it, and then they deliver it. And it sounds like something that was written down in a marketing brochure and that they're just somebody's really reading it to somebody. It sounds terrible. to avoid that, never script your story.

Just in short bullet points, answer the eight questions, and then just tell the story in that order. And your brain will have to invent the sentences every time because all you have is an outline to go by. And so your brain is going to go through the outline and invent the sentences that goes with it. And it will not sound robotic because you're just, you're improvising a story on the spot.

And there's nothing more natural and excessive. contemporaneous and conversational than somebody who is making up a story on the spot, right? It's the memorizing the script that makes it sound robotic, not memorizing the order of the story. I think too at the beginning, it's really important of how you launch into it and don't set unrealistic expectations and don't qualify the story, such as when somebody says, hey, Paul, this is the funniest story you're ever going to hear. Here we go. There's no way it's going to be the funniest story that you ever heard. You've been around for a while. So if I, it's not.

So don't say that. And I'm thinking of a few friends that I love dearly, but they do this a lot. I'm like, dude, stop doing that. The story isn't that funny. And now it's worse. It would have been funnier if you would have just told me, you just started talking, just told me the story. There was a surprise and then there was a funny bit within it.

And I'm probably laughing as opposed to, hey, you got to hear this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. I think a lot of people do that because they want to get your attention, but it ends up having the opposite effect by the end because you're so let down. Yeah, I totally agree. In fact, I like the way you said it better than I normally do. In fact, what I normally just talk about is don't even tell people you're going to tell them a story. Right. But telling them you're going to tell them the best story they've ever heard is even worse. But it's even bad just to tell them, let me tell you a story. Well, don't do, most people don't want to hear a story. And you know, the analogy I give is it's like telling an adult that you're

about to tell them a story is like telling a five-year-old kid. It's time to stop playing with your friends and come inside and take a bath. In both cases, they don't want to do it. But in both cases, once they get into it, they love it and don't want to get out, right? But if you tell them, that's what you're going to have to come in and get in the bath or I'm going to tell you story. They're not interested. But once they're in it, they love it. So just don't skip that first part and just put them in the bath, right? Start telling the story. Just tell it, right, exactly.

There's so much, so much more. That's why I encourage people to get your books. But the other thing I quickly learned about, but not that much as we were chatting beforehand, was the fact that you've taken a hard left turn in your career. And I'm curious as to why. I would like to dig in more. So what are you doing now? And can you share more about why?

Yeah. So it turns out I've taken, I think, three hard left. turns in my career. And it looks like I'm doing it about every decade. And, you know, maybe that's, maybe that's normal. But, yeah, I spent the first decade in my career in finance and accounting type roles after getting my MBA and finance. And then I shifted over to consumer research. So that's still in business. So maybe that's not a hard left turn. It's a slight left turn, but completely different functional discipline within P&G. And then I became an author and, you know, started writing books for a living and giving speeches and teaching training classes. I would say that was a hard

left turn completely out of corporate America. And a year ago, I made probably the hardest left turn. Well, it's not really a career change because I'm still doing what I'm doing. But in my spare time, I'm in a degree program in astrophysics at the University of Cincinnati. And, you know, it's not because I want to go become, you know, an astrophysicist. I have no, you know, delusions of grandeur. I'm just going because I've been fascinated with science all my life, but never studied it. academically. And after 10 years of being a writer and a, you know, kind of a performer on stage,

which really exercised the creative side of my brain, the logical, analytical side of my brain just needed to get exercised. And, you know, astrophysics is about the most difficult thing I can think of to study. So I'm doing that just in my spare time, just for fun, mostly. Could you actually feel, I mean, like, okay, I'm really exercising this side of my brain, the other side not so much so it's atrophying. You could feel that? I mean, that sounds funny to me. Well, I mean, obviously I'm not physically feeling the left in a bright rain tickle,

but I do somehow am conscious of the fact, have been conscious of the fact that I missed doing really analytically rigorous type of thinking. I missed that kind of thinking. And I'm getting that satisfied with this now. I'm definitely enjoying it. Paul, someone who's, let's say they're earlier in their career and they look at your career and see like, wow, he's done a number of different things. That's really cool. Maybe I'd want to do that.

I'm not sure. But let's say you're talking to someone who's 24, 25, and they've graduated college. They want to leave a dent in the world. They're not exactly sure what they're going to do, but they care about other people. They care about doing good, right? They want to be a productive achiever. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? Yes, I would say to not be afraid to make those hard left turns.

In fact, the studies I've seen say that people today take seven of them over the course of their career. So technically, I got three left. I got to make sometime the next few years, right? And a lot of people start out worried that they've got to pick right the first time. You know, I've got to pick the right degree program in school or I'm screwed forever. Do I become an engineer? Do I study engineering?

Do I study business? Do I become a doctor? a lawyer. I'm making this life-changing decision, and it's not life-changing, but it's probably decade-changing. It certainly will affect the course of your career for the next many years, but very few people end up where they start these days. So I guess part of the advice is don't worry too much about that. Start somewhere, work your butt off, get good, you know, make a mark in the world in that area. And then if you get interested in something else, then make that left turn and go make a mark there as well. Yeah. How has though the aspect of publishing work? To me, I think

when you have the guts and the willingness to publish your work, whether it's a podcast, it's a blog, it's books, I think it creates a magnetic effect for you. It gives you a chance to attract people to you. And hopefully the type of people that you want to be attracted to you, which then creates opportunity. And that seems like it's happened for you. So this willingness to be curious, because that's ultimately how your book started, you were just curious.

You were asking questions. You were interviewing people. And then that led you to share what you've learned, and then that's attracted a lot of opportunity to you. Can you share a little bit more about that aspect of your career? Yeah, well, that was actually very intentional. So when I, and this maybe partly answers your last question again, too, like a career advice. My philosophy is that, my observation is that most people really love about 10%

of their job. It's why they chose the career in the first place, what gets them out of bed in the morning. Most of them hate 10%, you know, filling out the expense report or office politics or whatever. But that big 80% in the middle, most of us just, we like it. It's good. I wouldn't do it if you didn't pay me, but it's good work. And I thought, you know, 10, 12 years ago, wouldn't it be great if I could do that 10% at the top all the time, if that's just all I had to do. And so I figured out, well, what is that 10% for me? And it turned out for me, it was those few days a year that I got to give a speech at the annual company meeting or teach a training class to new hires or newly promoted general managers

or something. So essentially it was being a teacher for a professional audience. And I thought, well, how can I do that full time? Because there's no job at the company to do that full time. And I looked around and I realized whether people who get to do that. but they've all written some bestselling book, and then they travel around the world teaching that thing to executives. I thought, well, I guess I need to go write a book.

So that's when all that converged with me learning. I was learning storytelling. I thought, well, that's what I'll do. I'll write a book about all this stuff that I've been learning about storytelling. And that's how I'll get that career. And so the goal was, the goal of the book was not because I wanted to be an author. The goal of the book was to create that following that you mentioned. I can't remember the word that you used, but created that interest and that attention,

you know, so that I could have that career as the professional teacher and speaker. Now, it turned out, I loved writing that first book. And so I've loved writing all the five books that I have. So, which is good because it turns out there are two types of people in my line of work. There are people who love researching and writing books but are terrified to death to get on stage and speak. and the other people who love speaking on stage, but writing a book is like fingernails down a chalkboard. They just hate it.

And it turns out I love both of them. And so that just worked out perfectly for me for that career path. So I really did end up getting that. I'm doing the 10% the whole time. I love it. But here's the thing. You learned by taking action, right? You didn't just say, like, I'm going to be 24 and understand my passion.

And that's what I'm going to do. Like, no, you actually worked real jobs for a while and you found what you loved within those real jobs, then took action to make your, the 10% time 100%. I think that's the critical component when someone says, find your passion or follow your passion when you're 23 or whatever. It's like, I don't know how many people understand what that is. And the only really way I think to learn is you've got to do stuff. You have to get out and actually do things and figure out what that 10% is. And like David Epstein, well, he was quoting Hermania Abar when he said, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory, right?

And I think the way that we learn is we got to do it. We have to actually be taking the action as opposed to just thinking about what would be cool or what I potentially love when you don't necessarily know what you love until you do it. Right. Yeah, which is the other reason why you shouldn't waste too many brain cells figuring out, you know, what am I going to study in school? Because you're going to get out, get in the real world and get a real job. and then you're going to eventually after 10 years or so figure out, oh, I hate that.

What I really love was this 10%, and I need to go pursue that. So, so good. Well, Paul, I really appreciate this. And I highly recommend people get lead with a story and sell with a story. Those are the two that I focused on the most. But you also have the 10 stories, great leaders tell, parenting with a story, four days with Kenny Hedford. So there are plenty out there to read, to dig into more, to learn more.

I think we probably barely scratched the surface of what you've published. And I hope everyone enjoyed it. But I just want to say to you, Paul, thank you so much for doing this. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, especially since we live probably about an hour from each other. It would be great, man. Yeah, it's always good to meet a neighbor, I guess. Absolutely, man. Well, thanks so much for doing this, man.

You bet. Cheers. As you can probably tell, based on guests I've had over the last few months, I am fascinated when it comes to becoming a better storyteller. I can't get enough of it. I want to talk to the most impactful storytellers in the world and try to understand how I can better do it and how you can as well. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did a few takeaways from my notes from this conversation with Paul.

The James Watt story. keep one or two small vital pieces of the story and save them for the end. The aha moment. The surprise makes it more memorable for your audience. And the way to get better at this is to practice it every day, whether it's with your partner or with your friends. Find a way to save a few of the small vital pieces to the end to create a surprising moment for your audience. And then asking better questions. Instead of saying what keeps you up at night, ask, tell me about a moment, right?

Phraising is so critical. You can also use this when perhaps you're walking home from the bus stop with your children. Instead of saying, how was school today or what did you do at school today? And they say, good or recess. You can say, tell me about your day at school. The change of the phrasing will hopefully help you get more. out of those conversations when walking home from the bus stop with your child. And then the human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Your job is to help the other person make a decision. And to do that, they need to rely on both logic and emotion. So us as leaders, we need to help make that happen. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message. and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Paul Smith. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader.

And because you continue to do that, and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much.

Talk to you soon. Can't wait.