Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Terry guests on Talk About Talk

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

Terry was recently interviewed on Dr. Andrea Wojnicki's podcast, Talk About Talk. Andrea is an executive communications coach. She helps executives improve their communication skills and elevate their confidence and credibility.It is an interesting chat about communication. Hope you enjoy it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling. Subscribe now and don't miss a single beat. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. Our 2025 season starts in January. It's our 20th anniversary on CBC, so it's a big year for us.

But until then, we thought we would drop an interesting podcast for you to listen to. I recently did an interview with Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. She's an executive communication coach, and she coaches executives to improve their communication skills, elevate their confidence levels, etc. So we had an interesting talk about communication, and we thought you might enjoy it. So here is Dr. Andrea's podcast titled Talk About Talk. It's interesting you say the power of threes.

I was known to be a, I was a humor director. So if you had humorous scripts, you would bring them to me. I could do drama, but there were directors that were better at that than me, but humor was always my thing. And I used to call them bingo, bango, bongo moments that when things happen in threes, like, you know, two knocks at a door is one thing, but three knocks is funny. And it's hard to articulate why that is. Or if something falls off, let's say a glass falls off a table, if it falls in a sequence of three sounds, it's funny. And if it falls in two, it isn't. So even the power of three is a powerful rule within audio.

That fabulous voice belongs to Terry O'Reilly, host of the popular Under the Influence podcast. I've been listening to Under the Influence for years, and I've always enjoyed Terry's sense of humor and his skill as an exceptional storyteller. And I knew that we're both Canadian and we're both podcasters, but I had absolutely no idea that he's also a huge fan of The Power of Three. Did you hear what he said? Bingo, bango, bongo. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's talk about talk. Welcome to Talk About Talk podcast episode number 173, Under the Influence with storyteller

Terry O'Reilly. In this episode, you're going to learn the ingredients that are necessary to create compelling stories, how and why to peel back the onion and think hard about what business you're really in, and a lot more. In case we haven't met, my name is Dr. Andrea Voynitsky. Please just call me Andrea, and I'm your executive communication coach. I coach ambitious executives just like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and clarity, establish credibility, and ultimately achieve your career goals. Sound good? To learn more about me and what I do, just head over to the talkabouttalk.com website and you can read all about the coaching and the workshops that I run. Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you at the bottom of the

homepage. You can also sign up for the Talk About Talk email newsletter where you can get free coaching from me in your inbox. Head over to talkabouttalk.com and sign up now. All right, let's shift gears. I can't wait for you to hear my conversation with Terry O'Reilly. If you've ever heard his Under the Influence podcast, then you know that Terry is like an encyclopedia of stories and insights. And as you're about to hear, he's exactly the same in real time without a script. He's also very gracious. Let me introduce Terry and then we'll get right into the interview. And

at the end, as always, I'm going to summarize with three learnings that I want to reinforce for you. Sound good? Okay. Long before he had a radio show, Terry was an award-winning writer at Canada's top advertising agencies, creating campaigns for top brands such as Labatt, Bell, Nissan, and Hudson's Bay. In 1990, Terry co-founded Pirate Radio and Television with eight recording studios in Toronto and New York City. In 2005, he became the host of the CBC Radio 1 and WBEZ Chicago radio show called Under the Influence, with over 1 million listeners a week. His podcast has been downloaded over 75 million times. Terry was awarded with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Advertising and Design Club of Canada, and he's been granted honorary degrees from three Canadian universities. Ah, the power of three again.

He's also written three books, the latest being My Best Mistake, about people who make catastrophic career decisions, but it ended up being the best thing that could have happened to them. Terry has a wonderful wife and three lovely daughters, and he says they sometimes like some of his work. All right, here we go. Thank you so much, Terry, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk About Talk listeners. Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. There's so many directions that we could go in this conversation, you know, advertising, branding, personal branding. But I thought something that really stands out about you that I appreciate very, very much is your fantastic ability to tell stories.

So I thought we would start there. And I'm curious, as a master storyteller, what do you think makes for a great story? Is there an ingredient list that's necessary? That's a very good question. When I think about that, I think two things. I think structure. I think that's always been one of my strengths for whatever reason, who knows, is story structure. That may have come from almost 40 years in the advertising business, where you have to, you know, structure mini stories inside 30 and 60 seconds, which is,

you know, a Herculean feat at best. So I think, and even you see a lot of movie directors start out in the advertising business and they learn storytelling because you have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end inside 30 or 60 seconds. And I think that's a real discipline that you have to develop. So structure is the key for me because as a director, so I directed commercials for three quarters of my career. I think I directed, my staff told me at one time, something like 14,000 commercials in my career. Wow. So I got to see a lot of really great storytelling and a lot of really bad storytelling.

And where most stories fell down, Andrea, was in the end. There was great beginnings, wonderful middles, and terrible ends. It just never wrapped up. They never had a destination in mind. It didn't come to this wonderful, satisfying. It's like seeing a great movie and you think, God, I loved everything but the way it ended. You know that? Because the ending is the toughest thing for a writer to write.

So structure, to me, is critical. that you have a beautiful, teasing opening, and then you have this really sumptuous middle. And then you have this inevitable end that's just so satisfying. Right. I think the other little thing beyond story structure is the element of surprise, where you don't really know where a story is going or you think you know where it's going and then the writer just yanks you to the left or to the right and I think those unexpected moments add impact. My brain is immediately going to personal branding when you say that but I'm going to stick with advertising for a couple minutes here. So beginning, middle, and end, consistent with my love of the power of three, I'm thinking about my self-introduction

framework. Start with who you are, what you do, what your passion is, what your expertise is. Ground yourself in the present, then go past to establish credibility. And most people end there, right? They're like, and that's me, right? Going around the table or around the screen. Step three is the icing on the cake. And you said similarly, that many people or many stories are missing kind of that last, that part three, or the ending of the story. Act three. Yeah. Yeah. Act three. So that's, that's interesting that that analogy,

you know, even in sound, Andrea, it's interesting. You say the, the power of threes. I was known to be a, I was a humor director.

So if you had humorous scripts, you would bring them to me. I, I could do drama, but there were directors that were better at that than me, but humor was always my thing. And I used to call them bingo, bango, bongo moments. That when things happen in threes, like, you know, two knocks at a door is one thing, but

three knocks is funny. And it's hard to articulate why that is. Or if something falls off, let's say a glass falls off a table, if it falls in a sequence of three sounds, it's funny. And if it falls in two, it isn't. So even the power of three is a powerful rule within audio. I had no idea, but I'm not surprised. Yeah. That's the power of three. Three is this amazing number in our lives. Although they say the world's favorite number is seven. And the world's favorite color is blue. But I would say three is really,

it is that key secret ingredient. Yeah, I think seven is like the maximum. There's something like, that's why phone numbers are- That's right. Four, right? Yeah, I'm a fan of threes. You have three daughters, right? I have three daughters, that's right or right yeah yeah i i'm a fan of threes uh you have three daughters right i have three daughters that's right i did my i did my reading terry did you did so back to the storytelling i'm i would love to hear what your take is

on what brands are the best storytellers, maybe past and present? My favorite brand for storytelling of all time is Volkswagen in the 60s. So Daryl Dane Burnback, which I think was the greatest advertising agency of all time, led by Bill Burnback, probably the greatest creative director of all time. What they did with that brand to me is amazing because if you put it in context the early 60s automobile advertising was all the same it was you know see the usa in your chevrolet and the vw brought humor to advertising for the first time and then they brought incredible honesty they would talk about how ugly the car was and they talked about how underpowered the car was and they didn't make they would make all its faults strong points and you know that even

though it's underpowered it doesn't it it doesn't take much gas and just because it's ugly doesn't mean you can't love it and it became the most beloved car yeah in north america i think and it was all due to the storytelling. One of the first ads, the headline was lemon. And I don't think I could sell that ad today. There's no way a car manufacturer is going to allow me to say lemon as a headline. But if you read the story underneath that headline, it was basically saying that the car you were looking at in that ad had a blemish on the chrome of the glove compartment, so it can't go out yet. So it really was a story about incredible quality under a headline that is the most toxic word in automobile advertising. So the storytelling

made that car an icon. And I think they were the best storytellers in advertising for all time. A little more recently, I would say, Nike is a great storyteller. You know, just do it. And every Nike ad you see is a story about a team or a person achieving something amazing. Yet, no Nike ad looks like the other Nike ad. They almost feel like they have nothing in common, but it's the storytelling that makes it campaignable. Apple's the same thing. I think Apple does incredible advertising. They hearken back to Steve Jobs, which is so interesting to me. They've really been so consistent that virtually every Apple ad is about one person achieving something. It's not a business. It's not a company. It's always one person achieving something with the power of a

computer, which was Steve Jobs' vision of taking the computing power out of IBM and giving it to the individual. So they've gone to that strategy for all these years. And I love their storytelling. Yeah. You asked me who the best storyteller is today, right now at this moment, I would say Heinz. Okay, Heinz. Heinz is doing, this catch up is doing the best work I've seen in years. And most of it's done out of Canada. It's done out of Rethink in Vancouver.

Okay. They are winning every award. They are being written up in Ad Age and Ad News every week. They are doing things like, I wrote some things down. They did a big puzzle with 5,700 pieces or something. It's all red. One of those crazy puzzles they did. They asked kids to draw just ketchup. They just said, draw ketchup. And kids, all the kids drew Heinz labels. Wow. They asked AI to do, they said, they asked AI, draw a ketchup bottle and AI drew Heinz. Like they had all these great ways. They did a tweet, which was the slowest tweet in the world. 57 letters. The message was 57 letters, Andrea, the slowest tweet in the world. 57 letters.

The message was 57 letters, Andrea, but it took 57 hours to complete. So just standing there watching this tweet slowly appear. All of that is storytelling, right? Because the richer a ketchup is, the slower it pours, which has always been Heinz raison d'etre, right? And all these fun ways of getting across how unique and how loved the brand is in that category is just incredible storytelling. It's almost like they've gone meta. They're reinforcing their equity and creating new equity with it, right? Like, yeah, wow.

In that old sleepy brand, like it's not a dot com. Like it's been around forever. So where are you seeing these ads? I mean, I know you're, I shouldn't ask you personally, but where? Where can people see them? Yeah, where can people see them? We used to, you know, tune in when we got home from work and we'd watch the evening news and everything. So and now the media landscape has become so fragmented and I'm,

I'm, I see as many ads as the average person, but I have not seen that. So I'm wondering if they're on certain meat that, you know, maybe they are on television or streaming platforms that I'm not. I would say most of it's probably online. Yeah. In the form of videos youtube videos or whatever um just they're great at creating press yeah all those heinz ideas create press and i always say the best advertising creates press because suddenly your budget feels like it's quadrupled if the press gets hold of it right and rethink our masters at that. Yeah. So my next question I was going to

ask you is related to the point that you just made there. So over time, other than becoming more fragmented and going into new media, obviously with the internet, especially video, what else has changed in terms of advertising and storytelling? I think you sort of touched on it. I think storytelling is spilled out of traditional media, for sure. But even online, it's spilled out. So for example, sticking with Heinz, they put out at New York's Fashion Week, which just happened, they put out a line of clothes, Heinz, a ketchup, put out a line of clothes that had just a little ketchup drip. And it became the talk of Fashion

Week. I did read about that. So here's a ketchup finding a way to worm their way into New York's Fashion Week with just the ongoingness of their strategy and their storytelling ability. Yeah, you know what I would say there? The medium is the message, right? That's absolutely brilliant. I love that. And everything they do is tailored to that specific medium, which is so great, which I think is the sign of a great marketer.

It's not the same thing in every medium. It's the same tone. It's the same overall strategy. But Instagram looks different than Facebook, and Facebook looks different than YouTube video. Like everything's tailored to that medium. Right. Brilliant. So I'd love to switch over into personal branding. And you were talking about the Volkswagen lemon ad and how they turned that into a pot. So it drew the reader in, you know, what, what do you mean you're calling yourself a lemon? I better read what they're talking about here.

Right. And they basically turned, I've heard this term a lot recently. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Yeah. Right. Right. And that also relates to humans. So when I'm coaching executives on their personal brand or their professional identity, they'll admit to me that there's some part of their identity that they try to hide, right? It could be, for example, their sense of humor. Like, I don't want people to think I'm unprofessional, so I hide my sense of humor or I hide my, you know, my upbringing where I was brought up or my accent, or they tried to somehow hide their identity. And then, and then I talked to them about how we can create a narrative where what

they're perceiving as a bug may actually be a feature. So that's my segue into asking you, Terry, whether you consciously and or strategically develop your personal brand? You know, I did an episode on personal branding a couple of years back. Okay. And it was the most popular episode of that season, which surprised me because I thought I just never would have guessed that. And that's why in the book that's sitting behind you there, there is a chapter on personal branding. I read it.

Even though that book is for marketers, I really thought, you know, there's everybody even within marketing has a brand. So I think like any great brand, a personal brand has to share so many things in common with if you look to Nike or Apple or Heinz or whatever, is that first of all, they figure out what their uniqueness is in the category. And then everything they do kind of centers around that uniqueness. And there's a consistency then. There's a tone. There's a kind of language that a great brand uses.

There are guardrails too, I think. But I don't think they can be super, super narrow. Because as you were saying, you know, if someone's really funny, or, you know, if someone had a really tough upbringing, but achieved a lot of success, that's a great story. Like that can really be it's not a bug, it's a feature, like it can be a really great part of your of your personal brand about how you overcame obstacles or overcame speed bumps to achieve success. So for me, a great brand is what makes you different? And then how can I express that in creative ways? And that means

you have to look around the category, see what your competitors are doing, because you don't want to strike a similar tone to somebody else. You want to find your own piece of real estate that you can own. Even my radio show on CBC is different in one big way because I look when I pitch the show to CBC, never thinking for a moment that they would ever buy it, Andrea. You know, the advertising-free CBC taking on a show about advertising. Yeah. Yeah. I know it is. Yeah. I looked at all the shows on, on CBC and I thought, okay, I'm going to zig.

Everybody's saying I'm going to zig. And what that was is I didn't do interviews. Like I may be the only narrative show on CBC. Maybe there's one more out there. But I chose to go narrative storytelling instead of interviewing. Yeah, I wouldn't say that's the only thing that distinguished. I mean, it is. No, it's one of them. Yeah.

So you also have a beautiful voice. You also have incredible knowledge. You're also a beautiful storyteller. Right. I could go on um so that was your starting point though andrea was that beyond all of that lovely stuff the starting point was how can i stand out on the air just sonically right so i thought okay i'm not going to do interviews that was a big decision because there's a lot of great advertising people I could interview. I'm sure. And it's fun. Yeah, it's fun, right?

Yeah. So I was, maybe you've answered this next question with what you just said, but so what's your product category or your cat or personal category, I guess. I mean, you're, you're saying other radio shows. You know, the first chapter of that book is what business are you really in? Yeah. And that's, that's, You think that's so easy to answer. And I give some examples in there that Molson's not in the beer business or in the party business and Michelin's not in the tire business, they're in the safety business. I mean, you really have to know what people are buying from you in order to be relevant. Yeah. You see, I'm just showing, I'm opening the book to show you as I was reading that chapter in particular,

I took my marker out. I started writing, like talk about talk is in the business of, right? Yes, right. But that, I mean, that gets to the heart of your question. You have to know what it is people want from you because as i say in the book if you're if someone's shopping for tires because they want to make sure their family's safe if you're selling speed as a tire feature and the place across the street selling safety they're

going to cross the street even though you're both selling tires right yeah I think you have to really, and it's so hard to peel the onion to figure out what it is that you offer. Even my show, it started out as a show about creativity and then it very quickly morphed into a show about strategy. And that has been my ongoingness. And I'm a creative guy. I was really always dealt with strategy, but I wasn't a strategic account director. I was a writer. But here I am evolving into strategy. So my show is really a look. I take people on a look behind the closed doors of advertising.

Like everybody's got shit of an elevator pitch. That's how you get to the nub of who you are and what you offer is try coming up with a one sentence elevator pitch. Of what you do, whether you're a brand or a person. Yeah. And what you do and what makes you unusual. Yeah. You know, I have a chapter in that, in that book, which I find such a great exercise. It's really hard to do well that exercise, But, you know, I would say, you know, Dirty Harry, that great Clint Eastwood film, series of films that made him famous, really, you know, what was it about Dirty Harry that made him so compelling? And it was that,

it wasn't that he was a rogue cop, it wasn't that he was tough. It wasn't that he broke the rules which is what everybody answers the the true answer to that is he was more violent than the criminals he chased that's right i just read that i just read that like when you when it's articulated you go yes that's exactly why he was so mesmerizing and and and why he created so much that character created so much uh controversy yeah and um and ticket buying was before yeah and even i wired magazine which is my favorite um elevator pitch of all time they you know it's about entertainment technology uh trends and their elevator pitch when they were looking for funding from investors was we want to feel like we've been

mailed back from the future. Yeah, I love that too. Maybe the best elevator pitch of all time. My favorite elevator pitch of all time is, you know, the Sigourney Weaver Aliens movie? Do you know what the elevator pitch was for it? Jaws in Space. Yes. I probably learned that from you, You may have. Yeah. Once you can articulate a really great elevator pitch, that means I mean, look at the language in the three we've talked about there. It isn't like I am a marketing communications expert. Like that's not an elevator pitch. That's a that's just a statement. That's not an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch should make people lean right in. So when Wired Magazine said to their investors, we want our magazine to feel like it's been mailed

back from the future, all the investors around the table instantly were interested in that magazine. That unexpected element that you said always is so important. And even if a story is one sentence, right? If it has something unexpected in it, then... Yeah. A little surprise or an incredibly interesting collection of words that sums up what is the essence of you that makes you so different. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, I want to have time for the rapid fire questions at the end. But before we do that, I want to shift to your most recent book, My Best Mistake. Yeah. Can you share with the listeners what the basic premise of the book is?

And then also share with us maybe one or two of your best mistakes. The premise of that book was people who more than i have a couple of additional little stories in there but the overall arc of that book is people who made catastrophic career decisions where they lost their jobs their credibility their livelihood they lost everything and it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them yeah so i thought that as an exploration was interesting because when that happens to most people they usually disappear they disappear into the ether or they just completely change careers or vocations and just like wipe the slate clean but i thought thought, yeah. And I thought people who actually muscle through that

are more interesting. So the first chapter of that book is about Jaws, Steven Spielberg. It's such a well-told story, except for one detail, right? So everybody knows he was out on location at Martha's Vineyard. He's got three mechanical sharks that he's had built to scale,

which ate up most of his budget, by the way. He's a first-time film director, really. He'd done some television. This is his first time with the big leagues. I think he's only 28 or something. He gets out to Martha's Vineyard. They put the sharks in the water. He's got his cast, his crew, everything out there,

and the sharks immediately malfunction. And he's paralyzed because the main beast of this film doesn't work. And he goes into his hotel room one night thinking he's going to lose it all. He's going to lose his chance of being a director. He's going to be pulled back to Hollywood. He's going to be fired. He's sitting in the dark, panicking. And then he asks

himself the most interesting question. He says, what would Hitchcock do? And in that moment, he knew the answer. And the answer was, what you can't see is the most terrifying thing of all. So then he figures out a way to imply the shark, the fin through the sharks out in Hollywood, he tried them in freshwater tanks. His mistake was he didn't try them in saltwater. The saltwater corroded all the mechanics. I thought I never knew that detail. And that's why I love the story.

And that's why I loved how he, well, I mean, that huge mistake he made in the filmmaking led to the best part of that film and lost him on his career. It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to him. Yeah. as an audio storyteller, you're leaving just in the same way that he left the moviegoers image of the shark up to the moviegoers, right? When you're telling your stories on your podcast and your radio show, you're leaving it up to us to kind of fill in the blanks in our minds about what everything looked like. That's the joy of audio. Your listener becomes your art director. And I always thought that was so incredibly powerful. I mean, a lot of writers in advertising don't like audio, don't like radio, let's call it radio, don't like radio, they're afraid of it. They'd much rather do television or print or film because at first glance, it looks like audio doesn't have all the same toolbox. You don't have casts, like you don't have faces, you don't have wardrobe, you don't have locations.

I always thought that was way more freeing because I could be on the moon in a radio commercial. If I have done it correctly, you're with me as a listener, I can be at the bottom of the ocean. And all of that I couldn't do on television because it was too expensive. Yeah, that's really interesting, right? And yeah, it's the power of audio. I wonder if these art directors or creatives are also thinking that it's just less tangible, right? Like it's an audio file. I can't actually open something.

That's why it's also the hardest to present, Andrea, because you can show a print layout, you can show a TV storyboard, but with radio, you have to actually get up in a boardroom and perform it for your client, which gets to your great question, are you an introvert or an extrovert? I am. I love this question. I was so glad that it's on your list. Okay, let's do it. Are you an introvert or an extrovert, Terry? Complete introvert. Really? Oh, complete introvert. So they say the definition of an introvert versus an extrovert is, do you get recharged by being alone or recharged by being around a lot of people? So I recharge not by being alone. I'm not a hermit. I mean, but away from the crowd is where I recharge, right? So that was a big hindrance to me when I started my career, because I learned quite quickly that you had to learn how to present in a boardroom. You had to

get up, you had to be able to perform, you had to be able to field questions, you had to be able to really own the room. And there's a lot of money riding on those meetings, right? You could spend, you know, a million dollars on it. You're trying to convince someone to spend a million dollars on your idea. There's a lot of pressure going on. And I hated it. It was my white knuckle fear.

I would beg people to present my work for me because I just, it was just me because it was the thing I feared most. And then I realized that by letting other people present my work, most of it wasn't getting sold. So I thought, okay, I have to learn how to do this. So I was very fortunate because I had a great mentor. A creative director I had early in my career was a magnificent presenter. He was just, oh my goodness, he could just thrill you with the work. It was something about him. And I just watched him constantly at work. And I slowly, by osmosis, learned how to do it.

And then I actually got over the hump of fearing it. So I would volunteer a lot. So creative director, I'd say, OK, who's going to present the work tomorrow? And I'd go put out my hand and go, OK, O'Reilly's going to present the work. Who's going to present the strategy? Jill. And I would go home and just walk in the dark because I've now put myself in a situation where I have to do it.

But I did it so many times that I actually got over the hump of fearing it to actually looking forward to it. Amazing. For a introvert like me, that is a big journey. Yeah. So I can be a situationally specific extrovert. Oh, wow. Wow.

You just came in with the zinger. So the most common answer that I get is like, I'm a recovered introvert. That's some version of that, right? Like I was an introvert, but I overcame it. And I'm like, introverts are the best listeners. Yes. World needs introverts. Yes. But your story, I'm sure, will inspire a lot of people, whether they're an introvert or an extrovert or not. Okay, so that wasn't so rapid fire, but it was a very valuable story for everyone to hear. The second rapid fire question is, what are your communication pet peeves? first of all i think you touched on it too i think people don't listen i think listening is a big part of communicating like two monologues don't make a dialogue right yeah very well put you are going to be quoted on that terry yeah i've seen you know i i've been in so many meetings where somebody will ask a client a question and then answer it before the clients had a chance to act like it's

just a monologue then i think listening is a very underrated huge part of a great communicator is listening and know thy audience the golden rule you know putting yourself in the shoes of who you're talking to or imagining it's a funny thing you know if i'll write a an episode of our show and i'll send you know i'll record my part and the engineer puts it together and we'll talk about it i'll make a list of revisions sometimes 20 or 30 revisions long because i'm i'm in the weeds on it and then i I'll listen to it over the course of that process like six times. And then it'll air on CBC and it feels completely different to me because I know a million people are listening to it.

I'll pick out little mistakes in it where I thought, how could I have missed that when I listened to it six times in a row? So I just wanted to share with you that over the past several years, people ask me all the time, what do you think communication superpowers are? What are the things we need to work on? And I, I would come up with a list of three, depending on the person, the three most important things probably are confidence, listening and storytelling. Yeah. Right. If you don't have confidence, actually you have nothing because you're paralyzed, to your point. And then being a good listener is a great next step. And then kind of the icing on the cake is becoming an eloquent or effective storytelling.

You know, Theodore Leavitt has that great line that I've stolen for decades, which is people don't buy three-quarter-inch drill bits. They buy three- inch drill bits, they buy three quarter inch holes. And you have to understand even not just brand advertising, but as a personal brand, or in a meeting or an exchange, you have to understand what it is people are buying, right? You have to listen to them and know what they want. And not just make it myopic in one way. Yeah. So this is what I hand wrote in the front of the book when you did that. You shared what the story in the first chapter that you just shared here. And I, so I, you know, I put the book down and I thought, what is talk about talk selling? Is it communication skills coaching? No, it's actually selling confidence. That's what it is. Exactly right.

It takes a long time to get to that though, doesn't it? To peel that onion, to get to that word. I love the metaphor, peeling the onion. I've been dancing around that idea of confidence for years. Yeah. So, okay. The final rapid fire question, rapid fire question rapid fire question is there a podcast or a book that you've been recommending lately not not your books not your podcast not my podcast something else out there um i read so much oh my goodness oh yeah you have a book club yeah yeah and uh you can see i don't know if you can see behind me i can't see see myself on the thing, but I mean, that's just marketing books back there, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Let me think about that for one second. One podcast, it's got nothing to do with marketing per se, that I love is The Plot Thickens from Tartar Classic Movies. So Ben Mankiewicz, who I love, I just love his intro. If you ever watch that channel, he always does these really wonderful interviews and or he'll do great introductions to movies, old movies, telling you what happened,

what happened behind the scenes, et cetera, et cetera. He has this great podcast called The Plot Thickens, where every season is about a different filmmaker or actor or actress. And it is absolutely rivetingly fascinating. Oh, excellent. I will check it out and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's really good.

There's one more I'll say I'll talk to you about just very quickly. There's a podcast series called, I think it's called The Bank Robber Diaries. I may have that name wrong. But this whole series, they interview a real-life, modern-day bank robber. Oh. Who robbed, I want to say, I may have my numbers wrong because I listened to the series a year or two ago. He may have robbed like 20 banks in california now not some like now and he tell he talks about how he does it about how it was just

a fascinating look into a into a criminal mind that you would never normally get like here's how i case a bank here's how i make my getaway here's where i parked my car because i had to run out with all the money and i had to like it was like, just mind blowing to get inside the mind of someone like that. And then he's, he's now, you know, beyond that, he's eventually an FBI guy caught him, he went to jail. Now he's on the other side of that. And he's just, it's a fascinating story. I was curious whether they were interviewing him in jail. No, he'd already done his time. He'd done his time.

So is there anything else you want to leave with me in the Talk About Talk listeners in terms of storytelling or personal branding or advertising? To be a wonderful storyteller, in my humble opinion, I just, I think it's, you have to have an enormous sense of curiosity. I think you have to be curious about people, and things and why people do the things they do and, and influences in the culture. And, you know, again, that's about listening or asking the right questions. And I think really wonderful writers have this ability, Andrea, to be in a situation, then hover above it at the same time. So, you know, you're having an exchange with your car mechanic, but you're also watching it from above in the ceiling because you're watching the dynamics. Yeah.

I remember I was getting my car fixed. And I looked at the bill and I had a heart attack. And my mechanic said to me, you know what? It was really difficult, but, you know, I didn't even bill you for all our hours. It's you lose, I lose. And I thought, what a great way to sell a high bill was to use the term you lose, I lose.

And then as a writer, I hovered above that moment, you know, and I grabbed that moment to use elsewhere and and I am always making notes by the way of things people tell me or I make copious notes on every book I read and uh and I collect them all and the great thing about being digitized is you can search anything but I may not i may find a wonderful story that someone's told me andrea and i i may not use that story for five years but when i use that story it is the perfect story for that moment gosh so right now i collect stories so where do you put them it's on my computer it's on a hard drive in case my computer, you know, dies. But

yeah, even just book notes, I have probably 1600 pages of book notes so far. Wow. Incredible. Just pulling out little moments, little stories, little turns of phrase that I can attribute back to somebody. But like, you know, you don't buy three quarter inch drill bits, you buy three quarter inch holes, like all those little nuggets that just clarify. Okay. I'm going to sneak one last question in because like, you're basically serving this one to me. Have you created a language model for AI based on all of your books and all of your podcast episodes? Because I feel like people would pay money to ask Terry. I haven't done anything like that.

Well, there's an opportunity for you. AI is kind of, I've been stepping back from that just to see it unfold because it's so new to all of us. Yeah. Yeah. Well, who knows? All right. Well, I want to thank you so much, Terry, for sharing your stories and your advice

very much. I learned a lot and I have learned so much over the years. And now I'm thrilled to share that with the Talk About Talk listeners. So thank you. Well, this has been a terrific conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Isn't Terry great? If you want to hear more of his fantastic voice, check out his Under the Influence podcast. And I want to say thank you, Terry, for so graciously sharing your insights with us. As you could probably tell, I had a lot of fun in that interview. Did you catch where I realized I was telling Terry a story that I actually learned from him. My favorite elevator pitch of all time is, you know, the Sigourney Weaver Aliens movie?

Yeah. Do you know what the elevator pitch was for it? Jaws in Space. Yes. Yeah. I probably learned that from you, Terry. You may have. Pretty funny, but probably the best implicit compliment

ever, right? Repeating a story back to someone that first shared it with you. Anyway, now, as promised, I'd like to summarize three main points from our conversation. One, the necessary ingredients for a great story. Two, the power of overcoming obstacles or speed bumps to achieve success. And three, this idea of peeling back the onion. Okay, so first, storytelling. Terry says that there are two great things that make for a great story. First, it's structure. You have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And he says, a teasing opening, a sumptuous middle, and an inevitable end. It's just so satisfying. And second, he says we need the element of surprise. As Terry says, unexpected moments add

impact. And to be a wonderful storyteller, Terry also says you have to have an enormous sense of curiosity. Curiosity about people and about things. It's about listening and asking questions. The second point I want to reinforce here is the power of overcoming obstacles. This is the point of Terry's latest book, My Best Mistake. Terry talked about the example of how Steven Spielberg's Jaws mishap, i.e. the mechanical shark resting in the salt water, turned that movie into a long lasting cultural icon. He also specifically mentioned how weaknesses or obstacles or bugs of ours can become an integral and compelling part of our own personal brand. It really is about what makes us unique. The third thing I want to reinforce is this idea of peeling back the onion. It could be for your product brand or for your personal brand, but thinking deeply, peeling back the onion regarding what business they're in the safety business. And talk about talk is not in the business of communication coaching. Rather, it's in the business of elevating your confidence. Now,

ask yourself, what business are you really in? Okay, there are so many more rich points, but if I have to limit myself to three from this conversation, it's the ingredients for a great story, the power of overcoming obstacles, and this idea of peeling back the onion to determine what business you're really in. And that's it. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I put links to Terry's podcast and his books in the show notes, so please check them out. And I want to say thank you again, Terry. It was wonderful to meet you and I loved our conversation. Thank you so much for listening. Please let me know what you thought of this episode. Connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a DM. Talk soon. There you are, alone in your car, waiting at a red light. Suddenly, there she is, pressed against your window, holding a homemade cardboard sign. Can you really tell what it says about her? Don't let homelessness assumptions

get in the way of homelessness solutions. Go to canadacandoit.ca. Help the Canadian Alliance to end homelessness.