SNM069: 7 Storytelling Mistakes that are Turning Off Your Customers

speaker 0: 0:00 seven storytelling mistakes that air getting between you and your audience and what you can do to fix them on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot. The social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses joined over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

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One of the first pieces of feedback I got when I began this block was that my podcast episodes when I began sending them out was that I needed to start with stories I needed to open with an engaging story so people feel more connected to me. Listen, my earlier block post, I often went straight into the meat and now I try to be better by telling a personal story of something engaging to get people a little bit interested. Telling stories is not easy. It's a craft.

It's an art. There's a reason there are people who are professional storytellers. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a dying art. There aren't very many people travel from town to town telling verbal stories anymore, but we do come from very much an aural tradition. It's very much is the way we developed most of our story structure with the mark greatest joys of all time Work told stories. I am very much involved in different aspects of copyrighting in this part of the business.

And when it comes to copyrighting, it's very much about telling of stories, often telling the hero's journey, which is a particular type of story you can think of. Star Wars is the prototypical hero's journey that goes through the seven phases of becoming hero, discovering that your hero discovery of a hidden power, finding a mentor, finding your enemy, finding a challenge, overcoming the first challenge, these different phases and people chop up the hero's journey into different stories.

But you can pretty much fall of Star Wars is a pretty good example of it. There's several different variations, but we tell these stories in different places, and I listen to a lot of people looking for investment their businesses. I love listening to those where people have a new small business and they're pitching it. And that's the same thing.

That there's a idea of sending a pitch is that you want investors to put money in your company, and so you tell them a story to get them engaged in. Oftentimes, people want to get better and better. This and they spend thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring companies to design their pitch deck everything from their slides to the content of their stories. Because well crafted story can make you 10 times more money than a poorly crafted story.

And understanding some of the most common mistakes will help you. As you tell stories. Threat your block, website products and sales process is one of the most common mistakes is the attempt to shock the audience. We always want to grab everyone's attention and there's a balance. Sometimes in a movie you'll see something that's too far, and it's not the right genre movie. Sometimes you're watching a movie that's for kids.

And then they insert a storyline of subplot that doesn't affect the main story that has a Nintendo and shocking element. Often they slip in lately things about child abuse or things about other horrible things in that area. And it doesn't fit. Sometimes you What is that doing in this movie? I thought this was a kid's movie. Why does it kidsmovie have this? As much as those stories sometimes need to be told, they don't always need to be in a cartoon or a movie for Children.

That's not that type of thing. I want to expose my Children to. When I was younger, many parents thought a great movie to show their kids would be Forrest Gump, forgetting that in the very beginning of the movie, it shows the mom sleeping with school principal in order to get her son into the school. And it doesn't show a lot, but you can hear the noise. You can hear the kids listening to his mom doing something horrible.

Is that something you want to expose your Children, too? It's a fine movie for adults. It's no problem, but it's not something I want my five year old singing going. What is she doing with the teacher? I don't want my Children asked me those cups of questions. Movies have these scenes better shocking or that are over the top. And when they're too far, we then don't like the movie. There are certain times when different things are appropriate and certain times when things are not appropriate.

And in your story you'll often try to find the most extreme example. And this happens when we try to talk about positive negative things, you will see these cells on our commercials. Will they say, Oh, if you spend a week working on this project to make $500 million they always say these bigger and bigger numbers and because they're so unrealistic, they're trying to shock you with how big the number is, and then you go. It's not believable. It actually hurts the story.

So when you're trying to create those emotional way points in your story, it's very important to be more realistic in one of the ways that people do this in sales letters is, rather than saying $500 million will say 497 364 $178. They do a very specific number because it's more believe what something people connect with a little bit better by having something there that's a little bit Maur rial because no one gets a paycheck for a number ending.

In all zero who always get checks with a bunch of different random numbers in this gets taken up for taxes gets taken up for this and that. We expect our paychecks to be a little bit off center. We don't expect them to be perfectly zeroed in numbers in other ways of shocking. We don't always have to tell the most extreme story I try to when I share my different stories about my life. My experiences find a story that fits the rhythm.

What we're talking about, I I don't often try to shock you. In the previous episode, we talked about getting hacked or why you must back into website damage that could happen. And rather than telling a very extreme story, I simply told a few light stories about times when I'd had to deal with attacks on my website. It's very tempted to take that story and say Someone used my website too. Hurt someone else and do all those things.

You could make it a very extreme, very specific story that's very shocking and can't go down that path, but as much as your desire to shock. And it's something that we really want to do because we see it on television storytelling stuff all the time. Now it takes it too far and you lose the direction of the story. The second mistake is very interesting, an attempt to be very authentic. You end up giving too much information. Good story telling us about efficiency.

If you can tell the story in three minutes instead of 43 minutes is better with storytelling in sales letters all often write a very long sales script, and then the rest of the time is spent deleting as many sentences from it as I can. The shorter your sales messages, the short story is the better, especially with video sales letters.

You really want a message that's very short and that therefore people can absorb when you get into sales more and more, and you will as you begin building your business and you begin to experience more more sales videos, you'll notice that the shorter the video is, the more sales you'll make. If you ever really long video, not everyone stays till the end. You lose people every few minutes, so shortening the story, efficiency of the story using time wisely. It's very effective.

But sometimes you'll hear someone telling a story. They want to tell you everything about themselves, and they tell too many non related things about their childhood. I could tell you very extensive stories about dealing with issues. As a child, we all have stuff we dealt with as a child, but when it's not relevant, it doesn't fit. And I have certain episode specially episode might talk about dealing with depression, where I opened up about a lot of things for my childhood.

But in this episode it would be completely irrelevant. And what it makes sense was time SDO plug started. Talking about tough stuff is a child or stuff in my family. We all have stuff in our families, but it's not relevant, and it loses your audience as much as you're trying to be authentic. Instead, you've revealed too much you want to reveal just enough to get people engaged in the story, not so much that they start to go.

Why is this guy tell me his entire personal story? And it's, Ah, tough balance. This leads into our third story telling mistake, which is read over depth, where we want to tell everything about the story we tell five minutes about every character. Perfect example of this is a movie I watched very recently. Call it Suicide Squad. For the 1st 35 minutes, you're introducing characters. Each of the seven main characters gets about five minutes of introduction.

Now, if you've managed to sit through this entire movie and if you have I'm very proud of you. I barely was able to do it. It took me two separate nights. Thio, Get through this story. People always talk about how it's the worst movie ever made. All these other things. The main problem with the story I can tell you right now is breath over depth. They try to get you engaged with every character, but most of them are not memorable.

It all if you watch that movie, and I said, Tell me the names of all the characters. I bet you could tell me the names of two or less. I think I can name three, but I'm not 100% about the third name, and only because two of the characters I've seen in other movies or comics or cartoons before. So you have all of these characters and they did breath, and that's one of the biggest mistakes you could make a movie.

It's the same reason that every time they do a series of X Men movies that people were going to get disengaged by the later movies because they keep interesting. Too many characters. They go for breath and in your story, if you're telling too much Brett, which is very common, it's very tempting. You want tell people everything that happened, you'll have an ineffective story. It's better to go very deep into one story. How did it make you feel what really happened?

What was the experience off this single day of your life? Those stories are very, very effective. They're much more engaging as humans. We love depth. We want to know how is he feeling? What was he thinking? What happened deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper the fourth storytelling mistake is an attempt to mask failures or embarrassing moments. Sometimes in a story, you're the villain for your the person who got tricked.

Perfect example, I could have said, rather than admit that someone hacked my website and shoved in a much of pornography five or six years ago without me knowing I could have said happened to someone else I knew were saying something very generic because it's it's not very exciting or something that you won't admit to tell people that you got hacked. Your Web site got damaged. Stinks doesn't make you feel good. We don't want admit our failures.

Don't omit those embarrassing moments those times when things went wrong, because when we d'oh, we feel like it lessens ourselves. There's this thing in our society where we're obsessed with showing about how perfect we are and a lot of marketers in the same field of mere this way they never admit their failures. They never show any weakness.

It seems like since day one, they've been making a $1,000,000 a month, and I hate falling people like this because having been through this business for seven years, have been through a lot of experiences. I know every expresses, ups and downs. I've had very big months and very bad months. Over the past seven years, I've had days that were amazing and months that was brutal, and that's reality. It's a really business. It's a real journey, and you always have ups and downs.

I haven't had a month where everything was perfect since I started. There's always something that you could do better that you could succeed with. That you could have done and made more money, always make mistakes, never stake loses your money instincts. But we tell these stories. We act like I've never done anything wrong that has been perfect within. People can't connect with you.

The biggest mistake people make when writing a story and this is the number one reason movies fail is they create characters with no flaw. The second problem was Suicide Squad is that none of the characters has a flaw. And when I say flaw, I don't mean injury. Having a broken arm or being a mutant is not a flaw. It's a characteristic of flaw is I don't trust people.

Flaw is that I don't wanna talk to women a flaw is that I don't believe in myself the flaws that I'm shy, thes air attempts of character flaws and leave the type of character flaws that over the course of the story, the character comes over their flaw, as then achieves their victory. Perfect example. Harry Potter's flaw is that he doesn't believe in himself. He has to learn over the course of seven or 89 movies had to believe in himself. That's really the journey.

As much as he's fighting bad guys and everything else, there's an emotional journey. It's very important Have that and a circle back to suicide squad not to hate on that movie. But no character goes to an emotional journey. Their attempt to create the journeys, the flaws that they're criminals, and at the end they begin to care about humanity. But that's an incorrect application of the flaw, which is why we don't feel any engagement with the characters.

I can't tell you which characters live and die by the end of the movie. I think a couple of characters died, and I remember which once and I don't care because they didn't create because they failed to create a connection, and the connection requires a flaw. Really great stories. There's something wrong with the main character, and they spend the journey overcoming it. The early Jason Bourne movies are really good also.

That's because the original author only wrote three movies, and in those stories he's overcoming certain flaws. Am I good or evil? I don't know how to interact with people. I don't know who I am. That's his flaw. And it's a little bit of an injury the way Robert Ludlum writes that it's very much you're falling.

This character is trying to figure out who he is, trying to find out if he's good or evil on this journey, emotionally and intellectually, as much as he's fighting villains and everything else. And if you watch the movies, we watched the latest movie you may have noticed by the fourth movie because they've revealed his entire past. They tried to make it interesting by revealing one more layer of his past, and it's not interesting. You don't feel very engaged with the main character.

Even if you enjoy that movie and the actions fine, there's nothing wrong with the action scenes in the movie. The problem is that certain aspects of the movie repetitive, but also that the character doesn't show a flat. What's the flight? Doesn't was passed, Already learned is past the last movie. He doesn't know a little bit more of us past about his dad like that's such a small thing that it doesn't create enough engagement. That's why most people didn't feel emotion engaged with the character.

If you ask people why they liked or didn't like the movie, most people, they're not able to identify it because we're not trained to. But if you look at movies you didn't like, where you didn't engage with the character most of time, it's because the character showed no flaws. Flaws are actually good thing. They humanize you. The six mistake is stealing stories or cliches I first got in this business. Teaching men had to talk to women.

That's one of the first series of books I wrote before I begin writing books, teaching women How to talk to men and one of most common things is to teach men how to tell a story the structure of the story. And to do that, I would often tell my own personal stories and very interesting. I was one time in a bar in London that he overheard a guy telling a woman a story that it happened to me. Very strange. But that's what happens.

Unfortunately, people, instead of saying no, I'm teaching you The structure was right. This is his example. People sometimes memorize and repeat a story, and there plenty people in that industry who say Just memorize to repeat my stories. But that's not very conducive because then you never learned how to actually fish and you don't get to be a real self. And I most of my stories that I like to tell are about my family, about my sisters, and that's how I grew up.

I have three sisters, and so that's where a lot of my engagement went. And a lot of my first interactions with the opposite gender was through my sisters and through their friends, telling someone else's story. I don't mind people tell my stories.

I think it's kind of like a common why you think my story's so good you want to repeat it great, but it's very much a short path because eventually people find out that it didn't really happen to you now I'm is guilty of this is anyone else. I have definitely re told stories even on this podcast that didn't happen to me most of time. When I retell the story, I'm you tell us where someone else told me that I think is valuable.

And it's like I'm giving his apple that I overheard someone else say last week, an episode of you know, five or 10 episodes ago. In an interview, Derek Great. I repeated in the very next explode one of the stories he told me because it was very valuable and so sometimes repeat stories. They're very good lessons. We want to make sure that we don't do it too much.

What happens is we hear someone else's story about 1/3 party, and we forget what the sources and I often do. This. It's like, Oh, I heard a story about someone working with publisher, and this happened and you forget that you heard it. I forgot that I heard in the day earlier on my podcast recording. Not that it was something I read most of stuff.

I bring you guys a read and I do interviews so rarely I do like one a month or less that I simply forgot that was the source. But then later on her every all man, So I'm willing to admit it. That source was that it wasn't like a fully stole story about something happened in this life. But I've seen people do that as well. They repeat entire story to someone they await that happen to me, not you. What are you doing?

The way this really falls down is when this falls into cliches. You start telling a story about we're walking along the beach. Look back. There's one set of footprints. That's an old story. People tell over and over again one of these other things, right, And they get told over and over again. And yeah, they're kind of effective.

But if people have heard before that it becomes too much, it's better to create your own metaphor, scrape your own original stuff, don't fall into cliches or tell things that you've seen in 50 movies before. There are certain things that are really cool the first time you see in the movie. But when you see it 50 60 or 100 times you, I keep seeing the same trick.

One of the craziest things is if you've never watched Alfred Hitchcock movies, go back and watch just a couple of the big ones like North by Northwest. You watch this moving, you'll go. What is he doing? Stealing all the things I've seen all this before. But then you realize, Wait, no, he did it. First reason that such a great movie is that all of these very iconic moments from other movies are stolen from him or that stolen, but they're people copying it.

So we see the same twists over over here the first time. You see a very good twist. It's great. But if you see it over and over and over again, it starts to lose its value, its meaning. So you want to very much tell your own original stuff. This is why you don't need to buy openings or any of that stuff from storytelling. Service is their total waste.

You end up telling cliches, and the seventh storytelling mistake is the failure to understand the structure of a story. This is very, very important and unfortunately don't have enough time to teach you the entire structure of a story. But it begins by knowing the purpose of your story. Very big picture. Every movie has three acts. There's the introduction in period of self discovery. There's the training period in the second and then in the third section. The third act is fighting the villain. Now.

Not every movie is an action movie, but this covers any different type of genre. It covers pretty woman opening scene. The first get to know each other, freaking out who they are. Second scene. They began partying, kind of connecting and wondering if there's something really going on. Is it giving more than just a business relationship?

The third act is that about overcoming that end, ending up falling an actual love 123 So the three act structure is in pretty much every movie and movies that don't have it, or movies that miss the length of it are movies that wind up not liking lack of story structure, effects, books, movies, everything else. Justus much is it affects us telling our short stories, and that's really just the biggest picture of understanding story structure.

When you break out a story when you're working on telling, for example, a sale story when riding a copy writing when I'm copyrighting. I'm running of video sales letter. Entire story that we told me a video. That's something that's a 35 minutes. Story is longer than a TV show, isn't it? So I have two very much follow a strict structure now the way to learn structure. And I talked about this the cop writing episode, and you should listen to that one.

If you haven't, is you look for a version of this story that's similar to yours. If you're doing a story about weight loss, find a very good sales video about weight loss. Now you cannot steal words. That's plagiarism. Never do that. But stealing structures bind learning structure from someone else's. Fine go. Oh, first he talks about his childhood. Then he talks about overcoming his house. Then he talks about discovering a cure. Right? You have all these things, and of course, that's not the perfect structure.

That structure is actually quite long, and I have it written down in a file, but my structure is like 100 steps for that type of story. I like to break it down into really, really small pieces. Some people consider 12 or 13 pieces, and you could find tons and tons and tons of examples online or people teach story structure.

But the best way to learn it is to look for someone who's succeeding right now and replicate their structure and then write a better or as good story. That's true to you. There's no reason to steal someone else's stories, but to learn structure from someone else's fine, because that's how they learn from someone else, too. Learning the structure following the seven simple steps avoiding these storytelling mistakes will help you better engage with their audience and would increase how well your sales stories convert.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller, serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow.

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