How to Steal the Stage with Magnetic Storytelling | Magnetic Storytelling for Entrepreneurs

Alas, poor Yorick, for I knew him well. We all grew up with stories, and forgive me if I've probably butchered a little bit of Shakespeare, but you'll find out why in just a minute. When we were kids, we were told that telling stories, or what we might have called porky pies in England— porky pies are lies in rhyming slang— telling stories was something we were told not to do. We were told to really be quite factual, and to tell the truth and to keep it clean. But as we get older and as we've got businesses, we're actually told to tell stories. We're told to get back into storytelling because it's the best way to build engagement with our members of staff, with our customers, and with our partners. And it's an art form telling a story. It's not just a long-winded narrative about something that you think is interesting and That's why I've brought an expert, an actor turned professional storyteller, onto the mic today. Peter Bray is joining us from Warwickshire, which is the home of Shakespeare, and he's at Leamington Spa. Peter Bray, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Jim. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, you know, I only did a snippet there of Shakespeare. I know that you could have done much more and much better than I did, but I wanted to introduce A little bit of my thespian skills, nothing compared to yours, because I know that you were on literally on stage for many, many years until you had a transformation and got into storytelling and helping business owners, entrepreneurs, and including people like medical staff how to tell stories. So Peter, we're going to talk about what makes a good story, what makes a bad story. I'm going to challenge you to tell your story in 6 words, the old Hemingway test. And then we're also going to talk about some mistakes people make when they're trying to build stories for their companies. Peter, you went from perfume sales to storytelling and consulting. Tell us a little bit about how that happened and your own story, and then we're going to get you to tell your story in 6 words.

Fantastic. Well, it all started, you could say, when I was selected by a wonderful tutor that I had in secondary school to go on a course that introduces you to drama school and the prospect of studying acting at a top drama school. And I was chosen because I kept on being put into school plays and goofing around lunchtime performances and stuff like that, which I very much enjoyed secretly, but I didn't show it because I didn't want to get bullied about it. You could get picked on for showing too much enthusiasm at that age. So I was, in my mind, going to do something very cool where I'd go to drama school and get taught how to be in the next Ridley Scott blockbuster with swords and horses and guns and just looking awesome and cool. And what actually happened was that I went through 3 years of vocational training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and then started a career as a young, bright-eyed actor in London where I was promptly put into plays. And some of my early performances will show you the extent of my delusion of what I thought I was in for. I was cast as a clarinet-playing dog in one of my first acting jobs. I was cast as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, where I got to wear an extraordinary dress in an all-male production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And that's how my career began. It was with Shakespeare and with theater, not movies or getting to play with guns or swords and horses. I accidentally totally fell in love with Shakespeare, which is not what I thought I would do as a small-town boy from southeast England. I ended up absolutely loving Shakespeare and getting more and more into it the more jobs that I did, and eventually going into tours around America. We went to Mexico, we went to around Europe, went all sorts of places performing Shakespeare. And then I started getting asked to teach the act of acting, the art of acting and storytelling. And then I started to teach storytelling itself. And somewhere along the way, I stumbled across while I was, as you say, working very similar to Joey from Friends, spraying reluctant department store visitors with perfume as they went past, trying to fulfill my sales quota, frankly. And I was really sick of it. And I was at a lunchtime break in a bookshop and a title caught my eye on the spine of a book on the shelves, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Retire early, escape the 9 to 5. And everything that I just wanted to do. And I read that book and got introduced to the world of entrepreneurship and marketing. And that started me off down a side path while I was an actor, where I started to get more and more into marketing, entrepreneurship. In between acting jobs, I'd build these little micro businesses and then totally forget about them when I went headfirst into the next acting job. And eventually that grew and grew until it took over from acting. got very tired of having to pack my bags and go where people told me to go to as an actor. So I'm now a full-time marketing consultant and storytelling coach who helps entrepreneurs, business owners to extract the stories that they need to extract to connect with their audience.

Okay, Peter. Well, so I did say to you, that I was going to challenge you to say that in 6 words, because one of the skills of being a podcast guest, or frankly, if you're on a Zoom call in a network meeting, is to not say what you do, but to give a story that anchors you in the mind of your audience. So I'm going to challenge Peter Bray here. Take that 4-minute summary of the last 10 years of your life and make it into the 6 words, which of course is what Hemingway did when he said, for sale, baby shoes never worn. The shortest story ever written. Peter, can you condense your life story into 6 words?

Tell beautiful stories, ex-actor, Declaims.

There you go. So I left the pause in. It was dramatic pause, but the point is it's not as easy as it seems to think of a story.

I'm sweating.

Stories, yeah, and stories take some time to work out. Now, Peter, I've invited you on the show because entrepreneurs often have got quite a long-winded story that loses an audience, whether it's investors or customers or, you know, listeners to podcasts or journalists. With your experience, and I'll put you on the spot there, but with your experience, what makes a compelling story, the kind that an entrepreneur should learn to tell?

That's a— that is the question. That's an excellent question. I'd say that is the golden question. And my answer is the one that earns you the trust of your best customers, your true fans, to put it in the words of Kevin Kelly's famous article, 1,000 True Fans. It's the story that hooks someone in first and foremost, because without attention, it doesn't matter what, how the rest of your story is. So it has to hook them in first, get their attention, earn their attention. Then it has to take them into a fascinating and rare and compelling world that they have— you help nurture an appetite in your audience for them to find out more. They have to find out more. They have to be compelled in forwards. They have to care and empathize. And then you have to take them to a satisfying conclusion. which satisfies all the questions that you've built up and sticks the landing, so to speak. It has to have an emotionally and intellectually satisfying resolution to that story with a message that possesses them. And one of the godfathers of story, you could say, in my opinion, Robert McKee, talks about how a story is an idea wrapped in an emotion, which I didn't love when I first heard of that. I thought, well, that's a bit cynical because I've spent 14 years living stories as an actor. That's— I'm on the inside. I respond to it on a gut level. And sometimes I kind of jerk away when I hear something articulated so casually. And actually, now I think that That entirely nails it. It's an idea wrapped in an emotion.

So Peter, there's a lot of talk for entrepreneurs of building your own story, and the, um, I think it's Campbell's Hero's Journey. How do you take this idea wrapped in emotion and make it into a story which has this idea of You know, a story arc. Can you give us an example, maybe in your own case or someone you've worked with, where someone could articulate that idea wrapped in emotion? Because that's a great theory, but me and my fellow listeners are going, okay, so that's great for an actor on the stage, but here I am about to go do a TED Talk or to go on a podcast or do an interview with the journalist. How do I go about making my, my idea wrapped in emotion into something I can actually say? that I can believe in?

Right, well, that's a process of extracting first information about who your audience is. So it's about deep diving into who you're talking to because that's going to dictate the answer to that question. What idea? What emotion? So the idea has to be something that is intellectually fascinating specifically to who you want to listen. It has to elicit curiosity, which is one of the main emotions that you can wrap a story in for business and marketing purposes. So really how you start that, start making those decisions about how to create your hero's journey is thinking about, well, what is the problem that this solves? What's the transformation that this story needs to deliver? And by deliver, I mean, I guess, what my audience has to resonate with a transformation. That's what, you know, if you're going on to say, I've got a thing that I offer that's valuable and you should listen and here's its story, then you have to know and be able to articulate the transformation that is inherent within that story, within your product, within whatever it is. And that can be on any level. It doesn't have to be a grand transformation. Tony Robbins is a big transformation where it's like, I will transform you into your full potential from the small place that you are occupying now, or whatever it is. But a burger stand would be, I will transform you from being starving and a bit drunk into belly full of really great food that, thank goodness for that, you'll feel better tomorrow because of that burger. Whatever level of story that is, you need to understand the transformation. So you need to know who, what the problem is that's at the beginning of that arc and what the transformation turns that problem into, what the resolution is. You need to know who has that problem and the details of them and what their world is made up of. What do they see every day as a result of that story? And, you know, often people use language that's in their words as the expert, how they solve a problem. But you need to understand what the world of your listener looks like in their words. And, you know, this is something as an actor, I was paid to step into the worlds of other people. And it's really a similar thing. You need to do your research as if you're an actor playing a part. to understand on a visceral level what that world looks like.

Peter, let me ask you then a question. Some of the most famous work that we have on stage or TV, including Shakespeare, was written— Shakespeare over 400 years ago. Shakespeare didn't have today's audience in mind, and yet it's still compelling. So You talked about getting to the mind of the audience, but plainly that playwright, you know, his mind is long gone. How do you marry up your own story with the narrative that the audience will find engaging? Because we can't just take their story, right, and be in their, in their world, because we've got our own story. And, and the whole transfer of value as an entrepreneur is I've got something that I've solved that you will also find solves your problem too. So how do you reconcile the need to have your own story and to make that resonate with the audience?

Yeah, that's, that's, that's another golden question because what you're looking for to answer that is the, the Fragments of universality, the pieces of the puzzle that transcend an individual's experience and resonate in a larger sense. For example, if I told you that I have a very particular dog toy in my house, I've got a greyhound, and that she has got this dog toy that she loves that's sharp and She chews it and she actually ends up making it sharper. And then she drops it around the house and then walks away. And I stepped on it and experienced the most excruciating agony in my foot and was hobbling, fell against the wall, bumped my tailbone on the floor, was rolling around, and it was sheer agony. Now, you could probably relate to that even though you don't have a dog toy the same as my dog's toy. So the details are different, but you can find the archetypal elements of story. And one of the ways you can do that and how I've run lots of storytelling workshops in the past is by getting people to find the stories that they are drawn to, their attention is drawn to, and then deconstructing it. with the setting. Who's in this story and who's it for? Who are the characters in this story? What's the location of this story? What happens? What's the main transformation that changes from beginning to end? For example, in that story, it's from I was in total physical peace, physical agony. That's the transformation. That's the exchange of values, as Robert McKee talks about it, the value exchange. That can go from positive to negative, negative to positive. I can talk about a story where I start off with my foot in agony and take this wonderful lotion and put it on my foot and I'm transformed into my foot being better than my other foot. That's a transformation that you can look at. So it's about extracting the archetypal elements that are universal and then wrapping them in your individual experience because that's That's the balance. That's why we're still hungry for stories. That's why Apple, Amazon Prime are still making stories. Haven't they all been told? Yeah, they have, but the details matter. The details are what we need to change and update to keep people fed. We've got one appetite for the archetypal same old stories. And they're not— in some ways, they very much are the same old stories. The Romeo and Juliet, 2 lovers, There's an obstacle to them being able to be together. And then they go through a journey and either it's a happy ending and they get together or it's a tragedy and they are irreconcilably separated. It's the same story, but the details matter. We update it over and over and over again. We take— how many remakes of Romeo and Juliet? How many non-remakes? People just doing the same script of Shakespeare. Thousands, hundreds of thousands throughout the ages, and we're still hungry for it. And that's because you can change the details, you can update it with setting, with characters, with music, with the spectacle, with the staging, with the style, with the delivery. All these things can make the same story unique, but you can borrow the same universal archetypal elements.

Okay, Peter, so thank you for explaining that. And I think this idea then that you've got some essential human conditions— love unrequited, a pain from, from comfort to pain, from happiness to grieving— these, if you like, emotional, emotional states that we go through. And then, if you like, the, the dressing up of those things are modern, urban, rural, group, individual, male, female. And that, if you like, translates that universal theme into something that's relevant to the audience, and it's how you package that. That's wonderful. Thank you for explaining that.

No, that's a great sum— that's a great summary.

Okay, well, I took it off your explanation, so that's great. There we go, just a bit of mutual, uh, confidence there. Any, any mistakes, Peter, that you see people making when they tell stories? I often ask my guests to tell us a mistake that they've made in marketing, but we haven't a kind of a deep dive into story with you, because as a story consultant, I think it's too good an opportunity to miss. So any mistakes that you've seen people make when it comes to telling their story?

Yeah, uh, it's, it's the opening. Uh, often there's, often there's a great story hidden in there, but the opening doesn't let people get anywhere near it. You lose people. People do judge a book by its cover. I can't remember the amount of messages, marketing messages that we're exposed to per day, but the last number I remember hearing about was something about 5,000 marketing messages a day, bids for our attention. So the market's more cynical than ever. And if you If you underestimate that opening to your story, then all that wonderful work that you've put in is very likely to be wasted, to not have the attention it deserves. And you can earn that attention with things like practicing frameworks. For example, time, place, tension. That's a great simple way. So, The time, it was midday. The place, I was in the middle of a maximum security prison in Utah State. And tension, it's not where I was supposed to be. Here's what happened. So, you create a really clear picture in someone's mind of where it is, what's happening in a very practical and concrete way, And then you introduce the tension. And sometimes people skip straight to— they try and just get some clickbait curiosity opening line, and they miss the practicality, or they start and underestimate the amount of curiosity it takes to break through people's attention guards.

That's wonderful. So time, place, and tension are 3 ingredients to a great opening, and could those be switched around? Could you have tension? I shouldn't have been there in the first place. It was a Thursday at 3 o'clock, Utah Penitentiary. Could you, if you like, mix and match the order?

Yeah, you can, you can, you can. I would say that that is— that's exactly what you should explore, and it's exactly what you should look to deconstruct in stories that capture your attention. So I, you know, my philosophy is that there's no rules, there's only principles. And once you understand the principles, once you understand why these things are there, then you play with them. And then you do that by respecting the form that already exists. And you can shortcut that by looking at what's being successful. So you can, there's all sorts of AI tools that you can use to see on LinkedIn, for example, with creators, what's their most successful, what's their most viral post. And you can find that and you can look at why. You can just study the opening lines of the most viral pieces of content or ads that you notice, you keep seeing and you keep seeing over a long period of time. Well, if they keep on spending money on that ad, then it's doing something. And so you might want to deconstruct and look at how did they open? Is there time? Is there place? Is there attention? Is there a story? Maybe it's not so much a story. Maybe it's a story in a different way of, if you have this problem, and that's how they hook in the attention, they go straight for the— there's no dressing of place and setting. They're going for the transformational story in the bare bones and practical, do this, do that, and then you'll get this outcome. That's still a story, but it's changing the setting.

Peter Bray, storyteller extraordinaire. If there's a number one tip that you would give us, because it's such a big topic and we don't have unfortunately any longer— the curtains will fall on us, if I could carry that analogy through— what would be your tip? What would be your tip for entrepreneurs?

Yeah, my tip would be to start telling more stories in public. Show your work. Work this out by publishing more, and that can be if you've got an email list That's just a marvelous way to have that interaction, to talk to your email list, find out their stories, tell their stories, watch, tell stories that have a great opening, that have a point and a moral that's valuable for people to pay attention to and delivers value when they're finished reading. And notice what gets responses. If you don't have an email list, do it on social media. Start telling and publishing stories. If you don't want to tell stories about yourself to start, well, look at your reviews, your best customers, tell their story, look at their transformation. Where did they start? Why did they need your solution in the first place? And if you don't know that, ask them, have conversations, interview them and say, what made you—

where were you?

What did your world look like? before you started using this? And what was the tipping point that made you take action and say, I need whatever it is?

Peter, that's great, great advice, really. And so often you find people will post what they've done or they are posting what they do. And you see this a lot when you do a networking event, people explain what they do as opposed to coming up with some kind of a narrative that anchors that person in the mind of the person who's listening. Peter, I always ask for a book. Should I say no Shakespeare allowed to you? A book or podcast?

Yeah, you should. You should definitely.

It is wonder that enraps me thus, as I remember rightly from Twelfth Night, or he dost bestride the narrow world like a like a colossus. Bit of bit of Julius Caesar there.

My gosh! I I mean, I never knew you had it in you. That's really impressive.

Well, but that's the joys of Google. I have to confess, I. I was actually on stage with my sister in a production of Twelfth Night, and we were the twins. Oh, you were the twins? Which is why I remember the, uh, and yet 'tis wonder that enraps me thus. Oh, I love that play.

I've been in it and directed it, and it's marvelous.

It was wonderful. And I had a lovely blonde wig so, uh, so that I would look like my blonde sister.

Yeah, fantastic.

Which my grandmother didn't recognize, but that's another story, Peter. That's another time, place, and tension moment. How did I resolve that? Peter Bray, your book or your podcast, no Shakespeare allowed.

Yes, I would say read Story by Robert McKee and ignore the breakdown of all the genre bits if that's slowing you down, but it's an absolute— you'll see that every film you watch, every book you read, you'll see it in different light and it's— I found it profoundly transformational and moving. That's, that's my, that's my recommendation.

That's a wonderful one. Peter Bray, I'm glad that you left the perfumery. Probably the women being sprayed by you were probably quite happy that you're no longer there either. But if you want to find out— find you in Leamington Spa, how can they do that?

Yeah, well, you can, uh, try me on my website at peterbraymarketing.com, and there's lots of wonderful resources that you can download, and you can see how I tell stories in my emails to my email list to create that connection.

Peter Bray, thank you for getting a connection with me today.

Thanks, Jim. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

It'd be my pleasure. My story is Plane Jump: Entrepreneur's Journey in Progress.

That's amazing. There's so much—

what do you think?

Time, place, and tension. What happened? What's the plane jump?

Oh, were they—

dramatic questions.

Dramatic question. But we've got to say, the curtain has fallen, the matinee is over, the ice cream cups are being picked up off the floor, uh, as Peter Bray and I have to leave the stage. Exit left, followed by a bear. Peter, we'll take over. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Jim.

Okay, well, what a story. Is such a massive topic, and I wanted to have Peter on to explain how it can work. But you can see how difficult it is as well to condense your story into something. Peter used 3 to 4 minutes of a 30-minute interview to tell his story. That's great, but it means we have less time for the work that he can do with you and me. So bear in mind, time is so important, especially if you're giving interviews. Get an engaging story that has time, place, and tension in any combination that you seek. If you've enjoyed this time and place and conversation with Peter Bray and myself, do please leave a review. It all really helps. And share this with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.