Learn how to retell the same story without losing your audience. Start in the middle instead of the beginning, layer in sensory details, and read the room to know when to share vulnerable moments. Confidence matters more than sticking to the script.
Chapters
So how do you keep a story interesting to maybe the same group that's heard that story? And you've been in with that group for, you said, 14 years. It's like, okay, this is so good. Great question. Here's, here's, here's how I would respond to that. First thing that came to mind when you said that is start the story in a different place. You start the story, uh, in, in this example, start the story after the car crash, standing on the roof of the, of the car. Start there. I was staring down at the, the hood of the car and there was a shine on that, and I realized the shine was my blood. Start there. Yeah. Okay, people go like, no, wait a minute, he just went to the, like, the pinnacle, the magic moment of the story. And then, because when storytelling does not have to be chronological, so, so, you know, start the story in a different place, and people go like, oh, okay, let's hear this version of it. The other way to do it, if you tell a story sensorially, add different details. At different times, you know. And I've, I've, you know, we're using Brendan's story as a, as an example, but you know, there's times where he tells the story of opening the brochure and it said escape. Mm-hmm. But he doesn't tell that every time. He tells that at certain times. He probably reads the crowd, right time, right story, what pieces to, to put in there. And then I'd also say, uh, with this too, is trust, have confidence that when you change the story up, just these little tweaks to the story, that it's gonna be perfect for your audience at this time. Hmm. I've heard the same story 10, 12 times, maybe, probably more. But every time I hear it, it's like, oh, I got something different that time. Why? Because I'm in a different place to hear that story in a different place. But that might be good to remind your audience of that. It's like, you know, you've heard this, but you're going to get something different out of today because this is the story I'm going to tell. It's like, oh, okay. So, so it switches a little bit. And prepare your audience for that. I tell a story of being shy in high school, and you've heard me tell that story, but I can add different parts to that story. That, that changes things up. And as you know the story, part of it, I just told the story last week and I said, and I said, you know, I talked, I tried, I was trying to talk to the prettiest girl and I went up there and I talked to them and then they closed me off like the women typically do in college. And, and so I kind of broke through and then I fumbled through my words and, you know, they thought, oh, what a geek. And the room snickered. They laughed. And I said, well, that night I went home, cried myself to sleep. And that snickering made them feel like, oh, I was one of the ones in the room. I was on the wrong side of this story. And they could feel that. Now, it's really important that they don't feel pity for me. It was important for me to pull them into me. So then at that point, it's like, have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt like, like crying yourself to sleep? So they may not have. None of them in the— I asked if any of them were wallflowers. Nobody in the room was wallflowers. Like, oh, I'm alone in this room with this experience. So when they got to the place and snickered, I was like, oh, I could have expected that because I knew that they weren't wallflowers. But then I had to— then they couldn't feel pity for me because I cried myself to sleep. I grabbed them that way, but I was like, have you ever felt that way? Of course everybody has. And so now I made a common experience again. So there's those kind of different mechanisms that you can use to bring it alive for different— for the same audience in different ways.
