106. Storytelling for Small Towns (Part 2)

Everyone, we are back with Phil Eich from Storyville to have you get the beautiful opportunity to listen to part 2 of Storytelling in a Small Town. Phil's process, by the way, he talks about this from a principle standpoint. There's principles of telling good stories. He tells us what those main principles are, and then he gives exact step-by-step instructions as to how to start this in your community. And this is regardless of your size, regardless of your budget. The thing you have to have is a heart for people and you have to be mindful and thoughtful about it. As a person who values this deeply, I too was just blown away by the simplicity of it and the whole thought of like, okay, I need to challenge myself to do this a bit more clearly and with a bit more intention. So man, enjoy, soak this up, these super simple strategies that he offers, and he is really clear about how to do it. Because he wants everybody to tell better stories and we want everybody's small towns to grow. And this is a huge component. There is such a tie between communities that are willing to tell their stories and communities that will be the kinds of places that people love to call home. So without further ado, here is part 2 of our interview with Phil Eich from Storyville. Well, hey, Phil. Welcome back. We're talking part 2 of how to tell stories better. In small towns. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm excited that you wanted to do part 2 because what I hated when I was a teacher, used to be a middle school teacher, you go to these conferences and you sit for an hour and this teacher, fellow peer tells you for an hour about all of the amazing things that they're doing in your classroom or in their classroom. And then there's like 5 minutes left for a Q&A and you leave having no idea how to actually do it. Like, it sounds like a great idea. I believe you that it works. But man, I am overworked. I work 18 hours a day. I have no idea how to do this thing. All I want is like a step-by-step process and I never want to be that. And so I'm excited about diving into the practicalness of community storytelling.

I am telling you, man, if there is something I know about our audience, it's that they love them some steps, right? Don't we all? Just like, what do we do and what do we do next? And what do we do next? Okay, so I'll just say it. If you haven't, if you're listening to this and you're like, what are they talking about? The previous episode that went live before this one, we talked about the why of storytelling. I think it's super important that we spent as much time as we did kind of digging deep into the why, because frankly, it's become a buzzword. And whenever storytelling or anything, frankly, becomes a buzzword, it loses its power and it gets diluted down. In the marketplace, in practicality. And I don't want this to lose its connective juicy tissue. Like there's something so visceral about capturing the holistic person that's embracing the thing, right? Especially in this super noisy world. So if you haven't listened to the previous episode, we encourage you to do that first because Phil was the person that I was introduced to through a Facebook group, which again, is super cool. And for me, again, I have kind of a lens and a perspective on these things personally, but it's all about people. And so if we can connect with people, grab their hearts, grab their minds, grab their souls, and grab their bodies— and I don't mean physically grab their bodies, but like envelop all of that in the way we tell a story about what they can experience— we have such a better chance of capturing them in a way that makes them fans forever. So I don't know, Phil, if you wanna do any like recap of that outside of what I just said, but today is the how. The last episode was the why.

Yeah, I would just encourage people to go back and listen to the why, because while it is tempting to jump into the how, just tell me how to do it, give me a template, like just tell me what to do. The why really underlines everything that we're gonna talk about. Today. And on top of that too, like, if you understand the why of community storytelling, you then can proceed with your own kind of community storytelling. I do one kind of community storytelling. It's what I do. It's my wheelhouse. It's my bread and butter. It's what I do for communities across the country. But as you start doing this work, if you understand the principles involved, you are then are able to apply it in different ways. You're able to apply it to your own community. You're able to apply it to things outside of, like, community marketing. You can apply it to everything that you do because you understand the principles. And so take the half hour or however long that episode was, listen to that first, then come back and listen to this.

I also just want to share, you know, my previous background before I got into like community development specifically was corporate development. Like, how do we help companies be successful? And so I just want to share that there's this kind of premise of like, we are a certain thing. So it's a be, which leads to the do, which leads to the get. Okay? So we are a certain way. We have core beliefs, core values, core principles, to use Phil's word, that leads into the things we choose to do, the actions we take, the stories we tell in this particular case, right? And then we get something from that. We get results. We get more people in our organization. If you're a company, maybe you get top talent. Maybe you get additional customers. So for me, the reason this is so important is because it's a values-based proposition. And again, Phil uses the word principles. Choose beliefs, choose values, choose principles. I don't really care what you decide to call them. I think they have a similar feeling, right? They're just these core guiding things that you say, this is who we are. And you have to know that because otherwise what you're going to do is a whole bunch of actions that some other guru, some other person told you to do. And if they don't flow from you naturally, they're not going to get you the results you want. Even if a guru of the highest order told you that it's the thing to do.

I love that you're going on this rabbit hole because there is a great quote I love by Harrington Emerson, and he was an engineer like all the way back in like the early 1900s. I think he died in like 1931. And because I'm obsessed with this idea of principles, his quote is— it goes something like, "As to methods, there might be a million, but principles are few. But the man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods." Oh, I love that. Yes.

So I've never heard that quote, and I like live in this world, so that's awesome.

The last sentence kind of outlines what you're talking about too, is the A man who tries methods while ignoring principles is sure to have trouble. And like, when we talk in our culture about like gurus, like telling you what to do, telling you what to do.

Yeah.

If you don't understand why they're telling you those things, you're gonna try adopting some kind of thing that just does not apply to you, and you're gonna start it and you're gonna quit it, or you're gonna do it for a year and it's gonna lead you down the wrong path. And we'll talk about that a little bit today in that there's rules to community storytelling because community storytelling can really benefit your community, but it can also end up getting you into a lot of trouble if you don't understand the why behind how to go about it. It's not as simple as just following your passion and walking out into the street and interviewing someone and then posting their story on the internet and the whole entire world loves you because it's not quite that simple. And so that's what we're going to talk about first, are kind of these rules behind storytelling, and then get into the how.

Yeah, I love this so much. And that you and I spent a lot of time in the previous episode talking about the why. That is it. It's that it has to come from a genuine, authentic place of belief for you to be the person that does the things, whatever the things might be, whether it's interviewing a person or writing a person's story. And then that eventually dovetails into what you're hoping your community or your organization gets from that effort. And again, it's just to me, like the more digitized we become, and it's ironic, right? Like Phil and I are hundreds of thousands of miles apart and we're having this conversation via Zoom, right? It's amazing what technology has allowed us to do, but without the principles of why you and I are doing this, Phil, this would be a completely futile effort, right? Yep. It's hard to sometimes, like the way our world is moving to just like anchor back down to principles and values and beliefs. But I personally feel like there's never been a more important time to do that if you really want to separate yourself or stand out from the crowd in a way that you capture the people that feel, think, and believe the same things that you do.

Yep. Agreed.

Okay, so let's get into it. How do we do community storytelling?

So before the do, yeah. There are some ground rules because like I said, you can do this really well. You can wield this power for good or unknowingly you can wield it for evil. So rule number one is that your town, village, city, whatever it is, it already has a story. You're not using storytelling to rewrite the history of your community. You're not going to use storytelling to make your community seem like something it is not. You're using storytelling to fully embrace the story that your community has already written and is currently writing. That's an important point because sometimes we approach community marketing like, well, how can I dress our community up? How can I erase all of the bad things that I think will distract people or detract from our community or scare them away, like all these warts and things like that? Well, marketing is a little bit of that. It's important that you are able to really identify the soul of your community, and that's what you're trying to tap into. If you are a 1,000-person community with one retail location in the entire place and you try to wield storytelling like, well, we're going to paint it as the hip new place with 1,000 shops, people are going to call bullshit right away. They're going to see right through it. You're going to lose the trust of citizens. And so that's rule number one. Your city already has a story. You're using storytelling to uncover that and then amplify that story to people.

Can I ask questions about these as we go? Or will it be easier if you lay them all out?

Yes, please. Ask questions as we go.

So here's my question about this one, because man, do I think this is important. Because we never want to lie in our messaging. And yet I myself have actually said out loud, we can decide who we want to be, right? So can you help walk me even through, Phil? So this is where our listeners get to hear that you and I are talking about this in real time. You and I have not had a big long conversation about this particular belief. So for a person like me who wants to see our community shift in what I, of course, what I believe is a positive direction. Let's even say from the standpoint of like our openness to new people and new ideas, let's just use that as an example, right? When does it become aspirational versus like, which I think is positive, like this is where we're headed, this is where we're going, this is who we wanna be versus a, an outright lie. Like we are an open-hearted and open-minded community. I don't know that I would say that about my community. Like currently right now. Mm-hmm. And it's not because we're filled with a bunch of bad people. This particular thing I landed on is a real challenge. I just think like that openness to seeing things and holding space for people that think and feel and believe differently than we do. But where does that line in storytelling come, Phil, between being aspirational versus feeling like you're actually lying or manipulating your audience to believe something that's not true?

Two parts to that answer. One, I was interviewing somebody in Saginaw, Michigan for a story, and he used the phrase that we are amplifying our best.

Love it. I love it.

And I'm obsessed with that phrase because that's true. Like, it's amplifying our best. It's not trying to fake our best. It's not trying to make our best something that it is not. It's taking the best our community has to offer and then showing that to people. There's nothing dishonest about that because we as human beings do that all the time. I don't walk, I don't meet a stranger and like, hey, how are you? It's like, I suck.

Like, I hate everything.

Just like, I'm so— yeah, like, I'm right. I don't love my family like I should, and I'm lazy at my job. We don't do that. We amplify our best. If we're funny, we double down on being funny. If we're charming, we try to be more charming. Like, that's how human beings interact. So there's nothing dishonest about amplifying our best.

Love that.

The second part of that, with it being aspirational. So say that you have identified in your community, we need to be a little bit more open-minded.

Mm-hmm.

We need to be more accepting of people of diverse backgrounds, whether that's cultures or lifestyles or whatever it is. You don't have to explicitly come out and say, "We are an inclusive community," because that may not necessarily be true. But what you can do— I don't want to say subversively use storytelling, but I'll say it. Subversively use storytelling to help nudge the community in that direction. So for instance, say that diversity, equity, inclusion is a value you hold as storytelling, and it should be, but your community at large, that's not necessarily something that you would peg them as like, yes, that's something that we value as a community. In your storytelling, in the stories that you select, more often you're trying to amplify the stories of people of color or people of different backgrounds or religion, whatever it might be.

Yeah.

And so by doing that, well, simultaneously you are one nudging your community in a direction of being more open because you're amplifying these stories and saying that person is an amazing person who gives our community so much, their story deserves to be told. They are a person of color. And so now you can start showing the community the value of people like that. On the outside of it, as a person that may not necessarily know your community, I'm seeing your stories that you're pushing out of your community highlighting people like that. And so now that's giving me the impression that, okay, this is a community willing to create a platform to amplify these stories. And so you don't have to explicitly come out and say it because it may not be true and it's really easy to counter. But under the surface, you can use storytelling to nudge that social change and actually make that change happen.

That's a perfect answer, which is like unfair to say, but it's such a great answer because this, I think, is the conundrum. Some of us, I don't know how many people that listen to our episodes struggle the way that I struggle sometimes. You know, I'll be honest about that, right? That I'm in this space of just, I want to crack the minds and hearts of our community open. A bit, right? Diversity, equity, inclusion is a big deal to me. I think it means a lot for the future of our community. And yet when it comes to storytelling, I never want to use it in a manipulative— like you said, subversive. You simply meant like a, almost a behind the scenes, like, as long as you're being honest about the stories you're telling, you are representing the truth of your community. And I think that's what you're saying, right? So honestly, great answer to that. It's fantastic. Okay, so what's number 2?

Rule number 2 is that your goal as a storyteller is to tell a good story, not to sell. That's where so much of the storytelling buzz gets it wrong because they do use storytelling as a way to manipulate people. I'm telling you this story because in the end I want you to pay me $300 for this 60-minute online course, or I'm using storytelling to get something out of you. Or we rob stories of their power by doing something that covers the power of the story. And I'll give you an example. Sometimes like banks or credit unions, financial institutions will call me in and they'll say, hey Phil, we'd really like to do some human-centered marketing for credit unions. Like, heck yeah, man, it can definitely apply in that. And so I'll go in and I'll interview all the employees and get their stories and just beautiful stories. And I'll take these— not patting myself on the back— gorgeous portraits of them. And then what sometimes they do is I will pull up Facebook and they've posted that story and they have smashed their logo all over this portrait of this person. And now you have Phil Starwind Credit Union logos all over the place. No, don't do that. Don't try to sell. Let the story stand on its own. You don't have to ruin it by saying like City of Philville in the corner or like all this stuff. No, just tell a good story and the story will work its magic itself. Don't force it. Not everything needs a call to action. I know that's marketing.

Yeah, that's such a marketing thing. Yeah.

Oh, how dare you say that? No, you don't need that. And now the call to action could be Phil's retail boutique is open from 8 to 11:30 every single day. Does that make sense?

We'd love to see you. Right. Yeah. Cheapening the story with us with an overt sales message.

Yeah. Just tell the great story. And then at the end, bridge the digital divide between reading the story and real-world action by saying this business is open here, or it's located here. That's all you need. Don't try to make it into a pitch. Rule number 3: the less you, the better. Sometimes people get scared away from community storytelling because they're like, I'm not good on camera, I'm not good at writing, you know, all this other stuff. Here's the thing: we don't want to see you anyway. We want to see the thousand other people within this town. It's not Phil's Guide to Bay City, Michigan. Let people tell their own stories. Show different kinds of people telling their stories, experiencing different things, going to different events. Sometimes what it turns into, it's like Phil's the host of the show and then people start tuning it out because maybe people don't like me. Phil talks way too much, right? He's really not that funny. He's got this weird little chuckle he does and they tune it out. And so try to figure out—

I'm worried about our listeners right now. Yeah, I was gonna be like, you've been like a podcast, because it definitely feels sometimes like But I try really hard. I mean, this hits me like in all the feels.

Well, this is a little bit of different platform, but when we talk about exactly how I tell stories is a great way to do it, in that you are not like a journalist coming in and reporting on somebody's business. You are just letting that business owner who has run that business for 30 years and overcome so much, you're letting them tell the story. It's not about you, it's about them. And so when we get into more specifically the how. It's a great way to remove yourself from the story. And then finally, rule number 5, you need to believe that stories can change the world. Yes, it's about numbers and reach and getting likes and engagement on social media or website visitors and all that other stuff. But I'm gonna tell you that the thing that is going to make you do this work or motivate you to do this work and really incorporate this kind of work into the lifeblood of your community is the belief that stories can change the world. And I'll tell you why. Because how do we experience our world? Yes, it's through the internet.

Mm-hmm.

But I'm gonna say that that's mostly a form of entertainment because most of the things we consume ourselves with on the internet do not directly affect our lives. They take up our time. And they occupy our time and they, like, things that we're interested in. But what is the primary way we experience the world? It's the house I wake up in, the what I see when I walk out the door, the job that I go to, the people that I meet at my job, the people that I meet socially at the restaurant or at the grocery store or whatever it is, the streets that I drive in. If we believe that stories can change people's perceptions of their communities, we then change the world because perception is everything.

Right?

Perception is everything. And so we don't have to change the entire world. We can change one person's world by telling a great story, telling 10, 100 great stories. And then by doing that, we shape their perception of their community. And then improve their lives. We have changed their world because we've changed their immediate community. You have to believe that's true.

I do believe that's true. Already you've delivered a ton of value. Again, this is almost the why. It's like the why part too, right? Like the 5 principles of storytelling. If you don't believe these things, you're never going to tell a story that lands the way it could.

Yeah, you're not going to tell a story that lands the way it could, or you're just going to quit. 9 out of 10, like, everybody wants to riff on Humans of New York, and it's like People of Fort Wayne or Citizens of Indianapolis or whatever. I'm picking on Indiana, sorry, but yeah, you're good. And then what happens is they get 2 or 3 weeks into it, and then they were posting every day, and then it turned into every other day, and then it turned into once a week. And then lo and behold, you look at it and that page was started in 2016 and hasn't been touched since. And what I think people are missing is the belief that sustained effort over time is the thing that really makes this work. It is work. It's a simple process that we're about to get into, but you have to be motivated by something deeper than just, I'm going to get a lot of Facebook likes, or I'm going to be the next Humans of New York and every single one of my posts is going to get 300,000 likes. That's not going to happen. So you have to be motivated by something different than that. That?

Well, the long game. That community development is a long game. It just, by its very nature, most of the conversations, decisions that I'm a part of today is— so, you know, that whole metaphor of like, I'm planting a tree that I'll never get to enjoy the shade of, right? That's— that is what we are talking about. And storytelling is a component of that. It still comes back to, is it a meaningful seed? Am I planting it in fertile ground? And are the conditions ideal to help that thing grow. Um, and so I just think this is such an overlooked, like overhyped and overutilized tool, if that makes sense. Right? Like everybody hypes it. It's because they're like, oh, if we just tell better stories, we'll be able to turn this on and this piece on, and this will happen and this will happen. Not immediately. And you have to believe in what you're doing. And those 5 principles really set us up for that. So that's, I mean, you're totally speaking like my heart's centered language here, Phil. It's perfect. Okay, so if we go, okay, check, check, check, check, and check, like we believe these 5 things, what does this actually look like in practicality for the average person?

So let's, I'm going to give you how to do a Storyville story 101. I'm gonna describe it in words. I would suggest going to storyville.substack.com to look at examples of it so that you can see it. But it's relatively simple, so I'm gonna describe it in words, but go to Storyville Substack, check it out. It's where I kind of post examples of it.

Okay. And if you're, if you're in your car listening, by the way, don't worry about like trying to capture that. Just go back and check out the show notes. It will be linked right there for you. Yeah. So go ahead. Easy peasy. Yep. Easy peasy. Go ahead, Phil.

So if you are familiar with Humans of New York, imagine Humans of New York meets civic marketing. If you are not familiar with Humans of New York, The kind of stories that I create are quote-based stories. So they are stories that are only told through things that people I have interviewed have said. It's not like a news piece where Phil in the third person narrator says, "On a dark and stormy night, I walked in," like none of that. And with like quotes interspersed. It's 100% quotes. And then a company, if we're talking about social media, For that post, it's a portrait of the person. 9 times out of 10, it's a portrait of the person looking directly into the camera. And so you have a quote-based story, a person telling their story in their own words, accompanied by a portrait of them. They're looking typically straight into the camera. So that's the kind of story that we are about to create. So how do you go about doing this? Step number one is you have to create a plan. Sometimes people call it an editorial calendar. If you're new at this, that editorial calendar could be 2 or 3 stories long. These are the next 3 stories that I'm doing. If you're relatively experienced, it could be a year's worth. Every single week you're telling a different story. But why would you have to start there in story selection? It's because the order and the frequency of the stories you tell is a story itself. And I'll give you an example. And the example I give the workshops that I do, say that you live in a community that is 50% Black and 50% white. Cool. The first 10 stories that you do, like, oh, I'm going to do this business and I'm going to do this business and this is a new business and this is an old business and I'm going to mix in some retail and then I'm going to focus on the city manager, all these things. And you tell the first 10 stories and you're like, yeah, this is really cool. I did 10 stories. And then all of a sudden you start getting these messages and these comments on your Facebook page. It's like, why aren't you featuring anyone of color? Or this doesn't look at all like the community that I live in. And lo and behold, you have 9 out of 10 stories featuring only people who are white. Now you might have— it was probably unintentional because you're just looking at businesses or like, this is a cool idea. This is a cool idea, but you didn't plan it out. And so what happened is you fell into this pothole of telling the wrong story by the stories that you choose to tell. And so that's always my encouragement. Don't just run out into the street and run into any random business and just, "I'm gonna be a storyteller right now." You have to come up with some kind of plan and say, "Whose story am I telling? Are they a business? Are they a government person? Are they Main Street? Are they an individual? What demographic do they fit?" You could fall in the trap of telling 10 stories only featuring men, obviously not your entire community, and you were just grabbing stories, but the message that you're sending to the community over time is this is only a place where men make things happen, and that's not true. And so pick your stories. It could be the first 2 stories, the first 5, the first 10, and then look at who they are, who do they represent in the community, what are they doing, what kind of story, and that will help inform your decisions going forward. If you pick the first 3 stories and you live in this community that's 50% white, 50% Black, and the first even number, the first 4 stories, only feature people who are white, you know that you have to take 2 of them, put those later on, and then feature 2 stories of people who are Black because that represents your community. Yes, go ahead.

Uh, yeah, I would even ask you again, going back to my question of if there are certain shifts that community-wide we're trying to make. Like in my community, the aspiration is that we would become more inclusive. What really informs the plan of your stories is what message you are trying to impart, knowing that you're still selecting stories of true people, real stories, real authenticity, right? Like, it's not lying. We really need to think about that. I think that is so important because do you know how easy it would be for me in a— town of 1,800 in rural North Dakota to only highlight all people that are white of German descent. I mean, my gosh, like, just continue on down the road, right? And yeah, there's 100% is a lot of that, but there are also fantastic stories of people that have found their way here through whatever mechanism or whatever vehicle, right? And we get to think about that, like, what What do we want these stories to represent about us? I think that's so important. And I could see how easy we would fall into that trap of just being like, go out and talk to the people that are willing to tell their story.

Yep.

And then you end up kind of unintentionally misrepresenting either what you're trying to be or who you really are. Yep.

So I can see that.

Absolutely.

And it is important to point out that your community demographics also influences this. So you may not live in a community where it's 50/50. You might live in a community where it's 95% white, 5% people of color. You're not, in your storytelling, most likely going to be able to hit 50/50, but you can represent your community by making sure that you are reaching into different demographics and saying, I need to do very specifically and very intentionally reach into that 5% to tell those stories because those are important stories to tell. So that 50/50 is just an example.

Yeah.

But it is important to say, whose stories am I telling? Story selection has to be an intentional thing. It can't just be random.

Right. Love it.

So that's really step one. Choose your first, let's say, two stories. Cool. Well, after you've selected your first two stories, you are going to download onto your phone the app Otter. Otr.ai is the website. If you're on the App Store, you're just going to type in Otr and it's going to come up and it's going to say like Otr meeting notes. You create a free account and then you open it up. And what this app does is that when you sit down to do a little conversation with whoever you're doing the story with, you will take out your phone, you will open up Otr and you will hit record and you will put it on the table. And as you're talking, what Otr is doing It's recording the audio of your interview for reference later on, but it's also automatically transcribing your conversation for you. When I started doing this work, I bought a transcriptionist pedal, which is this little pedal that you hook up to your computer with a left and right pedal. Yes. And so I would go in—

by the way, the company—

it's like 6 years ago, 7 years ago, probably.

Fantastic. Yeah.

And so I would record like an hour and a half long conversation. I would use this little transcriptionist pedal to fast forward and rewind the audio as I was transcribing it. It would take me probably about 6 hours to transcribe the conversation before getting to the editing. What Otter will do is will transcribe it for you after you stop recording, it will upload it to the cloud. So when you walk back to your office or your home computer and you open up your account, it's all right there. It's transcribed. You can click on a word and it'll start playing the audio for you in case it messes up. Now the transcription's about like 70% right. Yeah. It's not copy paste ready. Don't just hop in Otter and expect to be able to copy paste it into Facebook. You do have to do some cleanup and we'll get to that in a second. But Otter is a game changer. And so after you've decided on your stories, download the Otter app and then you're off and running.

Can I just say I just used Otter today?

Oh, really? For the first time?

No, no, no, not for the first time. I've used it for as long as I think it's been an app. I want to remind everybody that I'm a verbal processor. So I often use Otter to talk out blog posts because then it has this cadence of how I speak. There's something just super cool about that. It's going to take out, like I just said, an um, or I'll say like, which is natural and vernacular. You can keep those in or take them out. It doesn't matter. So that's that 70%. Mm-hmm. And it doesn't hear every word perfectly, but man, it is way easier because what I often find, and this again is just this tip for people that are telling stories, right? When you're trying to convert dialogue into written word, we end up polishing it up in this really weird and like stuffy, stuffy way. Mm-hmm. And it doesn't read the way that we would speak at all. Mm-hmm. And so this is really help. I mean, Otter is super helpful for people that like have a personal brand too. If you're trying to make sure that your brand sounds like you, talk into Otter and let it capture your essence. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

It's a great feature. And what I want to say here too is that this app and this transcription, this is giving you the words to write. What's great about doing quote-only-based stories is that it removes most of the barrier of having to be a good writer. Right. Like being a good storyteller is no longer up to your writing ability, which is a barrier so many people have. Like, I'm just not a good writer, I couldn't tell a good story. The great thing about this is that you don't have to. You let the person who has lived the story tell their own story because they're the best at it. Now, some people are definitely better at telling their stories than others, but in the end, you have been given the words that you need to use, and we'll get to it in the editing part. About how you can play around with it, but it removes the barrier. You don't have to be a good writer to be able to do this, right? In fact, you don't have to be able to write a single lit. All you have to do is be able to look at something and be like, yeah, that sounds good, and then use it. So you've downloaded Otter, you head off to your first story. Let's say that it's a clothing store across the street. You walk into the clothing store across the street. Let's say that you've already reached out and say, hey, I wanna do a story on you. And they said, yeah, cool. When you sit down and do the interview, I want you to think about it more like a conversation because the word interview freaks a lot of people out, especially these people who have never done an interview before. It's going to freak you out because you never done an interview before. But what you have done is had a lot of conversations with people and you've had a lot of conversations with people without planning them ahead of time. You don't even have to go in there with a list of questions to ask, but what you should talk about are kind of the foundational questions like, how did this business come to be? Where did you get the name? What's been the biggest challenge you've had to overcome in making this place work? What's been the biggest challenge you've had to overcome in your personal life? The basic human questions, because you're going to get so many different answers. But what I really want to encourage you during this interview is to listen. And listening is a lifelong skill and it is a lifelong art. And it's something that you just have to commit to getting better at, because if you do it well, they are going to give you the questions to ask. For instance, you say something to somebody in this store, this retail store, and you say, "How did this place come to be?" And he says, "Well, I went to high school here, and then I went off to Vietnam, and when I got back from Vietnam, I needed something to do, and my father had died while I was away, and he left me some money, and thought opening a store would be a good way to do it." If you're not listening and you're just simply looking at your script for the next question, you're going to bypass absolute gold mines to this story, the essence of this story. Like, are you comfortable talking to me about your time in Vietnam? Mm-hmm. Tell me about your father. When you got back, how did you feel about coming back? And now what you're doing is you're taking the time to listen to them intentionally. And then you're also taking the time to really dig into what is actually the story. Because here's the key here: the business is not the story.

The person who started it, yeah, yeah, yeah, story, 100%.

There's a million, 10 million, 100 million retail spots selling whatever.

Yep.

So it's not that, it's that guy. And so that's what you have to be willing to do. And so Go in with kind of an idea of big questions, these fundamental questions, but then be willing to dig in and ask them, "Can you explain that? Tell me about that. What do you mean?" Those are really the important questions because that forces people to actually tell their story. But then when you're thinking about how do I get them to say important words for my transcription, that's what fleshes it out for you. You don't have to come up with these details if you're willing to say, 'Can you tell me about your time in Vietnam?' Or, 'Can you tell me why you decided to run a watchmaking business as opposed to something else?' You have to make them say those words so that the transcription picks it up, and that's how you write a better story.

There's two pieces of that that if I could add to— it's really having a genuine curiosity about other people, right? Like, if you're really listening and somebody says, 'I went to Vietnam,' A curious person is gonna have questions. Ask those questions. And so it's two, it's, so it's the curiosity as a nature, and then that willingness to ask those open-ended questions, which is, it's semantics, but if you just say, are you willing to, they can say yes or no, and it kind of shuts the dialogue down. If you can say, what can you tell me about, or I would love to hear about this, please tell me about your blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

They're gonna fill it with some words. And you'll know if you're a good conversationalist. This is what you're talking about, is being a good conversationalist, right? And good conversationalists are curious by nature. Like, they actually want to know more about any given piece of it. So I think those are such important things. It's not just the basics of what they tell you, because they might be somewhat reticent, right? Because they're prepared to a certain level to say certain things. But if you can keep it organic natural and real.

I want to say something to the introverts listening to that, because you are thinking in your head right now, I am not a good conversationalist. I'm absolutely terrified of talking to another person. And I will tell you that that is exactly me. Part of the reason why I started this work was, one, I don't know if I talked about in episode 1, but I was really, really poor. The second reason was my wife— girlfriend at the time, now wife— had gotten invited to a wedding reception. And this was when I was still building guitars for my brother. And I spent, no joke, and this is not an exaggeration, the next 3 months, every single day at work, trying to figure out how I could get out of going to the wedding reception. Because going to a wedding reception meant talking to people I did not know. And it terrified me. Hours, 8 hours a day for months. That was the only thing I thought about. And so it got down to the end of month 3, and I was thinking about my obsession with this, my anxiety with this. And I thought if I did not do something to break myself of this, I would never meet a new friend or make a new connection. I'd never grow professionally, anything like this. And so I had to do something. So when I swiped my credit card at Meijer and it was declined and I was officially broke, I thought that the camera was the way that I could practice talking to people because I thought about when I was actually comfortable talking to strangers and it was always about work.

Mm, interesting.

If, if they asked me about building guitars, heck yeah, I'll talk to you about it for an hour. But as soon as you started talking to me about something personal, that's when I couldn't do it. And so I picked up this camera and started going into these businesses to start this business. But then also because I knew the camera was my bridge. Now I could talk to the cobbler about how do you fix the shoe? How many shoes do you fix per week? Why did you get into this work? And it was a way for me to practice doing this. And so for the introverts out there that are passionate about this work and they know how important it is, but you are feeling like you are not able to do it, you absolutely are. Because of what I said earlier about doing a good interview, it's listening and it's asking a question that makes them talk about themselves. You don't have to talk about yourself, right? You don't have to even hold on a good conversation. I mean, it helps if you can, but really what it comes down to is can you just ask a question that makes somebody talk more? And you can do it.

This is so valuable, Phil, because I am an extrovert by nature. I mean, the work that I do, the way that I do it, I'm extremely extroverted. So I appreciate kind of that other side of that dichotomy and personality profiling, right? That we make sure and remind people that are maybe introverted by nature that curiosity is not a skill that belongs to one more than the other. Right. And in fact, I would say it's almost hard as extroverts in some respects to actually be curious. We tend to be more like self-involved and not, it's sometimes that's just unfortunate. Byproduct of that. But I think it's a really, really valuable thing to remind everybody because if we ever tell ourselves like, I'm just not equipped to do this, you do have to care though. Is that fair? Like introvert, extrovert, the care has to be there. You have to actually be curious about what it is that person's experience lived or discovered.

Yeah. Those, those fundamental qualities of caring and being curious and empathy and all of those, those are not relegated to certain personality types. Yeah. The expression is different. Yep. An introvert is going to express empathy and curiosity in a different way than an extrovert. Mm-hmm. But at the fundamental level, like if you care and you're curious about people, it doesn't matter if you're shy and you haven't talked to a stranger in a decade, you are able to do this work.

Fair. Love it. Yep. It's great.

So you have done this conversation because I'm assuming you're brand new. Keep it short. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. Don't go in thinking that you're going to do a 30-minute, 60-minute, 90-minute long conversation that unearths every detail of their life story, because life gets really, really difficult for you after this point if you don't interview in a way that respects your ability level. So as you get more experience, heck yeah, man, go 2 hours. It's going to take you a long time, but what you're trying to do is just practice the process right now. And so go in, say, hey man, we're just going to talk for 5 or 10 minutes and that's it. Keep it nice and short, to the point, because it's going to make life easier afterwards. After you hit stop on that conversation, you're going to take a photo of them. You're going to take probably a bunch of photos of them. You don't need an awesome camera to do it. You can do it with your phone. But what you are going to keep in mind as you try to take a good picture is, one, you don't have to be a professional photographer to take a good picture. And that's really where I want you to start, is because again, we have all of this like internal baggage of like, I can't take a photo or all this other— you don't need to do any of that. What you do need to remember is one, human faces, human stories. And so you want a picture of their face. The closer, typically the better. Now, you don't want to be too close, but keep in mind that a lot of these stories are probably going to go out on social media on people's phones. A faraway shot, like they're standing in front of their building and the building is huge. You're going to lose the human face part of it. And so the goal is that the face takes up most of the frame. Now you can break those rules later on, but for now, let's keep it simple. So you want to focus on the face, eyes looking directly into the camera. Number 2, you want to find some good light because especially if you're taking photos on your phone, the sensor on your phone, it's not going to be able to handle a dark room. It's not going to be able to handle a relatively light room. But the lights are high up in the ceiling. It's kind of a dark corner. So find a window, put them in front of the window. Either they're standing to the side of the window or in front of it, or a lamp that's lit somewhere, right? Even outside, find some good light. And then number 3 is composition, and that's the photography jargon. But basically what it is is where do you put the person and what's going on around the person. So let's say that I'm doing a story on a cobbler I could just take a photo of the guy's face or the lady's face, but I kind of want the photo to tell the story as well. And so instead of just getting a close-up shot outside on the sidewalk of the cobbler, I'm going to say, hey, can you stand in front of your workbench? Because behind him on the workbench are all these tools and then there's boots and stuff. That's composition. It's telling the story. I want people to know just by looking at this photo that one, you're a friendly dude because you got a big smile on your face, you're holding a boot. But two, it makes for an interesting photo because there's all sorts of stuff going on. So focus on the face, find some good light, tell the story with the other things in the frame. Take a bunch of photos. I started off shooting film and you really had to be mindful because it costs you a lot.

Right.

You could take a billion photos on your phone and it was—

Isn't it great?

Yes, it's awesome. And you should take a billion photos on your phone, try a bunch of different things because you're going to get back to your computer and you're going to upload this photo. And the photo that you thought you liked, you ended up not liking, or their eyes ended up half closed or something just didn't work. And so give yourself some options. So I usually tell people like, try 3 different ideas. Maybe it's in front of the workbench. Maybe it's a closeup of them holding a boot. Maybe it's them in the front of their store. Cool. You've got your photos. Now you go back to your office and you open up this story in Otter. Now we're into the creative editing part of this because you are the storyteller, they are not. And so what you might have to do is what I call creative editing. So you copy paste the transcript into whatever you use to edit your documents. And you're going to look at it and you're going to say, hmm, Well, we talked about Vietnam at the beginning, but then 5 minutes in, he added some more details about Vietnam later on. I'm going to move everything about Vietnam to the beginning because you're the storyteller. You're crafting the story. When somebody reads it, they're going to read it. We read differently than we listen, right?

Right.

Conversations are contextual, and so we can go down all sorts of rabbit holes, and we get it, totally understandable. But for the person who's not there, chronological order is kind of one of the most logical ways to think about it. So shift those things around, or you shift ideas around based on topics. Let's say that he's talking about fixing shoes here, and then he got into like what he did in college, and then his training at cobbler school, and then he talked more about fixing shoes. I'm going to group everything about how to fix shoes in the same section. So that I create this really clean, logical narrative about fixing shoes. And so you're shifting things around. You might have to change words as well. For instance, the word whitewash. Let's say that you're doing something on a cleanup project under a bridge and there's lots of graffiti down there. And the group leading it, they say in the conversation that, yeah, we're down here and we're whitewashing all the graffiti so that we can come in and we hired a public artist to come in and do a mural and all these other things. They meant well, but to some of the public, whitewash has a very racial connotation. And so now what you do is, well, I'm just going to copy paste and I'm going to publish it. What you've just done is you made life really, really complicated because now people are going to interpret it with a racist connotation and now it doesn't become a good story anymore. And so you might have to change words. To improve their meaning so that everybody understands it. Just change the word to, we're going to clean up all the graffiti. Boom. There you go. Perfectly okay. Do not feel like you are unethical. Do not feel like you are lying. Do not feel like you are manipulating. Don't do any of that because in 3,000 interviews and 3 years of doing this work, I have never once had anybody come to me and say, Phil, I hate you for making me sound better than what I thought I sounded like. It is your job to remember, amplify the best. It is your responsibility as a storyteller to keep that in mind, and you need to be an advocate for people. You need to have the sense that I do need to change things. I do need to smooth them out. Other little changes you can make: combining sentences. If your conversation gets really into the weeds and there's 10 sentences of things that are not really that interesting, maybe they could be important to the story, but they're not interesting. Delete them. Get rid of them. Cut them out.

Right.

Boom, boom, boom. Right away. And then by the end of that process, and that is a kind of a skill and you learn better with experience. I was just thinking this morning, like, oh, like I would not have thought of doing this even 6 weeks ago. You should have a story that's pretty good. After that, sleep on it and then come back the next day and read it aloud. You're going to make some last minute changes and now your story is ready to go. You're going to take this story and you're going to publish it on Facebook. Now, if you're working for the city on a city page, for a DDA on a DDA page, downtown page, Main Street page, even a community group, if you're just an individual forging a trail, you're going to post it. You're going to post that story, you're going to post that picture, and then you're going to watch the internet explode on the scale that is local to you. Because you might be in an area with 1,800 people and you get 100 likes on a Facebook post, and it's Amazing. Never had a post with 100 likes. You might be in a more metropolitan area and now you get 1,000 likes. Also super, super cool. And that's the process. You just rinse and repeat this process over and over and over again. It's interview, photo, edit, post, using Otter to create the transcription, editing it so that the story flows and that it's effective and that you're sending the right message. And then you just do that over and over and over again.

How often should people, like especially people starting out, let's say at this kind of broader community level, let's just use that for the example. How often do we need to be publishing new stories?

So I'm gonna go the, I don't wanna say riding the fence route, but I'm gonna say as frequently as your capacity allows. I'm using the word frequent there because maybe your frequency is one post every 3 weeks.

Mm-hmm.

Cool. Do one post every 3 weeks until you're like, okay, I'm getting the hang of this. I got some time. Like, I'm going to amp it up a little bit. Maybe your frequency is once a week with one post. Maybe you've got all the free time in the world and like, this is your life's passion and somebody is paying you money to do it. Now you can post a story every single day. Maybe you— it's one person. And how I do it is typically with a feature story, it's one person or business, and then it's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, a different part published every single day.

I was going to ask that. Yeah, I love that. That gives people a little more runway, right? The other thing I was just thinking about— oh, it'll come back to me, Phil. I lost it.

But this, this question of just like general frequency, I think it's important because, yeah, Because it has to be frequent enough that people get that this is a thing, because where it falls apart is if you bite off more than you can chew and you start posting or publishing these stories, a huge feature story every week for 3 weeks, and then you realize like, man, this is really, really hard.

Right.

And then we don't see another story from you for the next 12 weeks. And then we get another one. It's not frequent enough, consistent enough to really become part of the community fabric. And so that's what I would say is. As frequent as your capacity allows, but when in doubt, start way less frequent than what you think. Well, that way there you start low, you don't bite off more than you can chew.

Right. So two things. The question that I was gonna ask that came back to me was just about batching. Like, is there some value? And I would guess that's kind of how you do this, right? Like you have one or a half day or 2 hours or whatever. I mean, whatever your time allows you to do where you dedicate it to interviewing and you set those up, right? And I think more of us, again, it's just kind of me preaching to the choir. I need to get better at just the general concept of batching work because when you're in that creative mode, when you're in your curious mode, it's much easier to navigate a few, a handful of conversations. Yeah.

I would start off here like batching 2 at a time because, because taking in kind of the Toyota method of just in time, you don't wanna do too many because you're thinking like, okay, I'm gonna do 10 interviews over the course of a Monday.

Yeah.

If you're not really experienced with the process enough, you could end up screwing up those stories pretty bad, or they end up sitting on your computer never to see the light of day because you're just like, man, this is more complicated than what I thought, or I'm not ready, or there's things I have to work on, or just— it's really easy to push that aside. So if you do end up batching it, I would say start off just going 2. You're just going to do 2 interviews, 2 10-minute interviews on a Monday morning, and then work those to completion.

Right.

Schedule your next two.

Yeah. And the value of that too is that if you can get them scheduled to completion, then you're in it with that story.

Yeah.

Instead of having 10 different people who's, because it's really easy to forget even though you've got Otter and you've got all these things, but like we get moved.

Yeah.

At least I do. Right. When I talk to people and if I go like, even with podcasts, I'll just say this, like if I go too far back and I haven't edited or written show notes or whatever it's I'm doing to kind of polish that blog post. I totally can't remember what I felt, that emotion I want to tap into. So I think that's really helpful. What I really hope, Phil, is that people listen to this and they just go, I can do this too. Because this is who we are as people, right?

You absolutely can do this. Every human being is equipped with these skills to be able to do this, to listen to and convey stories. For reference, if people are like, ah, like he just went through the process, but I really need it in front of me again on the Substack, if you go storyville.substack.com and then search for a piece called, it's like a 3-part framework for storytelling. We'll find everything.

We'll find it for sure and link it right here. Yep.

So everything I just talked about is there in written form with examples and links and all of that stuff so that you can actually look at it and say, okay, now I have to do this. Now I have to do this. Now I have to do this. Almost like training wheels, and then you're, you can be off and running.

I have to just seriously thank you again, truly from the bottom of my heart. This is stuff that I feel like I intuitively know, like, cuz I do a lot of this kind of conceptual thinking, even theoretical thinking. I'm very people-centric, human-centric in the way that I work with companies and organizations and communities, but I am not doing a good enough job currently. Of telling the stories of my community. And you've completely inspired me to just start. Like, I feel I meet cool people all the time and I think to myself like, God, you're cool. Like, I think that like, you're so cool. You are so rad. And this is who I want people to know that we are. Like, who are we as a community? You are who I want to be representative of us. And yet I'm not doing this. In a clear, meaningful way. And so I'm telling you, like, you've truly inspired me to just say, okay, Rebecca, you know, I like, I know these things, but I'm not doing them. And so I really hope it does the same for everybody else that maybe has had that inkling or the person that has just said, gosh, I have no idea. I have no idea how to change anything in our town. And stories can do that. Yeah. They are transformative. They change hearts, they change minds, and they can actually change the total trajectory of a community.

Absolutely. Yep, I agree 100%. And it can be anybody, everybody. And even, please don't go out thinking that you have to go out and win a Pulitzer. They could be as simple as you meet somebody interesting, you ask them to take their photo, ask them about their cool outfit, crazy outfit that they're wearing. It's a 2-sentence story. People lose their brains because it's a real human saying, "This is me, this is who I am, this is why I wore these clothes today." And so it could be as simple as just one question. And that becomes your niche in storytelling. It's a one-question story. And so please start small. Please just do the work. Please just do something to do it. Because Rebecca, you and I were talking about before, like a friend of yours saying that the robots are winning and in terms of the internet and digital media kind of overcoming us. This is the only way that we can fight back by using these platforms in a more human way. And that takes people willing to do that work and talking to people and then relaying what those people say on the internet. To more people. It's the only way we can win. So start however you can, start in whatever way that you think you can pull it off, and then make that part of your life and part of your community's life too.

Phil, that is so— seriously, that is so amazing. I'm gonna reiterate this, like, I wanted just to let everything you just said just land as the ending, but I want to reiterate what you just shared with everybody listening to this, is that decide the thing you're most curious about. Like, when you meet people, what do you immediately wanna know about them? Start there because there, at least it's coming from a super genuine place of like, this is the thing I always wanna ask people. If you go to dinner parties, if you go to Christmas functions, if your spouse drags you to reunions, I don't care. Like wherever you do life, if the first thing you ask is this thing, make that your thing to start.

Yeah.

Because if nothing else, it then becomes a muscle, right? That you just continue to practice and it gets stronger. And then you can start to branch out and ask additional questions or additional things. But at least that's such a smart way to look at this, Phil. And I love that to tell people just like, what's the thing that you care about asking from the people you come into contact with?

Yep. Love it.

Fantastic. Oh man, Phil, thank you so much. Again, everybody, show notes. There's gonna be lots of templates and resources. And Phil, thank you so much for this time for our audience, for both part 1, part 2. Again, folks, if you haven't listened part 1, go back and catch that, the why of storytelling. But I just can't wait to see what people create, and you've certainly inspired me to tell our story better. So again, thanks so much, Phil.

It was awesome to have you back. Thanks, it's been a pleasure.