Ep. 107 The Scenic Storytelling Secret

Hey there, Mark Brown. Today you and I were teaching better stories, better business. And we came up with this new insight that goes along with everything else we teach on storytelling. We thought, ooh, this is good, let's go a little deeper.

And I tell you what, man, if we can teach people and show people how you can set the mood and set the scene, this is our little scenic storytelling secret. Let's do it.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the unforgettable presentations podcasts with your hosts, world champion speakers and coaches, Mark Brown. Mark Brown.

Your life tells a story and there's someone out there who needs to hear it.

And Darren Lacroix. And Darren Lacroix.

Stage time, stage time, stage time.

Ready for some powerful presentation, AHAs. Let's dive right in.

Hey, Mark, you know, we've been teaching this for years and we love to teach this. And you and I are doing a workshop right now. Literally, this is the end of day one. Better stories, better business. How to use stories to help sell your business, Gain new clients, get new leads, sell more products in the back of the room or online, whatever you're doing. And rarely do we come up with something that's really different from what we've been teaching. And this just feng shui's with what we've been teaching all along. And we're using my story model, the transformational story model from then to now story model. And so it's about taking what happened back then at the beginning of the story, with the customer, with the client, with yourself, with your founder of your company, and then comparing that to what happens now, where we're at now. So how we were back then and how we are now, the transformational change. But we wanted to just focus on one little aspect of the scenic storytelling secret. So some of you may know a little bit about what we're talking about, but we stumbled on to a secret. I'm going to see how many S's we can get in.

Mark stumbled onto the scenic storytelling secret. And it comes at the beginning of the process. You want your listeners to see the then, but want the now. And the secret comes in how you set up and portray the then. Because the then contains the aspect of an emotional condition with which the individual, the character, the main character begins this quest, this journey. And if that's set up correctly with an emotional impact, it can literally transform how meaningful their journey, their struggle, when it gets worse, and eventually finding that resolution can become. So the journey becomes that much more significant if at the beginning, in the setup, the scene is set significantly. Lots more S's there, Darren.

Simply subtle, yet spectacular. You dropped a bomb there. I want to make sure if people are listening, you're taking notes. Write this down. We want to have our then, or if you will, we say then and now. That's like saying before and after. It's our version of before and after. So the then needs to be relatable. So the character, the person sitting, listening to your speech, listening to your presentation, can relate to. Not necessarily the literal, but maybe the emotional. We'll get into that in a second. But they want the now. They want the transformation. So relatable at the beginning, want desire. The same thing that the main character, as you said, gets in the end of the story. We want that revelation, but we not even know that we need it. Kind of like my story. I didn't need to wake up. So, Mark, let's dive in a little deeper.

Sure, sure.

Right when we're talking about right up front, we gotta get them curious. And by the way, we want to mention Craig Valentine and Patricia Fripp. We've gleaned a. We've worked with them a lot, so we want to honor them, that they help create these ideas. We're just taking it a little different direction and kind of making it our own. But definitely would not have known this, taught this, learned this if it was not for Craig Valentine and Patricia Fripp. So a big shout out to them.

Amen.

Amen. Get them curious. And then we want it to be emotionally relatable. And, Mark, we learned from David Brooks. We all have different stories. We all share the same six emotions.

Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. That's right. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust. Originally made public by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Ekman decades ago. But Dave taught me this when he was coaching me back in 1994 and 95, over 25 years ago. And it has been significantly helping me over the years to tell better stories. So the emotional, it has to be emotionally relatable.

Yeah. And the cool part of that is that we may not literally relate, but we could emotionally relate in terms of when in my championship speech, I talk about going home to tell my parents I wanted to be a comedian. So you might not literally relate to going home and telling your parents you want to be a comedian, but you could emotionally relate to. To an uncomfortable conversation with your parents or the other way with your kids. So we can relate to that scene where that big conversation happens. So we relate to the emotion of it, not the literal. And that's what we're talking about when we say make it emotionally relatable. And we also want to get the audience curious what's going to happen. And part of that comes from the conflict. But we want to mention the mood. If you're a great storyteller, you want to be a great storyteller, you want to be unforgettable. One of the secrets that we stumbled upon is we never really talked about this before, but what's the mood in the scene at the beginning? Now you not going to literally, you know, it was a dark, stormy night. You're not going to. We don't necessarily recommend you say what the mood is, but we should get the feeling of what the mood is based on the dialogue, based on the situation. So we want to know it. But hey, for you as the storyteller, sit back and say, okay, what was the mood here? And that's going to help you tell a better story. And now we see, okay, how can we get that across? How could we subtly get that across without literally stating it?

Well, you know what, Darren, I know you've told this anecdote many, many times in the last 20 years. I'm going to ask you to give that 15 second opening you talk about when you go to the room before the speech of your life. I want you to just give that little line there and I want to focus on the mood you are in, what's going on in your head and see where the irrelatable emotion comes to play. So you told us, even in this morning's workshop, you talked about that morning was the biggest speech of your life. Just give me that little quick opening piece there and I'm going to break it down to share with everyone what we mean about the mood that you said.

As you open your then story, imagine this. You are about to give the speech of your life. You've been working on it for six months. You've given it to everybody, the cat, the dog, anyone who will listen. It's Saturday morning, it's 8:55. The contest begins at 9. You walk into the meeting room and you look out and you see two, 2,000 chairs.

Whoa.

You can feel the tension and the excitement in the air at the same time. You can smell the coffee brewing in the back of the room. And right at that moment, my dad walked up to me and said, darren, I can't find my seat.

Not now.

There's 2,000 seats, dad. Pick one and here I am yelling at the man who loves me and cares about me the most. And that's when I realized the tension was not out there. It was all right up here in my head.

Wow. Now you hear that? And we hadn't really focused on this because very often we focus on how you set the scene visual, what the audience sees. And yes, we know it's attention time. It's. It's five minutes to showtime. Darren sees 2,000 cheers. Darren smells a coffee, and his dad has a conversation. But what we have to understand is this. We need to look at the mood that Darren is in as well as the atmosphere that the scene creates. So on the outside looking in, wow. It's contest time in five minutes. There's 2,000 cheers. Oh, my gosh. There's tension, there's excitement. People want to see the contest. There's coffee in the back of the room. Oh, yes. And he and his dad have this conversation. When you're talking about someone's experience emotionally, what's Darren's emotion? What's he feeling? What's he thinking? What's the mood in his mind? Not only the mood in the room. And I believe the mistake I used to make was I would focus on the mood in the room but not ask myself, is he nervous? Is he excited? Is it a combination of both? What's going through his mind? So now you combine the visual 2000 chairs, huge ballroom contest excitement with Darren's emotional state. Dad, there's 2,000 chairs. Pick one. That tells you there's some tension there. In his own mind, he wants to focus. He's getting distracted. And you begin to think, how will he settle in? How will he calm down? Will he be ready to perform? That's one simple example of breaking down the mood. You can set through two things. First, Darren described the scene in the room. We know what time it was. We know how many chairs there were. We know they had coffee. People are billing about trying to find their seats. So we see the physical scene. We also get a glimpse inside Darren's mindset. What is going on in his mind? Dad, there's 2000 chairs. Pick one. Is he unraveling? Is he holding it together? What's he thinking? What's he feeling? And then he reveals a part of it when he said it was in his own mind. But in a minute, he has taken us through all these different aspects of setting a scene. And the mistake I know I made early in my career was simply to say it was showtime, huge ballroom, and it was exciting. But I missed the opportunity to add some more dimension to it with the coffee, with a conversation with his dad and with the thoughts going through his head. That's a lot to say in a short time, Darren. But you see, this particular scenic storytelling secret is about not just showing a physical scene, it's about the emotions. What did Aaron say? Be able to relate emotionally to what's going on. And it's really, really worth our while to parse this, to think it through and to ask ourselves, how much more can we give to our then story if we set the mood carefully and portray the scene effectively for the audience to understand when they see the journey? Now it makes more sense. Now the emotion is more well connected and now we understand what transformation really means. All because we set the scene significantly and specifically.

Yeah, when we did the workshop today and I set up that scene, I asked everyone and they were all on screen in a meeting format so we could see everyone's faces and had them raise their hand. And I asked, raise your hand if you pictured that setting, Raise your hand if you pictured that scene. And everybody does. And one of the keys to this is just giving us one detail. The 2,000 chairs. That's big, but I didn't say there was a red carpet. There was the corporate tan fabric on the wall, There were chandeliers hanging. That. That turns into too much. That turns into trying to figure it out. And just like the old thing, when you read a book and then you watch a movie and you're like, the theater didn't look like that because in the director's mind it did. And that's the set he had to work with or she had to work with to create the scene. And they did the best to make it majestic or the way it's supposed to be in the scene. But you, when you read it, you read something different. And for us as presenters, as pastors, as speakers, we need to just give enough detail so that the audience paints the picture. I love Patricia's brilliance in this. Patricia Fripp, when she does, when she says, it doesn't matter what they see, it matters that they see.

Oh, that's good. Say that again.

It doesn't matter what they see. It matters that they see meaning. If they picture anything in their minds and they picture a scene, they're with you in the story, they're going to go through the rest of the story with you and they're going to go on your journey. And that's why just today we wanted to focus on setting the scenic secret setting the scene and mood. One detail, not 32 details. We don't need to picture the exact scene. We need to picture a scene. And I've seen people do it. And Mark, I also love that you talked about when you told stories in the old day, you just said it was exciting.

Right?

Telling the audience the mood isn't nearly as effective. And you know, you and I both learned this along the way. So we didn't know this at the beginning either.

Right.

That's why we're doing this podcast, to catch you up, get you up to world class speed as quickly as possible. Just saying it's exciting as opposed to getting us to, through your dialogue, know it was exciting and notice. What also I did was I put the audience as the person going on stage so they're more likely to see it. Not here's Darren, he's about to go on stage, he sees 2000 cheers. He smells coffee. They don't care. But when we can, if it's a positive scene, we don't want to put them in a tragedy scene. But if we can and it's appropriate, we want to paint the audience and invite them, as Craig says, into the scene. So I said you walk into the room, you look out, you see 2,000 chairs. And that subliminal, I don't want to say subliminal because you hear the words. But that strategy to get the audience to picture it, we can't not picture when you give us those suggestions. So they smell the, and they, they feel the excitement. And that's why at the very beginning, you've been working on this speech for six months. You've given it to everyone, the cat, the dog, anyone who listen. Okay. That's part of setting the mood. So you know it's importance because I had been working on it for six months. So now whether they were in a speech contest or not, they've given that big presentation. If they're presenters, obviously, or even if it was, they never gave a presentation except in high school. You know, the book report, it still felt the same because they've never done it before. So it's the emotional relating.

Yes. And you, Darren, you pointed out by having the audience imagine you were with me on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday morning and they are able to place themselves in the scene. But you also said something and kind of blew by it. I want to go back to. You said the dialogue can also help to set the scene. You're right. I thought you had to be descriptive. For example, a year and a half ago, pre pandemic My older son Joel and I were in the UK to watch football, what North Americans called soccer. We went to two major well known stadiums. One is Old Trafford in Manchester where my favorite team, United plays. And the other was White Hart Lane in London where my son's favorite team, Tottenham Hotspur plays. And I could tell you, man, we got to go to the new White Hart Lane. That was spent. They spent millions on this thing and it was really a fantastic edifice. Did a stadium tour and man, that stadium is something else. You can say that.

Hold on, I'm just trying to look up edifice.

Here you go again, man. Look, friends, if you're new to the podcast, I am the word nerd here. I am a self confessed word nerd. And Darren often says he has to bring a dictionary with him. When I say my things, my words is. You know what? He's actually, if you're listening to this podcast, he's actually looking up the word.

What's the third letter after Edi.

Edi. Edif. I, C, E. I can't believe we're doing this on our podcast. This is ridiculous, man. But yeah, I'm the wordsmith and Darren will often say, slow down. Edifice. What is that? Edifice. So I could tell you that we.

Went to the state synonyms are expunge, obliterate, erase, cancel, blot out, wipe for an edifice.

We'll get it later on. Not erased. But I could tell you I went to the stable. It was really a sight to behold. It was wonderful. That's one. But when we first walk in, I could set the mood using what we call internal dialogue. Joel and I stepped onto the turf at the entrance corridor to White Hart Lane's Tottenham Hotspur stadium. Wow. I can't believe we're here. We saved for a year for this. And this building is magnificent. Wow. I can't wait to tell my friends about it. Wow. Magnificent. I'm awestruck. It's breathtaking. You can feel that in my head I'm saying, I can't believe I'm here. I'm at White Hart Lane. Oh my gosh, this is incredible. You can get that. You can also have a dialogue between two individuals as my son, Joel and I, on our first ever father son trip to the uk, stepped onto the turf at Tottenham Hotspur's White Hart Lane. He said, dad, can you believe this? Look at the cockerel at top of that bleachers. The angle is incredible. There's no other stadium like this. Man, what a memory we are creating here, dad. And I knew right then we were making an unforgettable memory. So in our dialogue, you get an idea of how beautiful the place was. But it was also the emotional experience of being with my son on our first father son trip out of the country. And all of that was made available to you, made clear to you in the dialogue between two people. So you have dialogue, internal, we call it the inner dialogue, and the external dialogue. And you can use dialogue as a scene rather than being only descriptive. There are options to do either or, but you want to choose one, which details to put in, and two, which technique can help you to reveal the scene. And I recommend you don't use one technique all the time. The beauty of being world class is you have different ways to reach your audience, depending on what your intent may be and what works for you at the time. Sometimes it will be dialogue person to person. At times it'll be third person observation, at times inner dialogue, and at times just simply describing what you see. The key is never forget the relatable emotion that has to be a part of what sets up the beginning of the story. So the scene is clear, but the audience can relate to what it was like to be there. And as Darren said earlier in different words, you don't have to have the same circumstance, but you have the same emotion. You don't have to have the same circumstance, but the same emotion and sometimes the same emotional reaction. Darren?

Yeah. There's a scene that I set which is with me and Dan Jones. You know my friend Dan. Yes, I know that dropped some wisdom on me. And at the beginning of that scenic scene storytelling, he had invited me to go with him to photocopy the agenda before a Toastmasters meeting. And he had never done this before. Okay, so if you look at my face and hear my. He had never done this before. So I thought it was odd, but okay, sure, I'll help. And then we got in there, and you could see you're in the photocopy room, and you could see reams of paper on the wall. You could feel the heat coming off the photocopy machine as it spit out the agenda. And Dan turned to me and asked the question, Darren, what do you have to give? Give, give. I'm not here to give anything. Okay? So the mood is. I'm curious. And that helps make the audience curious. Like, what's happening? Again, the mood. Ask yourself for each of your scenes, especially your bigger stories. At the beginning, bring us there, take us there, but what is the mood? And then find a creative way to actually be able to give us that mood or communicate that mood.

Right.

Was there and could we do it in dialogue? So Mark, in the workshop we talked about the then for one person could be self doubt, the now could be confidence, the then, they could be scared, the now could be joy, losing money, gaining many clients, they could be aimless, they could now have a proven process. But how could we get that across with dialogue? How do we know they have self doubt? How do we know they're scared? How do we know they're losing money or losing clients? How do we know they're aimless? So asking these specific questions, once you bring the audience into the scene, they're going to go along with you for the ride. But the beginning, the setting of the scene and the mood is so critical.

Yeah. And one of my mantras regarding that Darren, is don't report, don't always report transport. When you're new to speaking, you want to tell a story, you want to talk about what happened, you want to relate what happened. But when you transport us, your audience into your story, we are now living it with you. So when Darren says, imagine you're with me at 8:55 in the morning for this contest, he's invited you to be there with him. All of a sudden you are standing next to him, you're seeing those 2,000 chairs, he invites you in. So the first instinct is to report what happened. You talk about what happened. But when you transport, you include us in the scene, you use dialogue so we can, wow, we can almost hear what happens. And not only is it an emotional experience, it's also a sensory experience. So when the audience can have some of the emotional, not just emotions in their heart, but they can sense. Darren said you can smell the coffee. Oh, what was that like in the coffee room if you felt the heat from the coffee machine, you know when they're running for all day and it gets really hot in there and it began to spit out copies. It was sensory, not just an emotion of being confused. So all of those, the emotion and the senses were all placed in that 1:15 second story about being in a copy room with reams of paper. You almost felt claustrophobic, all that paper around, it's hot in here. Filling out these things as Guy says, you can give what you got the confusion, you've got the atmosphere, you got the mood and you've also got the emotion and you've also got a sense of being there almost tactically, you can almost touch it. That's what you need to do. In your setup. So scenic is not just what you see with your eyes. It's what you experience with your emotions and your senses.

And I don't want to talk about this legendary film too much.

Oh, here we go.

This weekend, when I was preparing this slides because we created this new program, Better Stories, Better Business, and it's brand new to you and I. I've done it before in the past, but we were reinventing it, and I just happened to be amused and entertained. In the background, I had School of Rock with Jack Black going. And it's.

It.

It. I love the story. I love the film. It just cracks me up. It's inspiring to me, but that's just me. But I had noticed when I was preparing the slides, talking about the difference between the opening scene and the ending scene, how the characters trans. I didn't notice it until the end. Exactly what we were talking about. And at the beginning, the opening scene, Jack Black, playing the main character, is a rock and roller. He loves music, but he is a little bit on his own ego trip. And I don't know. The music was horrible because I don't know the difference. But the way we could tell, the way the storytellers told it, we could see him getting a little overconfident, doing little leg spins with the guitar, pulling off his shirt, but we could tell by the reaction. And that's another key. The reactions help tell the story. The other band members are kind of like, avoiding him and stepping away from him. So you can tell they don't like what he's doing. And then somebody in the audience was actually texting. These guys are horrible. Let's leave. It's seconds in the movie, and then he does a big stage dive, which cracked me up because no one. There was a small bar, and no one was there to catch him. And he knocked over a server in the process and just fell on the floor. And so it sets the mood of where he was at, what he was feeling, and what everyone around him was feeling. Transformation. Later on in the movie, he does a stage dive, but everybody loves him, and they carry him off. And it's awesome and it's beautiful. And if you weren't studying it even the way I was studying it, I didn't even notice that, But I felt it before. You know, the storytellers are so good that in a great Hollywood movie, you don't notice. Oh, he did a stage dive at the beginning and planted himself on the floor in a dive bar. Oh, at the end, there's hundreds of people There, carrying it like you don't. You just feel it. And that's what we're talking about.

Darren, you just did it, my friend. You. You said he jumped off the stage in a dive bar. He took a dive.

Oh, man.

Man, that was pretty impressive, brother.

I pulled in my inner Mark Brown.

Well, what was to me, thank you so much. What, what got me there was you said, you said, I didn't even notice it at first, but he had the first dive on his face at the beginning of the movie. And. And the last dive, he is crowd surfing. He's triumphant. That was the now, but the then was he's falling on his face, literally, as you did in your speech. And the journey of the story of the movie takes us from the then to the now. And you didn't catch that. But if a technique is being used in the film, why can't it be used here in your talks as well? One of our partners, one of our faculty members, Michael Hague, is a Hollywood script consultant and he is a master of story. And he talks about how Hollywood uses these techniques and that we can use them too. Fripp also talks about using Hollywood techniques in your storytelling, in your speeches. But if the audience can get the mood set at the beginning, then when they get to the now and go look back on the then, aha. It's almost a second aha. When they realize from whence they have come to where they. Where they are now. And part of our process as presenters is to give them the emotional desire to get from where they are, which is the then, to where the heart, the hero, ends up the now. They want to be on that journey as well. One key is to remember, Darren said, the details are important. The question is, which details are important? Which ones do you lay aside and which ones will promote your message and move your story forward in the most efficient way. It involves a lot, but when you understand it and you begin to apply it, you realize that these little techniques can help you truly create scenes that are unforgettable and drive your stories forward.

Yeah, Mark and I love teaching this. If you want to join us, you can check it out at Stagetime workshops. Stagetimeworkshops.com Once we do one of the programs, we'll do another one several months later, a few months later. So check out the current schedule whenever you're listening to this. Stagetimeworkshops.com and we're always trying to find ways to make them better, to improve them, to make it more as an outcome for the people who go through them because we want to transform them, that by the end of the third day they see things differently. They have a process that they can use over and over again. So we truly hope that this has helped serve you in your storytelling. There's so much to it. Mark just said, you know, Hollywood uses these techniques and the question for us is, okay, how do we take that idea and use it as a presenter? Whether it's online or on stage, how do we use these ideas and take our stories from good to great to unforgettable? It's a process and unfortunately, when we see somebody who tells a great story, sometimes we have story envy. But we're seeing the end result. What we need to have is story process envy. How did they get there? What did they do? Who coached them? What were the changes they made? And just like the movie School of Rock, which I'm a big fan of and I had no idea it was going to turn into a teaching tool. But all movies have that transformation of the character. But it's so subtle that we just notice they got it, they achieved it. But if we were asked to identify their desire, we may or may not be able to quickly identify it. But we're cheering for him at the end. Yes, he met the girl, she met the guy. He conquered his self doubt. Like we don't think think conquered self doubt. We just think, yes, they got it. And that's the beauty of it. There's so much to the art of it that we need to step back, use the techniques, use the strategies and test it. Test it. Test it, test it.

Yeah.

Mark Brown, bring us home.

Well, my friends, we have revealed to you our scenic storytelling secret. It is our hope you'll begin to apply it today. And who knows, you keep doing this, your talk will go from good to great to unforgettable. See you next week.

Bye.

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