Ep. 118 Reverse Engineering Your Life Lessons

Hey there, Mark Brown. We've talked about life lessons before, but you and I just came out of one of our events, unforgettable Presentations, and we found it powerful for people, so we thought we'd revisit it in a little different way. We talked about the gold in your life, but this is reverse engineering your life lessons.

I will make one promise. We aren't going to do it backwards, but you're going to enjoy this. Let's do it, man.

Nice.

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.

All right, Mark. So we just came off an event and we had someone in our. In our workshop.

We'll.

We'll call her Carol. That's not her real name. The name's being changed. But Carol was, was really struggling with this whole find the stories of your life. And then just like in our live events as well as in stage time, we walk people through a series of questions to. To unleash powerful lessons that are inside them, those stories that are inside them. And Mark, even though we're not going to go through that part of it, why don't you just give us your famous worst? I don't want to give it all away, but your famous worst when we look at our life. So before you say that, Mark, like, this is coming out Thanksgiving Day in the United States. We have a holiday Thanksgiving. You're with your friends and your family. We've done this before, We've covered this before. But you have such a goldmine from your life, but you forget a lot of it. You forget some great stories that are inside you that could be powerful on stage. So put your antenna up. If you're listening to this as you're driving to grandma's, put your antenna up and just ask your friends and family and listen to what they say. So even if you're not visiting with family, if you have friends over or having a friend's giving, ask them just what are some of the fun, crazy stories from our experience together? And they're going to remind you of some that you forgot about.

Yes. Stuff that you did or you forgot about or also going to ask you questions like, hey, tell a story about a time when. And they always ask the same question. It's fun, but it's a lesson there. And sometimes it's as simple as going back to your childhood. And look at your best and your worst, your last and your first. And you can take any particular word you want. The best boss you had, the worst boss you had, the first boss you had, the last boss you had. And there's four ideas right there for stories from your life that maybe didn't even think about. There's four ideas, but one four words. Best boss, worst boss, first boss, last boss. And pick anything there, Darren. You'd be amazed at what you can find. And you reverse engineer, look at the experience and then say, what was the lesson? Or what was the lesson they taught me? Then how can I put that lesson into a speech or into a message? There's so much potential that we have I think is untapped, Darren.

And even if you did this last year when we recommended it, do it again this year, new ideas are going to come up. New ideas. And so, Mark, you talked about boss, best boss, best, worst boss. It could be vacation, right? It could be friends growing up, who was your best friend growing up, who was your worst friend? I don't know if that's a. But maybe the bully in your life.

Yeah, I can remember her name. Yeah.

Who was that bully in your life? And just your friends and family will remind you of things that you forgot about, that there's gold in your life. So we do this exercise all the time. So join us for one of our events. Check out our event, Stage Time Workshops, stagetime workshops dot com. We're actually going live coming up in March, but we got a few virtual ones between now and then. So join us for that, especially Mastering Virtual Presentations with Ed Tate. Like, how do you do this and keep them engaged? So check that out. In this last event that we had, we go through these list of questions, 140 questions in the online program. And we go through about 60 of them in the live thing. And people always, always, always come up with new stories they hadn't thought of. But we had this woman who was in our workshop or Carol. She's a consultant. She knows her business, she knows what she does, she works with executives, but she was really struggling with that. So we took a little different approach. And this is the reverse engineering lessons from your life. Your life lessons. So, Mark, I think it goes back to. And I know people have heard this story before, but when you asked me when I was Starting with a blank piece of paper. And you asked me, write down all the lessons from your life, and if you could only pass along one, only one, to your nephew, the closest child in my life, what would that be? And I remember I started to try to answer, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. Take a notebook, write down all the life lessons that you've learned, and you learn them somewhere. Maybe it's a book, maybe it's an uncle, maybe it's an aunt, maybe it's mom or dad, maybe it's a pet. But write down the lessons first. So this is a little different from what we were saying before. Looking for the stories. Instead, we're suggesting now look for the.

Lessons, Mark, lesson first, and then find the story. And what I found interesting, Darren, was when you did that, you went, I think two and a half legal pad pages. And for the millennials, a legal pad is a pad of paper. It's a bit bigger than a regular size. Just Google it. Okay? But you went through two and a half pages to find the lesson that was most meaningful to you. Okay, I could do anything if I'm willing to fail. There was no story yet, but you had the lesson. And the key for the reverse engineering piece is when you remember the life lessons that you come up with, the story is going to follow because you're going to go think, okay, how did I learn that lesson? What was the I went through? What were the ups and downs, the experiences? Who was with me in the journey? Who taught me? How did I fall? How did I get back up? What did it take? Now, once you look at the lesson, I learned this in life, you begin to look at the how all the other components begin to fall into place. And before you know it, the story almost reappears and you can almost recreate the characters. You remember who was there. Oh, yeah, my Uncle Joe said that. And before you know it, all of a sudden, the lesson becomes the story and the lesson, and then you can craft that into the experience your audience needs to hear.

Yeah. So we find the lessons, write down all of them. Because even if you don't use it necessarily for this speech, or not sure how to, and even if the lesson's cliche, don't quit, okay? It's still a universal message. That's why it's cliche. It's cliche for a reason. But now we just add your own twist to it. How can you make it uniquely yours? It's still a universal message. You just don't want to use the Cliche words that have been out there since the 1980s, motivational speakers. So you make it your own, you make it new. Mine, Falling Forward, that's not really anything new. Actually, it was Mark, who is the former pastor there, that wrote a book, Falling Forward.

I don't recall who that was.

He spoke at nsa.

It'll come back to you.

It'll come back to me. But anyway, so it wasn't necessarily Brand. I had never heard of it at that time. I then since learned about the book. I was like, oh, I'm glad I didn't know, or I wouldn't have wrote the speech. I would have been worried about plagiarizing. But it was the idea. It was my unique experience as well. So it was our personal story. So if we look for the lessons first again in the program, we encourage people to, what are the stories in your life? But now we're saying something different. And we asked this to Carol. She wasn't getting the story thing, and she was getting a little frustrated. She's like, how does this relate to CEOs and executives? She really was stuck. And we said, okay, let's try a different approach. Which is the idea that spurred this podcast. Come up with a list of lessons. Because if you're alive, you've learned lessons, and a lot of them you probably have to relearn.

Are they life lessons or live lessons? Anyway, I'm sorry.

So we are encouraging you to create a list. And again, even if some of them are cliche, you may or may not use them. But start the list. I promise you. Promise you there's some gold in there. A lot of people aren't willing to take the time to be unforgettable. And this is one of those exercises that can be so fruitful. So fruitful. And this weekend, Mark, I didn't even tell you yet. I got an email from Carol with a list of lessons. And she said, that's where I'm at so far. And 10 minutes later, she sent me another email. I thought of one more. And that's how it works. That's how it works. They're not all going to come right at once, but you'll notice ideas if you set your brain, your RAs, your reticular activation system, looking for the lessons. You're going to come when you're driving, when you're in the shower, when you go into the bathroom, when you're just having conversations. But if you're looking, you will find them in those lessons. So we find the lesson, then we reverse engineer. Now what's the story around it? As Mark said, who are the characters? What were you feeling? If you want to tell a good story, what were you feeling? That's why we have better stories, better business. We show you how to take the idea and turn it into a powerful business story. Next we develop the story. Now we got to see where in our presentation does it fit?

Fit. Right.

And next week we're going to talk about the power of the walkthrough.

What? Stay tuned real quickly. Regarding that, word of caution, Please don't make the assumption you have to come up with a sensational Hollywood blockbuster story kind of lesson. What? No, you don't need that. Some of the simplest lessons in life are the fodder for great stories and great points. It doesn't have to be a super sensational, earth shattering moment.

The father or the father? The father.

I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna keep going. I'm not from New York. The father from New York. Okay, but seriously, sometimes the simplest lessons are powerful because they're what you need in the moment and when you pass it on, simple though it may seem to you it could be just what an audience member or audience members need reinforced from your seemingly simple story. Lessons aren't always powerful in your face. They're simply effective in how they change our lives.

And mark, I think you even have a Markism based on that.

Your story doesn't have to be sensational. It just has to be sincere. And sometimes the simplest lessons can be the most powerful. Anything. It could be lesson about love, about family, about how you treat those who are more different. There's so many lessons out there. Like you said, Darren, I could do anything if I'm willing to fail. That's a pretty simple lesson. But the cool thing is your individual journey and your individual story was so unique, but the principle is so universal. Remember that, friends, your journey may be unique, but the principle is universal. So let the lesson help you to help your audience.

And you may not know right now where it's going to go in your presentation, but if you follow us or Patricia Fripp, you know, we have the Fripp speech model that we teach, which is the step by step process which we'll go into a little bit next week, but the step by step process of how to put it together. And these lessons may or may not fit in there, but capture them. As we say, capture what captures you. Capture them. Because even if they don't fit in your presentation, like I just, you know, I had a story of Getting my first checking account, like with my grandfather, and it doesn't really fit anywhere. That's okay. Capture it. Because then down the road you might realize, ooh, I have a new client. A group of bankers.

Perfect.

Well, now that could be. I could pull out some of the evidence that I already have and put that one in, maybe as an opener, maybe at the beginning of one of the points of wisdom so that it will resonate with that audience and they'll think it's cute. They'll think it's adorable. Now, you didn't recreate the whole presentation, but you bridged that gap. Sometimes we don't understand that we might have a universal message. It might be great, but the audience has this commonality in this place that they live, whether it's work or they're a group of entrepreneurs or they work for this company. So there's a commonality. It's our job, it's our responsibility as presenters to bridge that gap between our content and their world.

Oh, that's the goal. Say it again, brother.

Our job, our responsibility to bridge the gap between our content and their world. Make no mistake, if you want to be unforgettable, one of the easiest, simplest ways you can do is customize your presentation for that group. And it's more likely to be unforgettable because they will feel like it's just for them.

Yeah. When you say customize, the more you know about your client and your audience and the more you can, you could even use. You can use their stories. But the key is the lesson that you deliver through the stories that you create from the experience can be based upon even more universal themes. Leadership, communication, family relationships. Those all sound very cerebral. But when you personalize your experience. Oh, yeah. I learned the power of what family means, no matter what. When I was 18 years old and I came to America for the first time. I had 40 bucks in my pocket. I had two suitcases. And people see that in my bio. What I don't know is that my father, sister, my aunt, divorced mother of two small kids who had their own issues, opened her two bedroom apartment from me. She gave her daughter's twin bed to me. So we had two twin beds, her son and her daughter. I got her daughter's bed. She took her daughter into her bedroom where she slept on a mattress and a box spring. No headboard, no footboard. She was struggling to take care of her two kids, but she saw me, her brother, son, as family and was willing to do anything she could to help me to start my Life in America and my second day in New York, my aunt took the day off and spent the day with me traveling around New York City trying to help me find a job. And a wonder of wonders, at the end of the day, I went to a bank on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and got a job as a bank teller trainee for a whopping 136 bucks a week. She did all that, gave me a place in her home. Displaced. Her daughter spent the whole day with me to help me to get a job. Because the lesson was, when you're family, we do what we can for each other. Darren, I've known you for 20 years. I've never told you that.

Never have I. Never.

But the lesson is, when you're family, you do what you can. Family loves unconditionally. That was a lesson. And that story came to mind. Boom. My aunt. My Aunt Grace.

Boom.

It hit me just now, and this was spontaneous. Friends, I didn't rehearse this, but just thinking about this concept made me realize that principle was alive in that story. And this was spontaneous. I'm just telling it to you as it was. It happened to me in the moment. But that was simple. I didn't spend time trying to find the lessons. I thought of a lesson, and the story came to mind immediately. If I can do it that quickly. Imagine when you invest time to go through your lessons and then find the stories that match and then decide, I can insert that here. You have no idea what potential this simple process can hold when you reverse engineer your life lessons.

Yeah. And it's not even focusing on the time alone. It's retraining your brain to have your antenna up in a new area, and that will serve you for the rest of your career as a presenter, however you use presentations. So now that we've trained your brain. So that was part of Carol's challenge. We were trying to rewire her brain to think that way and see it, because she couldn't see how a personal story could tell a business point. And she told us a story about. She came home one day and her mom had. Did she say sold her dog?

Her dog. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

And that's, like, devastating. It's like that. That could very much be a motivational. It could be a business point of, you know, your boss does something that, you know, you don't understand. It doesn't make sense. So now you bridge the gap. And what's the lesson learned? And, Mark, I just had it happen two weeks ago, and this was actually something that I teach that came up, and I learned a new lesson from my own learning. And it was. I started on TikTok. I wanted to experiment. You and I are both on TikTok now.

I've seen it. Yeah.

And so my philosophy is I go right to people who are doing it, and I ask them questions. People who have the experience. That lesson came from listening to motivational tapes like Brian Tracy and Tony Robbins in my early days. They said, go right to people who are the best. They think differently. So even though I was inspired by a couple of friends that had just started TikTok a little, I found some people who I knew that I had their phone number, I could call them up and. And asked them questions. People who were killing it, who had thousands upon thousands of followers. And I asked them. And Christine Moore, who is a friend, she's in recovery, and she TikToks her about recovery and her addiction and how she got out of it. And she's really good. She's killing it. So I called her up and I said, hey, can I talk to you for a few minutes about this? And she's like, wait, you want to learn from me? It dawned on me that not everyone thinks this way. And she didn't even understand it. Even though she knows it. She's like, yes, Christine, this is exactly what I teach. You are killing it on a new platform. I'm going onto a new platform. The rules are different on every platform. So why would I not go to someone with experience who is killing it? Cause I don't wanna learn lessons from. In the comedy world, there's an open act, a middle act, and a headliner. I don't wanna learn lessons from the opening act. Cause they're gonna push me in the wrong direction. I'm gonna learn bad habits I'll have to unlearn. But, Christine, you're a headliner as far as I'm concerned. And so it made sense to her when I explained it, but that was like a lesson that I learned years ago. Reapplied. But then there was the aha that she didn't understand because she had looked at me as a mentor. I'm like, yeah, but this is a nice new field, and you're killing it. And so that was just something that happened recently that I'd never talked about before. But again, a lesson reverse engineered. Now, where could that go? In my presentation, who's the characters? Christine, me. Phone call. I had discovered her just typing in. She came up in my feed, and then I started realizing her profile. I'm like she's killing it. And I also had always admired how transparent she was about what she went through with her addiction. And that was big. Even though she was a stage time member for a while. This is a new field, this is a new category. So as I say, Mark, old school needs a little new school or we're gonna be out of school.

Out of school. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said old school. You said the lesson you learned some time ago, but it was almost resurrected. And that's why, friends, it's important to take the time and to go back over the life lessons learned. In our program, we do as Darren said, we ask content generating questions. But if you simply ask yourself, what lessons have I learned throughout my life? And don't dig too deeply into the intricacies, just get a lesson first. Find a lesson and you will recall the circumstance under which you learned that lesson. And over time, as you work through it and you engineer it, you realize how it will best fit into your presentation, your program, your keynote, your workshop, whatever you have to deliver. The key is, though, to not let these valuable lessons sit dormant without at least finding out, hey, I got the lesson and I know how I learned it. You can build your next great presentation if you're willing to do the reverse engineering.

Yes. And think of what would you want to pass on to your kids? What about your grandchildren? What do you want them to know to help them through life? And when you ask that question, what Mark did when he asked me that question, is it forced me to go deeper. When you go deeper, it's going to mean more to you. And that because it means more to you, is going to enhance your delivery. You can't deliver well something you don't care about. You can't deliver well something you don't care about. So when you care about it, you're going to spend more time, you do more research, you're going to make more tweaks, which is going to get you closer to unforgettable. So, Mark, reverse engineering. Ask yourself, what are the lessons that you learned from your life? Write them all down. There was a moment that you learned it, and it may take you a while to kind of re, when did I bring it up again? With your friends and family, ask them the lessons they learned from their life. They might have some gold that you can use because chances are they're not a presenter. So make the list of lessons, then go back and ask yourself, what was the story around it? Who were the characters? What was the emotion? Before I learned the lesson, what was the down point that forced me to learn the lesson?

Ouch.

Ouch. And if you follow us, get our story structure that we go through and we teach to help pull out the essential elements and then we go and the next reverse is, where would that best serve my presentation? Where it might be the opening, it might be the closing, it might be reinforcing one of the points of wisdom. It could be your recurring refrain, your repetitive refrain, your foundational phrase that you use as a transition so there are places that it can go. But you and me as presenters, we have that inventory. Our inventory is our stories, our metaphors, our analogies, and how we get our point across in an unforgettable way.

And these are the best tools that you and I have, our stories. So we ask you, we invite you, urge you, we encourage you to start doing that today. Don't wait till next week or next month. Start doing that today. Begin to write down your life lessons. And maybe it's a child, a grandchild, a nephew, a niece, somebody you work with, a youth who's under the sphere of your influence. When you reverse engineer your life lessons and find the stories, find the characters, you will find a place to put it in a presentation or simply it to pass it on to a child that you love and that, my friends, will make you unforgettable.

Join us next week for the Power of the Walkthrough. See you then.

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