TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

28 Feb 2019 · 2 min

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TJ Walker (live-stream, Feb 28, 2019) advises people who present or teach to use real-life personal stories and experiences rather than inventing fictional, cinematic narratives. He argues creating wholly imagined stories requires acting skill and extensive training, so instead presenters should recycle authentic conversations and events—particularly those where they helped someone solve a problem—to make stories compelling and emotionally resonant.

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How do you create interesting, compelling, emotional stories? Where do you get the brilliant insights, the creative impulses to do that? I'm going to shock some of you with my response to that question. Don't do it. Don't even try doing it. The best source of stories, as I mentioned a couple of videos ago, for most people in most situations is just your own life. What actually happened to you, Conversations you had with real customers, clients, colleagues. Let's go deeper into that. The problem with trying to create this interesting, creative next version of Frozen or the Odyssey is that it's really hard work and you probably aren't a professional writer and creative writer. The other problem with that is when it's not something you've actually experienced. If you're trying to tell that story, you now are becoming an actor. You're trying to memorize a script. Guess what? That's really hard. Meryl Streep had to go to graduate school at Yale to be as good as she is. I don't know about you, I don't have time to go to two or three years of graduate school to become a great actor just to tell stories in business presentations. So my advice, take the easy way out. Take the shortcut, take the lazy man, the lazy woman's technique. And that is don't create new stories from whole cloth. Instead, recycle your own stories based on what actually happens in your life. Yes, you can retell other people's stories occasionally if it makes a point, but the the best source of stories for you most of the time will be simply telling people what happened to you in interesting situations where you helped someone else solve a problem.