How I Retired My Mom - A Simple Guide For Captivating People Through Storytelling
Storytelling: the most powerful way to connect with an audience
One day, two people told me the same story. But, that same story has two different outcomes. After hearing the first person, I fell asleep. While hearing the second, I was emotionally engaged and captivated.
From that story told to me by those two people, I learned that storytelling needs structure. For a deeper understanding, I will explain a structural aspect of captivating storytelling through my crafted story: How I retired my mom.
How to plan your storytelling
According to Paul Zak, a pioneer in neuroeconomics: “When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph. It will capture people’s heart-by first attracting their brains.”
To make a story captivating and interesting to someone or to an audience, that story needs this recipe :
1) The hero
Who is the hero? Who are the heroes? Are you the hero or are they an archetype such as readers, writers, speakers, students, employees, …?
2) The backstory
The backstory is the starting point of most good stories. If you are the hero of the story, go back to that time and place, and remember the circumstances that caused you to start on your hero’s journey.
The backstory usually starts at about the same point where many of your readers or listeners are in their life right now.
A backstory example: I was a broke student trying to sell information products to make money online on my website.
So, I came up with an online course teaching people how to create a faceless YouTube channel and grow an audience quickly.
The extra money earned from my course selling was used to buy video editing tools for my freelancing side hustle.
Many of them desire the same result(s) that you’ve already achieved. When they see that you were once where they are now, they will have faith that you can take them where they want to go.
3) The desire
Desire is essential to the story because it shows the end goal. It provides a reason for the journey to move forward.
The desire is the answer to: What do you want to accomplish?
Every story is about a journey either toward pleasure or away from pain. There are four core desires that drive most heroes.
Two of them move the hero toward pleasure. These are: retrieving and winning.
Retrieving → The hero wants to obtain something and bring it back.
Winning → The hero tries to win something valuable. They may want to win well-being for their loved ones, prestige, fame, money, and competition, …
The other two move away from the pain. Those are: stopping and escaping.
Stopping → The hero wants to stop some bad thing from happening.
Escaping → The hero desires to get away from something that’s upsetting or causing pain.
An example of desire: I wanted to be able to support my mom. Therefore, she could retire and finally start her dream, which is: to travel the world.
4) The Journey
In all good stories, the hero can be on two journeys: The journey of achievement or a journey of transformation.
The journey of achievement is the reason the hero sets out on the journey in the first place :
I was only making a few dollars a day, and on many days I actually lost money, so I wasn’t able to make enough money to support Mom.
It’s tied to the hero’s desire and is usually based on one of the goals you learned about earlier: retrieve, win, stop, or escape.
The audience is rooting for the hero to accomplish this journey.
The journey of transformation is the root cause of the hero’s struggles :
I was supposed to be the son who was helping my old mother. But, she was working two jobs while I was going to school.
Sometimes it’s hard to share, or even know, what the actual internal struggles are. But if you’re willing and able to get vulnerable and share your internal struggles, this will build rapport faster than anything else you can do.
5) The obstacles
Emotion doesn’t come from desire. It comes from the obstacles the hero faces while trying to gain the desire.
Our primary goal as storytellers is to elicit emotion, and you can’t do that without obstacles. Obstacles are often about frustration, fear, or hopelessness.
Example: The problem was that Google had changed its algorithms and increased its ad costs. Suddenly my website was no longer making any money, so I had to turn it off, which literally killed my primary source of income.
So be sure to spend time here describing how you felt. This old opportunity is not working and is the reason you (as well as your readers or listeners) are willing to go on a journey to try something new.
6) The Revelation / Epiphany
It could be a person who helps them understand something. It might be an idea they had while reading, or it could be a breakthrough they discovered.
An example of Epiphany: I watched a YouTube video that taught me how to add upsells to my products. Also, I learned that normal websites weren’t enough anymore to make money online. A sales funnel is what I obviously needed.
7) The plan
You have learned about the new opportunity. Now, it’s time to consider the steps that can make the new opportunity lead to the desired result.
My plan was to start creating sales funnels in other markets that had a better potential to make money than the faceless YouTube channel market. I started creating funnels and selling products in the dating, weight loss, and parenting markets.
Inside this plan, you are inevitably going to run into conflict.
8) The conflict
After developing the plan, heroes move forward on it until they start to run into conflict.
Each new funnel created took between 8 to 12 weeks to create. On average, our costs to get one funnel live were about $50,000, and then only about 1 out of 10 products would actually recoup that money. It took a lot of time and money to find another winning funnel.
In the midst of such a situation, they must either decide to go back to their old life, or burn the boats and keep moving forward. This is when the desire shifts from a SHOULD to a MUST. You move from I SHOULD start a business to I MUST start a business.
Describe the major setback and conflict you experienced that made you feel like all was lost. But then…there was a glimmer of light, one last way you could accomplish your goal. They will see you as someone who successfully took a stand and shifted from SHOULD to MUST. And you will inspire them to do the same.
9) The end result
After the final push, something happens. Share the aftermath of what happened so people can see the results that you got from the new opportunity.
After being frustrated, my little team and I decided to create a platform that would make it easy for us to create sales funnels. Five years later, hundreds of people made over ten thousand dollars with a single funnel.
10) The transformation
This is the resolution of your internal struggles. Here you talk about who you became through this process.
I was not only able to retire my mom, but I was also able to spend time traveling the world by her side.
Conclusion
Brain scans have shown that when we’re caught up in a story, our attention narrows to the present moment. The storyteller is building the narrative inside the listener’s mind. When someone listens to a story, they aren’t just listening, they are fully present.
If someone tells us a story, we are drawn in and we listen to it. We find ourselves drawn deeply if they are a good storyteller. If they are a poor storyteller, we still excuse that in many cases and try to make the story work for us. As a communicator, think of the power you weave, and the frame you set up to capture your client’s or your audience’s attention. And consider the power you wield to communicate your message.
We have learned to listen to stories and look for the moral or the meaning of the story. We have a different way of listening to a story than we do to facts and figures.
Stories have inherent power. We have learned from stories and will learn from stories for the rest of our lives.
