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Randy, thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Thank you.
Randy, it's good to have you.
We're excited for this one.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Yeah, so I'm Randy Ford.
I call myself a freelance writer, but also a storytelling strategist.
I'm based in Chicago.
My background is I was a reporter covering politics in Tennessee, where I'm originally from, and then fell backwards into working in politics in and did that and ended up working for a member of Congress for 10 years and then did some public affairs work still in DC.
I came to Chicago and decided I wanted to start my own thing and I wanted it to be focused around the storytelling skills that I had learned working in news, working in politics, working as a communication strategist.
And so that's what I do now.
I work with nonprofits and trade associations, small businesses and even individuals who want to get their family and personal stories out on video or in print.
That is fantastic.
An impressive career.
Kudos.
You're a brave person actually going into politics.
Well, you know, my boss also retired at a time that was good for our sanity.
That's great.
So, listeners, this is going to be the outline for our chat today.
Number one, we're going to talk about the storytelling triangle.
Number two, we're going to talk about storytelling for persuasion.
So how can we use this in sales and negotiation and our difficult conversations?
And then number three, storytelling principles for better communication.
So Randy, let's get us started with the storytelling triangle.
What is that?
Yeah, the storytelling triangle is kind of a concept that's common in storytelling, but it's really something that we kind of already internalize and do.
But talking about it helps us think about it more.
And the first thing I want to say is, when we talk about storytelling, it's kind of almost become a buzzword that people say that this is something we should do and we should.
But the common thing is that people think that means adding an anecdote at the beginning of your speech.
It can mean that.
But there's so many other things that we can learn from centuries of storytelling being the most effective means of communication since before we had language.
So the storytelling triangle, if you think about just a basic triangle, and at the very top point, that is you as the storyteller, the speaker, the negotiator, the messenger, anything you want to be, but we'll just say the storyteller.
That bottom right corner is the story.
That's your message.
That's whatever it is that you have to say.
Now you have complete control over yourself as the storyteller, as the speaker, and you have pretty good control over your story.
The third point on that triangle is the audience and you have zero control over the audience and how they're going to react to you and how they're going to react to your story.
So the whole idea of the storytelling triangle is to try to think of as much information as you know about that audience as possible, to tailor and try to meet them as closely as you can if you want your story to resonate.
This is really interesting because I've never thought about stories in this way.
And so what is the practical value of using this type of framework for your story?
Yeah, the really.
You know, I was just listening to a great recent episode you have with Emily Aries from Bossed Up where you all were talking about code switching.
And it's really kind of a very similar concept in a way.
You know, we already for better or worse, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's unfortunate, but we already often tailor what we're saying based on our audience and it happens automatically.
And we say if I spilled this cup of coffee in my lap right now, If I were all by myself, I would say words that I would not say to you, knowing that I'm mic'd up and just instinct tells me not to say that.
And I would say different words if I were on the phone with my grandmother.
So we already like take our audience into account with anything we say.
So the idea is, you know, take that and step it up to build into our more formal and professional communications as well as our personal communications.
If you think about this, if you're having a fight with a partner and you take a second to realize that oh, they're bringing their own perspective to this, to anything I say.
I need to take that into account too.
So those are the practical ways to kind of keep that triangle in your mind.
Yeah, I think that's really important.
And one of the things that I appreciate about this is the fact that we are separating ourselves from the audience, not in a way to create a boundary or anything like that, but just to really give a visual representation of the fact that we are different from our audience and we are different from the story as well.
Exactly.
And we have to recognize that they have a fully formed story themselves that they're bringing to it.
And personally I think if we're not willing to listen to and respect that and try to learn from it, then I think we lose the right to tell our own story, whatever that is.
So I think that's something that we, you know, a lot of us don't think about often.
Certainly, if you spend time on Twitter, you see a lot of people who don't think that way.
Absolutely.
And tell me if I'm taking this metaphor too far, because it's really interesting when you think about the fact.
Like you said, they have their own story.
So is it fair to think about these interactions, since this is a conversation, a dialogue, not a monologue, that it's these two triangles in the conversation, right? having an interaction yeah exactly if you think about you know let's let's just go back to having a fight with a partner or spouse for a second if you think about it you know you have the storytelling triangle where you're the messenger you've got your story which is your point of view over who left the dishes in the sink and and why and then you've got the audience who's the the person you're arguing with they have their own triangle that is rotated and to where they are the storyteller and they have a perspective on the dishes and you're their audience And so it's thinking about it, not just for yourself, but that that's the way everybody is approaching the world is with themselves as the communicator.
Absolutely.
And this really does a great job of demonstrating.
One of the most challenging things for people to grasp in any type of communication is the fact that there's a difference between a story and the truth.
Right.
Because sometimes we get so bought into our story that we don't understand the distinction between our story, our perspective and what really happened.
Exactly.
And also you know what needs to be self-edited and what are the important things that we share about our story.
You don't want the most important or meaningful things to get lost, because we just tell everything, every you know about everything, everything there is.
And we're missing those like real nuggets of truth that can have meaningful connection.
Absolutely.
And oh, this is really getting deep.
This is great.
Because I'm realizing too, to your point, what needs to be edited in the story.
Sometimes the thing that is very important to you in the story is isn't as important to them and it won't be moving to them in the same way that it's moving to you.
In fact, sometimes the things that are most important and most pertinent and moving to you and the way that you see the situation as a whole could actually have a negative impact on them in the interaction.
Yeah, I'll give you an example.
So I do storytelling performances around Chicago, just, you know, open mics or produced shows.
And it's a lot of fun.
One of the interesting things about it is feedback from somebody who was like that was great, but you kind of went off on that tangent about that other person.
And I really wanted to hear more about you.
And so that's always constructive feedback that for some reason, I edited more of myself out of the story.
And I'm so fortunate that there was an audience that connected and wanted to connect with me more as the storyteller and speaker.
So that's the other thing is to make sure that we are maintaining and we're not letting ourselves down in terms of what we share from our story.
Does that make sense?
Again, it's getting very esoteric, I feel, but-
I know, but I'm loving it.
And it's really interesting too, because now, especially when we consider the audience in this, we have to recognize that when we're communicating effectively, we need to think about this in a way where we are not centering ourselves.
We need to focus more on the other person and then what they need too, because a lot of times we tell stories that more so for ourselves, as a therapeutic endeavor, where we're sharing with somebody else because we have that human drive to be understood.
But if we're having these conversations for a strategic purpose, or even if we're just trying to get an important point across to somebody else, We have to recognize that sometimes what we want to say in the conversation isn't what the other person needs to hear in order to be persuaded.
Yeah, absolutely.
And even in an even more practical application of that, I get to do some coaching alongside one of my business partners, our mutual friend who's been on the show as well, Mariana Swallow.
And so we sometimes go into organizations and talk about more effective communications or more effective meetings, so people can get on with their day.
But even if you think about your audience reading an email, what is the perspective they're bringing to that and are you making them do too much?
As the storyteller, can you alter their experience, knowing they don't have time to read a 600 word email before bed?
Um so?
Or you know, if you're in a meeting, what is the experience that other people are bringing from that?
It's 12 o'clock.
You set a meeting for their lunch times.
You better make it quick.
That's the uh, what you owe them, knowing the experience that they're bringing to it.
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I love this.
This is great.
This is really great.
And I think this is a great opportunity for us to move on to point number two, where we're talking about storytelling for persuasion.
So what is it that we need to know when we're actually having these conversations for persuasive purposes?
You know the the funny thing persuasive persuasion always is a funny thing to me because my freshman year of college, in my public speaking 101 course, there were several sections of the course, different professors and at the end of the semester you could qualify to be in this public speaking competition and it was supposed to be an informative no, a persuasive speech was the topic.
I think five minutes or something.
They disqualified me because they said that my speech was not persuasive.
It was informative and they were drawing a line between that.
Luckily, my professor stepped in and said okay well, I teach that there's no difference, that if you are informing people in the right way, you are making the case to persuade without doing the arm twisting.
So they let me back in.
I ended up winning 50 bucks for third place, but um, but that.
That lesson stuck in my mind more than anything else.
He taught me, um plus, i appreciated that he was willing to stand up for me.
But um, so in shaping our stories and talking about ourselves and talking about the truth um, that's the most powerful way to be persuasive, especially when you, if we go back to the triangle, think about that audience and what kind of information you need to give that is going to persuade them.
Does that make sense?
Absolutely and, and this is really interesting so let's talk about that distinction, because so apparently from this story, we know that there are two schools of thought on it.
Some people want a more overt persuasion and some people want information being shared and maybe hoping that persuasion happens organically.
Can you, let's get deeper into that.
Yeah.
There's a you know, I know, you and I both have a lot of experience in the policy world, so we can, we can talk about it from that perspective too.
Um, you know, one thing that I help organizations do is advance their, their advocacy goals with decision makers, with legislators, and so on.
Um, And there's a trend toward storytelling where you say, you know oh, if you need a vote from this member of Congress, they need to meet a constituent who is impacted by this issue, which is true.
But also there's going to be people on the other side who can introduce those stories, too.
So there is that.
There's also the option of giving a 50 page white paper that no one is going to read.
So it's really about blending these and showing the the information and the faces.
And so that this is not just a budget line item.
This is actually about these kids who are at this daycare center.
And I don't know, I'm making this up, but it is something that actually impacts people.
And here are the results that come from that.
So that's the information and you meet the people.
And if that's not persuasive enough to like high five that little kid who's in this daycare because of this one budget line item that you wanted to cut, then some November will roll around where somebody remembers that right.
This is really interesting randy, because now i'm getting a better picture of the, the position of storytelling for persuasion, because really, when it comes to um, to storytelling, i think about it in terms of, like the.
I call it the trojan horse theory of persuasion.
So you think about the the trojan horse uh story from back in the day.
You bring the uh, The horse has a gift.
It gets beyond those gates that were impenetrable.
And then the soldiers come out at night and win the war.
I will not give details because it's graphic.
That's not what we're doing in these conversations.
It's not war, but it's a great metaphor.
And so with these stories, what's happening is that we're lowering people's defenses.
You can't help but listen to a story.
We're wired for stories.
And so the story goes in and they absorb it and they get the message and you get the message inside of them with less resistance.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, it's the old the old adage, you know, walk a mile in another person's shoes.
If you're having a transparent negotiation or conversation to to be able to say, OK, great.
Let's look at this from my perspective.
Let me tell you what is going on with me.
Let me tell you what I am all about in this situation.
And that very transparent way of just bringing it out and saying okay well, this is who I am and this is how I'm approaching this.
Whether it's some kind of big merger or again back to the dirty dishes, it's the same.
It's just saying okay, I'm gonna tell you what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, who I am, and we'll go from there.
Absolutely.
And I want the same from you.
I expect you to be transparent, back with me and in that same way, if we're gonna do this on the up and up,
Absolutely.
So it's a great tool for mutual understanding, right?
And I think what's great is that you can pair storytelling with other persuasive techniques that come at a different point in a conversation, and it makes it easier.
And so using this in tandem with some of the other negotiation and persuasion techniques that we talk about in this show is a really powerful way to convey a message persuasively.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's fantastic.
Well, let's transition into the third point.
And I think we could spend a good amount of time here.
Principles for better communication storytelling and communication.
So we've all heard bad stories and we've all heard good stories, but we all we can't often articulate what's the difference between a good story and a bad story.
So help us to understand what we need to do in order to tell a good story.
Yeah and, and part of this is also helping people understand that when we say storytelling, whether it's in a corporate setting, a presentation negotiation, anything doesn't necessarily mean story time.
So, you know, some people might think oh, once upon a time we came to the negotiation table uh, and and hopefully, you know, happily ever after.
Um, you know, that's story time and it can include that and it can be that kind of um approach.
But really again, as i was saying like, storytelling has been around since before we had cave drawings were stories um, if you look at them.
So um they, there are things that have that we are just wired to do.
I mean one thing I'm not like a big science guy, but this thing is.
One thing that I love is anytime we take in new information through any of our senses, it passes through the part of our brain called the neural story net, which just fills in any blanks.
If I tell you a story about a cat um, and don't tell you anything else you, without even thinking about it, may picture a cat that you know.
And so that's another reason to be aware of your audience and what they're bringing into this, because any information you don't tell them they are going to fill in.
And it could be a little detail like that, or they could, you know, assume something crazy.
You notice this often when people will assume that a doctor is a white male.
And it's like, no, it's a woman of color doctor.
And it's because they're bringing their experience.
They've only really ever dealt with white male doctors.
So we all do that in filling in the blanks from the perspective that we're bringing, based on our lived experiences and what we understand about the world.
So you know, knowing that that anything is filtered into those perspectives or filtered through those perspectives is an important part of understanding who you're communicating with or who you're communicating against.
Another thing that's just really a simple thing, but is the rule of threes, which is that we are kind of wired to take in, at least in our culture.
There are some cultures where it's different, but in our culture it's the rule of threes.
And if you think about the stories that we have the three bears, the three pigs, the father son, the Holy Ghost, the language, the wardrobe, any of these things the way most jokes are set up.
It resonates with us and it's a way that we take in information, even if we're not consciously realizing it.
It's just a rhythm that we as audiences have come to expect.
As well as and there's another one that's pretty helpful to think of, and that's the rules of primacy and recency.
So if you're writing or speaking, just know that people are gonna more likely remember the first thing you say and the last thing you say, and that's again just because they're wired to respond to that once upon a time and that happily, ever after now.
A good story has a beginning, middle and end and you shouldn't ignore that part.
But people are going to likely remember that the first thing they heard and the last thing they heard.
So you know, if you have a bulleted list that you want people to do, bury the boring stuff in the middle.
And that's going to play into the way that people have been taking in information, because we've been hearing stories their whole lives.
You know, nobody said Daddy, I want you to read me a bedtime PowerPoint.
We heard stories.
It's just how we're wired to take in information.
Absolutely.
And let's talk more about that rule of three.
And so let's give an example of a business context type of thing.
Let's say you're within an organization.
And your job is to create this new project.
It's something that the organization has never done before.
The board is kind of skeptical and you want to get them on board.
And so you have an opportunity to have a conversation with the people and you decide hey, I'm going to tell a story.
In that type of context, how would the rule of three play a role?
The very first thing I would do is make sure, if I'm trying to get them on board, that i show them a slide or something that says these are the three things we're going to do.
This is going to be easy.
This is not the, the over-the-top project that you're worried about.
Sure, it's going to cost you billions of dollars and and could destroy the company, but here are the three ways we could make it work to to do it.
Uh, and people can resonate with that number.
Um, some lists are five.
That's fine.
But if you get it down to just three things that we are going to do to make this happen, that is a manageable thing that people know and kind of have come to expect.
I think that's great.
And it's tough because I think there's a lot of allure to complexity, because sometimes, especially when you come from the world of the ivory tower
You graduate from school, you have all these very theory-heavy professors oftentimes.
Sometimes you buy into the belief that the more complicated it is, the more intelligent you look.
And getting people to adopt simplicity is really tough.
Simplicity is like a big deal.
And I'm glad you said that, because there are things that are important and meaningful to us that we and we touched on this a little bit earlier may need to cut out, to get to the things that are really meaningful.
And there are those kinds of people who are communicators, who are more.
I don't want to get into the communication styles right now, but the kind of people who overshare without, without realizing it and i love my mom to death, but she is is one of those where a story will go on and then sometimes i feel like she's writing a document and just keeps opening a new tab for a new document as she's going and i'm like this started as a story about a dog we used to have and now i'm learning about this vet that somebody goes to off broadway and I'm like we're off track.
We got to get back to the story here.
So that is a very big part of it.
And some things to listen for if you do a lot of public speaking, for example, is if you find yourself saying long story short, you probably already went long.
You probably need to rethink how you talk about it, or you know the long and the short of it is is another term that people do.
And so just scaling that back, thinking about what I need to share and what I can come back to later.
The other thing is there's usually always an opportunity to share more of your story.
You know, this is not the only time you're ever going to speak.
And again, Maybe you're in a situation where there's a question and answer time and you'll get to address anything that wasn't that core, those core three things that you decided you needed to get across.
Absolutely.
I think that's really an important part of it because the conversation doesn't end with your story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's hope not.
You know, so that's that's not a good sign.
Exactly.
And you can start to put in more details after the fact.
You know, just like you said, you can expand on it, but you want to use the story as an opportunity to capture the core of the message.
And I think one of the things that's tough is that people want to feel organic with the way that they tell their stories.
And they say, okay, yeah, I'm just going to tell this story about blah, blah, blah.
And they don't talk about how they're going to do that beforehand.
They just go in and wing it, and so um, what are your thoughts on winging it as a strategy?
It's, it's not so great.
Um, and you know you, you and i didn't wing this.
We talked including, we talked about three points in fact that we wanted to to hit on uh, which you outlined for the audience up front.
Um again, going back to to my colleague, mariana swallow, she tells people, if you're going into a meeting or you're giving a speech and you don't have time to prepare, At the very least pull out an index card and write down the three points that you want to have made by the end of it.
And at the very least, that will help you.
The other thing, if you do absolutely have to wing it, think about your ending.
How are you going to get out of it?
Because again, that's the last thing people are going to hear.
It's the first thing they'll remember.
And we've all seen those presenters or other speakers who will just say well, I guess that's all I got.
And that is not something.
So if you do have to wing it, think about those things.
What do I want to get across?
What is my exit strategy?
That's big.
And another thing that I've seen often and this is communication in general, but I think it applies to story too is that People signal the end of their thoughts.
And, at the same time, I believe, a lack of confidence or it can be interpreted as a lack of confidence by slowly decreasing the value, the volume of what it is that they're saying.
And then it's almost like somebody accidentally pressed the mute button and oh, I guess they're done now.
That's it.
Yeah.
Right.
No, you're right.
And you're right.
And that comes across whether it is a lack of confidence or not, it can come across that way.
And there are certain vocal inflections that we, you know, very intelligent people may do that that make them come across as being in confident or not having confidence or not being transparent sometimes.
Yeah.
And so one of the simple rules that I try to follow when I'm doing interviews is always end on a strong point.
Always end on a strong point.
I don't want it to end with a whimper.
To use a gymnastics term, we want to always stick the landing.
Yeah, exactly.
This is fantastic, Randy.
I really appreciate this.
Before you go, can you let the listeners know again about the work that you're doing and how they can get in touch with you?
Sure, yeah.
So go to firststorystrategies.com.
That's my website, of course, and you can see all about me there.
So I work with nonprofits.
I work with small businesses who are looking to talk about what they do.
So I do some ghostwriting if people need blogs.
I love helping them tell their stories that way.
We do some video production work to do kind of mini documentary storytelling.
And I work with a lot of families and individuals who want to get their stories down which, especially after this past year, year and a half is just a huge opportunity that I hope people are not missing.
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