143. Social Media Storytelling: How to be more bingeable than Netflix
Ever found yourself scrolling endlessly through social media, only to be captivated by a story that stopped you in your tracks?
Everyone’s had the experience of being hooked by a good story. We simply can’t help ourselves.
However, while the effects of good storytelling hasn’t changed, the mediums that we’re using to tell stories have. Social media (and fast scrolling attention spans) demands that we share our stories in micro moments.
But how do we do that?
What are the ways to tell a story that grabs attention the moment someone takes out their phone and starts scrolling through various social platforms?
If you’re posting an Instagram reel or a Youtube short, how do you build in the elements that make for a gripping narrative that will keep people’s attention – and do it in under a minute?
Well, to help explore this new realm of social media storytelling, I’ve invited master storyteller, Francisco Mahfuz onto the Standout Business Show.
Francisco is the author of “Bare: A Guide to Brutally Honest Public Speaking,” the host of The Storypowers Podcast & the author of some super entertaining storytelling that I’ve been binging on LinkedIn
Resources
Connect with Fracisco Mahfuz on LinkedIn
Transcript
Francisco Mahfuz:
As soon as a story starts happening, I’m trying to find out. Maybe this is important to me, maybe I can learn something from this, and until I find out what that is, I’m engaged. Even something as simple as just saying you know, it’s last week. I’m talking to the client. As soon as we get to discussing his business, he turns to me with his eyes wide open and says, okay, that sounds like a story. I kind of want to know what the guy says. This is the most exciting beginning of a story. No, I still want to know what the guy says. It’s very difficult to read that and go nope, I’ll give this one a pass.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, and today we are talking about how to grow your business through the power of storytelling on social media. So we’re talking about short form storytelling, and this is the question that I have for you Can you tell a good story in under a minute, or should you even want to? I know you’ve had the experience of being hooked by a good story and, as humans, we just can’t help ourselves. We love stories, but while the notion of storytelling and the power of storytelling hasn’t changed, the mediums by which we’re using to tell our own stories has changed tremendously, and this is because of social media and the fast scrolling attention spans, which is demanding that we share our stories in these micro moments. So how do you do that? What are the ways to tell a story that grabs attention the moment someone pulls out their phone and starts scrolling? If you post on Instagram Reel, or if you post a YouTube short, is it even possible to build in the elements that make for a gripping narrative that will keep and hold your people’s attention, and do that under a minute? Well, to help us explore this new realm of social media storytelling.
Brad Powell:
I’ve invited master storyteller Francisco Mafuz onto the Stand Up Business Show. Francisco is a storytelling coach for business leaders. He’s also the host of the Story Powers podcast and he’s been the force behind some super entertaining storytelling that I’ve been binging on on LinkedIn. So stay tuned and let’s start the show. All right, francisco, welcome to the show.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I’m happy to be here, brad. I was very excited about that intro I was doing.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I was luckily showing moves that nobody got to see, which will keep a shred of credibility I have intact until I get to talking.
Brad Powell:
Well, you know, I record locally on both sides. So in the final edit God damn it, I look, I record locally on both sides, so in the in the final edit, god damn it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I forgot about that.
Brad Powell:
We’re going to have a little insert of you dancing to the show intro. It’ll be right there. Fair enough, all right. So let’s talk about storytelling and I really want to dive into.
Brad Powell:
I mean, I’ve actually listened to several of the podcasts that you have already been on and I’ve been witness to a bunch of the stories that you’ve been telling on LinkedIn, which I think is a really cool sort of jumping point for us to frame our conversation, and that is these days a lot of the problem and challenge and opportunity for anybody who’s in business is that we want to get our message out. We want to get people to know about our stuff. We want people to know and remember what we do and who we are and the value that we bring. And yet, you know, one of the main ways and the only ways for us to gain that attention is to be on social media and to be contributing to the conversations there on a consistent basis.
Brad Powell:
Your whole work, your whole reason for being, is in helping people see that.
Brad Powell:
Well, when you do that, if you include a story, you will in fact be more memorable and you will in fact be more distinctive and differentiated, because the stories you’re telling are all about you and the kind of person you are and the things that you believe in, and people will connect with that.
Brad Powell:
The problem is that it’s in this relatively small frame and often witnessed on a little device like this. And so the question becomes when people think about storytelling, they think long, rambling story or they think Star Wars, epic, adventure, and so when you’re working with the clients that you work with and you’re helping them convey their messaging through the vehicle of story, how do you help them? You know, come down from that that the giant mountaintop of I have to do something, epic or or the other thing of like. Well, I have to tell my whole life story here, you know, and then condense it into something that is actually manageable for this new medium on social media the first thing I try to get across to most people is that they are familiar with the type of storytelling that I preach about.
Francisco Mahfuz:
They just haven’t really realized it Because the example I’m giving it away. What I usually tell people is listen, somebody asks you something and you explain, you give them theory, you give them opinions, you give maybe some facts or data, and often people will say to you I’m not really sure I get it, can you give me an example? And then you give them an example, which will often be something that happened in real life, that helps illustrate your point and that, at its most simple, is what a story is. It’s a real-life example that makes a point. So once people realize that, it becomes a lot simpler to understand that in most businesses you do something like that, you just do a crap version of it, which is, for example, a case study. Right, you know, use cases, case studies, that type of stuff.
Francisco Mahfuz:
They’re just, I think, crappy examples of storytelling. You know you’ve got the right idea. You know let’s actually show some evidence here. Let’s share something that actually happened that our client, prospect audience can relate to. The only thing you could be doing a lot better is the shape of it, because if you do it in a information only manner, you are not engaging all the areas of your brain that you could the way a story would. So all I’m really saying to people is you give examples as it is, let’s just shape them in the form of a story, and then you automatically make your communication more engaging. And that’s not epic. That doesn’t mean sharing your most vulnerable things about your life, and it also doesn’t take any particular length of time. In many ways it’s actually quicker than doing it in other ways.
Brad Powell:
Yeah. So talk a little bit about how you can form a story so that it’s not crappy, so that it’s not boring and it’s not just completely flat of like. Well, I woke up and I brushed my teeth and then I went on, had breakfast and today I had burnt my toast and that ruined my whole morning.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I went out and had breakfast and today I burnt my toast and that ruined my whole morning. Yeah, you just have to start with the end in mind. In the end in any story used for business is the point. So what is the point of your story? Oh, I don’t know. I want to show people how video can be a very effective way to do marketing, for example. Okay, that’s your point. Have you got an example of something that happened to you or with a client about how video was super effective? I would expect.
Francisco Mahfuz:
You should have that if this is the service you’re trying to sell and this is not the very first time you’re selling it and then you think, okay, yes, I had this thing that happened to Alex. Okay, what happened to Alex oh, Alex was he had just been posting for a while and then one day he did a video and that’s what happened. Okay, so one day he did a video and this is what happened is sort of where we want to get to right. That’s the meat of the story. What we now need to do is start as close to the end as possible. Can you start just before he did video? Can we start when you’re having the conversation with him to convince him to do video? Okay, we can do that, and maybe we can fill in a bit some context after you set the stage and that’s basically it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Right, you start as close to the figure out the point, figure out what the moment the story is going to revolve around this. Then you start as close to the figure out the point, figure out the moment the story is going to revolve around this. Then you start as close to the end as possible and you start with time and place. So you might say something. Like you know, it’s two months ago and I’m speaking to this guy, Alex, who I’ve been talking about for a while, and he’s just been telling me, like how all this marketing he’s doing on social media is just not really working. And I say, you know, you haven’t really tried video like we’ve been talking about. And he says, okay, fine, I’ll give it a go.
Francisco Mahfuz:
And then he shares the experience of giving video a go and what happened right after. And that’s it right. If you know exactly the bits you’re going to talk about and you’re not inventing them like I just did, you can go straight to the point. The whole thing will take a minute or less. Is it going to be the most exciting story in the world? Maybe it might be really exciting for the right people, because the things Alex will be saying he’s struggling with will be very relatable to them and the things he achieves will be exactly the types of things they want to achieve. Is it a great story? Would you tell it on stage? No, but it will absolutely do the job when you’re talking to a prospect or when you share it in social media as social proof.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I like that, and I think case studies are examples of ways in which somebody it could be you, or it could be someone who you worked with, or just somebody who you know who’s gotten over a hurdle or overcome a challenge or and it doesn’t have to be a big giant challenge some little thing that before things weren’t going well, or they had this thing that they they wanted to do and they couldn’t get there, and then they tried this thing and it worked, or they tried this thing and they fell flat on their face. Whatever that is like. Those little anecdotes work just simply because they do follow up a very simple story structure and they are related. People can see themselves in those different kinds of examples.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Yeah, that’s very much it. What you are trying to do is, first of all, you want to be very clear with the story that you know you, or whoever the character of the story is, is going through the same struggles, or very similar struggles to you, the audience or the prospect or whoever. So the struggles don’t need to be the exact same, but then the way the characters feel about the struggles, that’s really the most important thing. Are they really frustrated about something? Are they upset, are they angry, are they doubting themselves? That is actually more important than the struggles themselves, because then your audience is going to think that’s how I feel, that’s how it is to be me right now. So that’s super important. And then you have to show them a solution to their problem and show how the character or you feels after that solution has been found. That’s about it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Can you make that story more interesting? Yeah for sure. One of the very basic ways to make it more interesting is just to add dialogue. If it’s like me and Alex, I was talking to Alex in my invented story. I wasn’t saying he said this, I said that he said this. So just have dialogue. It just feels like two people talking. That’s way more engaging, and that’s it right. It can be a lot better than that, but for the vast majority of people, if they just mastered doing this type of story, they’ve already improved their communication. You know, it’s head and shoulders above what most people do when it comes to communicating this type of thing.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I just want to underline the emotional part. That seems so important that you want to have some feeling as in, and it goes back to like what do I want to convey when I’m sharing this information? Well, one of the things that you want to convey is, whatever feeling is part of the story, like what do you want these people that you’re telling a story to to feel? Like in in this you know communication that you’re doing, and I think another part of that and you you can tell, give me more examples. But using imagery and metaphor, like I’m, I’m all about visual.
Brad Powell:
So if you can paint a visual picture of some kind, even through whether it’s real or imagined kind of thing, like a friend of mine, actually one of my previous guests. She was on and she was telling her story of what happened to her during COVID, which was that she decided to learn how to rollerblade for the very first time, but the first time she’d never done it before and the first time she got on her roller blades she felt like a baby giraffe and she was like, oh no, this is really hard and she tied it to. And then, you know, for me, like getting in front of the camera was also really hard and I felt like a baby giraffe. Well, that image of the baby giraffe, I think, is what connects so powerfully, because, like, yeah, I may not remember much about what you said today, but I will know. Like that baby giraffe is stuck in the back of my brain now.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Yes, for sure. Powerful imagery is super, super useful when it comes to storytelling. Where I think people need to be careful is that it needs to be imagery and words that you would actually use when you told the story to real people. Like if you were having dinner and you’re having and you’re telling that story, would you just describe? You know, I just felt like a baby giraffe and I think you would, and that’s fine, because then it works. What some people do and this is where some storytelling goes wrong and, coincidentally, or not.
Francisco Mahfuz:
This is what I just put out on my newsletter this morning goes wrong and, coincidentally or not, this is what I just put out in my newsletter this morning is they start trying to be literary about it and it’s like you know, the moon was glinting off her dress or whatever. People don’t talk like that and then you’re just forcing the type of language and imagery that feels artificial. So if you can find something like the baby giraffe, that’s amazing. And what I actually find is super useful as well is to think about stories in two different ways. There is the story about the thing you want to talk about. So, in the example of Alex and using video for content marketing, that’s a story about it. It’s an actual story about the actual thing you want to talk about. The other way to talk about it is a story like it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
So today my post on social media was about me struggling for many years with back pain and then meeting an expert who told me how to heal myself. I got better and you know, the first time I had back pain for four years. This time, you know, happened again a few weeks ago. I only had it for four weeks and then I use that story to say you know, sometimes talking to a real expert makes sense, right, and then I sagged way into some stuff to do with my work. Like you know, if you’re struggling with these things, maybe it’s time you talk to a real expert. So that’s a story like the thing I’m talking about. So this is not a story about someone needing help with their TED talk or with their keynote and looking for an expert. That is a story that would be a story about it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
This is an analogy. The whole story is a metaphor for what I’m talking about. So that’s another way of doing it. Do you have a situation that is a bit like the one you want to talk about? Because then the whole thing can become a metaphor, and there’s one I share.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I’ve shared plenty of time and people tend to love, or plenty of times that people love, which is like I talk about me wasting a lot of time and energy and almost killing myself putting together a super complex IKEA wardrobe instead of just, you know, paying to get someone to do it for me, and then that’s how I learned that just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should right. And then I use that to talk about other things to do with my work or what things people are struggling with. So that’s the other way of doing it. So instead of finding a visual metaphor like felt like a baby giraffe, you find a situation like putting together IKEA furniture that stands in as a metaphor or an analogy actually for the thing you want to talk about. That’s the other way of doing it. I tend to go more that way than the visual metaphor way.
Brad Powell:
Yeah. So this really goes to what I think is probably the biggest hang up that people have when they’re thinking about okay, I want to tell a story, and what, Like what story should I tell her? I don’t feel like I have any stories. So what is your method for collecting stories or anecdotes or little vignettes to share?
Francisco Mahfuz:
So there’s two different approaches to it. Many methods, but two different approaches. The first approach is you look for a story when you need it. This is not easy to do. Sometimes it comes very easily. Sometimes it doesn’t. So, for example I want to talk about. So the point I want to make is about content. So the point I want to make is about content marketing. The point I want to make is about the value of looking for experts. The point I want to make is about how some things should be outsourced. So then I always think to myself okay, if I want to talk about the value of looking for an expert, has it ever happened to me that something really good happened because I did the thing you know, looking for experts in this case or have I ever struggled or suffered or got myself into trouble because I didn’t? So do you have an example in your life when you did the thing or when you didn’t do the thing? Okay, so both can work very well. No, I don’t actually have that example. Do I have? Do I have any sort of example that is like that Maybe not looking for an expert specifically, but looking for help, or trusting what someone else was telling me Not perfect, but they could work Okay. So that’s one approach of doing it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
The other approach is to collect stories for when you need them, and the approach I use is something I learned from another storyteller called Matthew Dix, and it’s called Homework for Life. So every single day I just ask myself if I had to tell a story from today, from something that happened, something I thought about, something, I remember, something I read or watched. What would it be? And then I just write down what that thing would be, and if I can think of two or three things, then I’ll write them down. And sometimes that’s very easy, because maybe I’m reading a business book and someone shared the story and that was a great one, so I just write it down. Sometimes I have to think about it a little bit. So I just start accumulating this potential stories, and you know I’ve been doing this for a while. So now I have, you know, well over 1000 of them.
Francisco Mahfuz:
But there is sort of a shortcut to that that you can do as well, which is called first, last, worst, best. So you just write down, get a piece of paper and write down on top. On the top first, last, worst, best. And then on the left.
Francisco Mahfuz:
You can write a whole bunch of things that are relevant to the work you do. For example, if you’re trying to focus this on work and maybe write boss or job or client, and you know what was, who was your first client, who was your last client, who was your worst client, who was your best client. You know the same for boss, for job. You can do this for funnier things that you can do, like you know car, pet, relationship, place you traveled, place you lived in, kiss, you know whatever comes to mind trouble, whatever comes to mind and then you come up with a whole bunch of things that could be developed into a story. Firsts and worsts tend to be the ones that where people more easily come up with things.
Francisco Mahfuz:
So it’s not. It’s not the same as just having a whole bunch of stories that you can look through, but it works as well. And for anyone who does take this on board and decides to write down the stories for when you need them, it’s useful to to tag them somehow. Maybe just put you know, hashtag whatever, leadership, client story, success story, client content, marketing, experts and then when you’re looking for a story about that, you can just do a search on whatever you know app you’re using to keep these things and you’ll find it more easily. I just use notes on my phone because I think that I’ve tried using spreadsheets, but anything that I don’t easily access from my phone is less. I’m less likely to fill in every day or fill in when it happens. So that’s the approach. Those are the two approaches I think most people should take, and it’s always easier to save the content or the potential content beforehand than try to find it when you need it.
Brad Powell:
Yeah well, lots of really great ideas. I’ve read Matthew Dick’s book Storyworthy. I’ll just mention it here. If you haven’t read that book, you should go and get it right now. Audiobook is quite good to listen to. I have both versions and I hear that he’s actually putting out a new book this spring that’s all focused just on business storytelling, so I’m looking forward to when that comes out. So now I’ve been collecting all my stories. My notes on my phone is full. I’ve got 167 stories all listed in there. Now what I want to explore, apropos to what we’re talking about at the start, is how can I take things out and whittle it down and be my own story editor so that when I am telling the story and I’m posting on social media whether I’m writing a post or I’m doing a short form video how do I keep it in a place where it’s going to be consumable for the fast-scrolling masses out there?
Francisco Mahfuz:
The advice I gave earlier about starting as close to the end as possible is a super important one, because this is where a lot of people go wrong. They want to talk about this one conversation they had with a client or with the partner or whoever, but instead of starting at the conversation, they think they need to give context first. And it’s like you know, I work with this, this and that and one of the struggles most of my clients have. You don’t need to do that, like you can just say. Last week, I was talking to this prospect of mine, alex, and he said Francisco, I’m really struggling with whatever. And then you can just sort of fill in context by the things you say, but to say, yeah, you told me, like you’ve been telling me this for weeks, okay, fine, you’re like. You know, the first time you asked me for help, you were already saying those things. Okay, so now I understand that you work with that and that this is a conversation that’s been going for a while. So through dialogue, you can put a lot of context in a lot more easily than if you had to do it through text, right? So try and have the conversation be, as have all the context that you think you need, but you don’t need as much as you think.
Francisco Mahfuz:
The other thing about making the story short is you can compress things. If you had three conversations with a client and all these points came through and these conversations happen reasonably close to each other it’s not years apart then just make it sound like one conversation. It doesn’t really matter, because even if the client looked at it and said that wasn’t just one conversation, you go yeah, there was three, but it was super complicated to try and tell that in a LinkedIn post. But, like, we did say all those things, or just about all those things, didn’t we? Yeah, that’s the conversation. That’s what the conversation was. Well, there you go. Right, sometimes there’s more than one character or more than two characters in the story, but do they matter?
Francisco Mahfuz:
For example, I just told a story this morning about me waking up late for school when I was 10. I have a brother. He was late too. He was running to catch the school bus or whatever with me. But the story doesn’t need my brother. My brother doesn’t add or subtract anything from the story from being there. So I just don’t talk about my brother. Okay, it would just be too complicated. I talk about listening to a particular music, a particular type of music in the school bus. There was not the only album that the driver played all the time. He had like three or four, but that’s just too complicated to tell in the story, so I just stick to one.
Francisco Mahfuz:
The important thing is what are you trying to say? Are these details that you’re keeping in? Are they absolutely essential for you to make that point? If they’re not essential, just take them out. Okay, can you simplify them? Can you take them out? Can you condense the timelines? Because if you do all those things and use dialogue instead of text, then you can save yourself a ton of time. So those are the things that I tend to find help a lot of people get out of this thing of like I need to write 15 paragraphs to basically get to a conversation, which is the important thing, which is the important thing.
Brad Powell:
All right.
Brad Powell:
So we’re getting close to the end of our time and there is one thing that I would like to explore a little bit, which is how story makes your messaging so not only just memorable, but it’s the kind of content that people will want more of.
Brad Powell:
I saw you doing a terrific example of this, where you were telling a story, where you were in an outdoor cafe and you ran into the movie star, javier Bardem, and so he’s sitting right next to you and, of course, your wife is getting all excited and and wants to go say hello, and you’re all worried because you’ve heard that he’s mean to fans, and you’re worried that your wife is going to be horribly hurt and disappointed by this encounter, but she is going to do it anyway. And she, she goes up to him and says hey, you know, can I have your autograph or whatever she’s asking? And and then then you stopped, and then you start explaining how aren’t you curious to find out what happened? And I, that element, that element right there, so encapsulates why we’re even talking about the idea of doing stories. So speak a little bit to that and this is, I know, core to the meaning behind the work that you do.
Francisco Mahfuz:
There’s a whole bunch of things to do with storytelling that explain that. There’s all the chemistry and you chemistry and all the hormones that are triggered when we tell stories or hear stories. There is all the evolutionary background of what stories are, for which they were learning to, so we are primed evolutionarily to pay attention to them. But you can sum most of that by just this idea of open loops. Right, the brain hates an open loop. There’s something missing for this idea to be completed, for me to understand what actually happened there, and stories have that. The good stories at least, have that built in as soon as a story starts happening. I’m trying to to find out. Maybe this is important to me, maybe I can learn something from this. And until I find out what that is, I’m I’m engaged, I’m listening.
Francisco Mahfuz:
You know, and anyone who’s ever watched a good movie or a tv show or read a good book knows that good authors will have cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger. If you’re the show Suits, you overdo that and people get tired of it. But you should never get to the end of a page or, you know, get a commercial break when you watch a TV show without something that is somewhat unresolved to keep you watching, and it’s the same thing with stories. So the more you learn how to do that by twisting and turning as the story goes, then the more likely that your audience is going to be engaged. And apart from that, even something as simple as just saying you know, it’s last week. I’m talking to the client and, you know, as soon as we get to discussing his business, he turns to me with his eyes wide open and says, like okay, that sounds like a story. I don’t know what happens, but I kind of want to know what the guy says. Is this the most exciting beginning of a story? No, I still want to know what the guy says.
Francisco Mahfuz:
It’s very difficult to read that and go nope, I’ll give this one a pass. You’re fighting against your brain just because like, okay, fine, I’ll click just to see what the next line is. The next line is no good, I move on, but that’s just how the brain is primed when it comes to storytelling. So when you combine the chemistry, the evolutionary imprint we have that comes from storytelling, and the open loops, put all those things together and you just have communication that is naturally more engaging than almost anything that people will do without a great deal of effort and skill. So I think it’s a lot easier to be an exciting, engaging communicator and a memorable one if you use storytelling, because then the format is already proven, we’re already prepared and primed for it. If you’re trying to do it with copywriting, if you try to do it with humor, with any of these other things, it’s a lot harder, right, it’s a lot of people just cannot do it. Use storytelling. The stories are doing the work for you.
Brad Powell:
Actually, with storytelling, the bar is pretty low, like you don’t actually have to be the greatest storyteller when you’re talking about, you know, watching a good movie, even bad movie I don’t know how many bad movies I’ve watched until the end, just simply because I needed to know what happens. It’s like it’s I have to know I’m going to watch, even though I don’t like this, I’m going to sit here and go through it. In fact, I’m sure people can relate to having binged whole series of shows on Netflix where the show wasn’t that great but you were hooked because you just need every. Every episode ended with a bit of a cliffhanger and he’s like, well, I’ll watch the next one. So we’re all sucked in, it just gets. We get sucked in by it. We can’t help it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need closure, we need closure.
Brad Powell:
Right, exactly, all right. Well, if someone’s listening to this and they are inspired and they’re thinking, all right, I need an expert storyteller to help me with my stories, because I just need help with this. What’s the best way for them to hang out with you? Reach out to you.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Well, if they want to find out more about what I do, the easiest place to go is my website, which is storypowerscom, because almost no one can spell my name If you try my namecom that will you know. Franciscomorfuscom, that would also work but storypowerscom is easier and also I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so if anyone wants to say hello over there, feel welcome to do it.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I don’t promise I’ll engage in small chat or take up your offer to fill my diary with coaching appointments, but I am usually easy to speak to there, so those are the two best places to find me.
Brad Powell:
All right. Well, I’ll make sure that links to your website and your LinkedIn profile are in the show notes and I’ll just say, like, go check him out on LinkedIn, just follow his stuff. Francisco is one of the most entertaining content producers on LinkedIn that I found and it just kind of makes your day. His stuff will go by and it’ll make you smile.
Francisco Mahfuz:
I’m not promising any real wisdom, but I always promise. I promise a laugh or two, right.
Brad Powell:
Right, so anyway, thanks so much for coming on today, taking the time to do this. This has really been fun.
Francisco Mahfuz:
Pleasure for having me man Thanks.
Brad Powell:
Well, that has to have been one of my favorite interviews this year so far. And here are my takeaways. Takeaway number one is stories can be very simple. You can just start with a real life example. A real life example that makes a single point and that is the structure for the story that you want to tell and when you’re wanting to figure out. Okay, what stories do I tell?
Brad Powell:
Well, there are many methods for coming up with story ideas, but, as Francisco shared, there are just two approaches. Approach number one is you look for a story when you need it. So you’re thinking the point I want to make is this thing, and you go find a story that will help you make that point, and that can be easy, or it can actually sometimes be quite hard. So another method, this method number two, is you collect stories and have a collection that you can choose from for when you actually want to tell a story. The example that Francisco gave comes from storyteller Matthew Dix, which is this practice he calls homework for life, homework for life. And so every day, at the end of the day, you sit down and ask yourself the question if I had to tell a story from today, what would it be and then write down one line of what that story idea is. And if you do this day after day, you’re going to end up with a list of story ideas longer than you’ll have ever time to tell all those stories. So try that. I encourage you to go find Matthew Dix. If you just go onto YouTube and search for Matthew Dix homework for life, you’ll find his TED talk and it’s really worth watching.
Brad Powell:
My last takeaway has to do with how do you tell a story and make sure that it’s condensed in a short enough form that is consumable for social media. Francisco’s suggestion is start your story as close to the moment of change as possible. The reason that you’re telling a story is because there’s some transformation that happens and you want to begin the story at the moment of transformation. Begin the story at the moment of transformation. So if you do that, then your story will be greatly condensed and will work much better on social media. And the last thing I’ll mention is this concept of open loops. If you want to get people engaged in your storytelling, then you want to create an open loop, because we need closure.
Brad Powell:
Anytime you create any kind of suggestion like well, here’s something that’s going on, people will hang in there with you because they absolutely need to know what’s going to happen next. So that’s it for this episode of the Standout Business Show. I just want to remind you that if you’d like to go and get the entire archive of the Standout Business Show, just go to standoutbusinessshow. It’s all there, all the audio, all the video, all the show notes and until the next time. So long, thank you.
