Transcript
The ‘Why’ in anything is the heart to anything. Which means that if you’re on stage and you haven’t figured out the ‘Why’ to your pitch, then what’s going to happen automatically is you’re gonna be searching round and round for an answer to your ‘Why’ as you try to sell something to your audience. And while you’re going round and around trying to search for it, you’re going to come off as very confusing to your audience. And confusion in business always equals one word ‘No’, and the whole point of pitching is you’re after a ‘Yes’.
Why include storytelling in a pitch? Because first of all, stories make up life. Stories are the backbone of life. So from the time that you were born, the story of your birth is a story. The story of our death will be a story, like you can’t even separate it from ‘The story of’. History began with storytelling in different forms. So if stories are life, then we identify with stories in a very deep level. They evoke emotions and we’re always going from one emotion to the next , as human beings, that is our existence from one emotion to the next to the next then to the next then to the next. So. It’s very important to remember that every single one of the members of your audience whom you are trying to sell a service or a product to or to get on board with your belief, with your passion, with your ‘Why’ will be moved by an emotion, by something that they will identify with. What do we identify with? Again, going back to the beginning of my answer, stories, characters, what happens to characters by wonder, by the authenticity in someone’s story of something happening to someone, for someone, against someone and then an outcome. So in essence, you’re connecting to your audience. You’re not selling a product or a service. In connecting with your audience as a natural byproduct, selling occurs.
If we consider chemistry and substances, yeah? You’ve got substance A and substance B and they’re going to have a chemical reaction with each other and it’s very slow and it’s taking its time. So you decide to use a catalyst. What is a catalyst? It’s a substance, it’s a third substance that you’re going to add to this combination, and the chemical reaction is going to start frothing and sizzling and it’s gonna be so much faster and so much better and more efficient. So silence is that third element, that catalyst that you will add to the two elements of a very important and powerful message in your audience’s brains. So you leave a message. The audience is absorbing it, is digesting it, feeling it, really, really allowing it to settle. But if you don’t allow them the catalyst of the silence then it won’t settle in. So you have to see it this way, that it is a magic catalyst to the most powerful part of your message.
The proverb ‘Practice makes perfect’ is one of the most ancient and most profoundly true and yet underestimated, underrated, understated proverbs ever. Why? Because a few things happen in our minds when we see other people performing, when we see TED talks, when we see people of the performance arts, when we see anybody onstage, we see a result. We see a skill that has been perfected throughout hours, weeks, months and even years of practice. We don’t see the journey. We see the result onstage, and so what happens is we create this expectation in our heads that and we’re supposed to be back and we’re not. ‘Hell, no. I’m nowhere near that. I’m not stepping on stage’. Practicing on stage is crucial because that’s where you get the most real feedback. And believe me, I know this. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re even a teacher of storytelling. And if you are a pitch coach and if you’ve been doing this forever. If it’s not foolproof. If you step on stage, you will definitely go wrong in some places. There would definitely be things that you want to perfect. So practicing is in fact a life long skill. So you need to keep practicing, keep failing, keep practicing and keep failing and keep practicing further and further till death do you part with practicing, that’s just the way it works. It’s life, it’s not just for your pitch, for your storytelling, for your art or for your artistic expression or whatever.It’s life, and it definitely needs to be stated a little bit more.
