We Are Our Stories.
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What’s your story?
A story is more than just words on a page, still pictures, or images in a video. A story is a way of interpreting the past and shaping the future. Whether you’re on a personal journey or a business journey, shaping your story and figuring out what story you and and need to tell means asking some hard questions and being willing to face difficult answers, especially if you don’t like where you are right now, personally or professionally. The story you tell can change your life.
9 Steps to Tell a Compelling and Effective Story
01 — Understand The Past
Telling a story begins by looking at the past, but not by defining yourself. your business, or your organization by what’s happened. The past is an important place to look understand WHY you are where you are, but it’s not the only place. Knowing where you want to go starts from a hard look at where you’ve been - it starts by looking at your pain.
02 — Understand Why
Being able to look objectively at where you’ve been is important, but it’s even more vital to understand why you are where you are right now. What beliefs do you have that contribute to where you are now? How have your present beliefs been shaped by your past experiences? What do you like and what don’t you like about the past and how it’s shaped you?
03 — Understand Your Uniqueness
The odds that you’d ever exist in the first place are infinitesimal. There never was, nor will there ever be, another you. When you take a step back and look objectively at what makes you, your business, or your group unique you can understand better how you can offer your unique gifts to people who need them.
04 — Understand Your Obstacles
Life is hard. Business is even harder. But knowing what you’re up against is vital to developing a strategy to overcome your challenges. You might have competitors or internal challenges you need to face, and until you know what they are, your chances for success are zero.
05 - Make a Plan
Knowing where you want to go is critical. If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s exactly where you’ll end up. Creating a compelling story means using the most effective means to tell it and putting together a plan to tell it.
06 — Implement your Plan
The best ideas can fail with improper execution. Once you’ve developed your strategy and know what you want to do, it’s time to put in the work to make your effort a reality.
07 — Measure Your Results
It’s important, after you implement your strategy, to take a look back at how you’ve implemented your plans and measure how effective they’ve been. By looking at numbers and feedback you can get an idea of where your ideas might need to be tweaked.
08 — Tweak Your Process
You probably had a good idea to begin with, but chances are, it wasn’t perfect. Some things that look good on paper don’t pan out in the real world, mostly because it’s impossible for you to know what might happen until you do it. Tweaking your process doesn’t mean throwing it out - it means taking a good idea and adjusting it until it fits just right.
09 - Wash, Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Intel, one of the most important tech companies of the 20th and 21st centuries, has a tried-and-true methodology: “Copy Exactly.” When you’ve put the pieces of the puzzle together, leave it in place until it doesn’t work any more, then make changes accordingly.