“I’m a creative, but I feel like a broken record.” Silvia leads the new games division at a big gaming company out of Finland. In our coaching session, she said her team wasn’t getting the message. They were tuning out when she needed them to tune in.
“Have you tried telling a different story each time to illustrate the message in a different way?” I asked. She blinked. “What do you mean? How do I tell a different story each time?”
A story is a vehicle for a message. Know what message you want to share and you can reverse-engineer it to one story, or many. The key is in knowing the process.
Silvia had a big presentation coming up. “There’s a lot of cool stuff happening in the company, but some people in the group are anxious about the chaos. They ask, ‘Where is this going?’”
Her message was clear: the world changes fast; we can’t take years to develop a new game. So we worked the story mining process together.
She found three different stories, but decided to use a personal story about when she was studying for her MBA.
She was overthinking things: professor expectations, wanting to share everything, researching problems to death. It’s the classic over-achiever story. What did she learn?
Constraints help you snap out of perfectionism. Deadlines are there to help you focus. As Duke Ellington said, “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.”
She delivered that presentation, told her story, and landed with, “We all care a lot, but that can lead to complacency. You just need to get started.” And her team got the message.
You don’t need to be a creative to sound interesting. What you need is to tell a variety of stories if you want people to hear the same message again and again.
If you think you sound like a broken record, reach for more stories. You’ve got more in you than you think.
I built a tool to help you find the perfect story for any message you need to land, and never deliver it the same way twice.
Ready to try it? Get it here: https://rebecca-williams.com/story/
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