A couple of weeks ago I recorded a storytelling Teleseminar with Michael Hauge, a highly-successful Hollywood Script Consultant and Story Expert. I expected to learn a few good tips but ended up being blown away by his content. My stories (and your stories when you heed his advice) will never be the same again. They’ll […]
Continue readingYou saw the title so let’s jump right in with 17 storytelling ideas that will breathe life into your speeches and keep your audiences engaged. Idea Number One: Start your stories in different places. You don’t have to start a story at the beginning. You can start it in the middle or even at the […]
Continue readingWhat are Speakers Neglecting to do? So often I’ll coach a speaker who does everything right with his story until the end of it. He establishes the conflict, escalates it, and gets the cure or revelation. But guess what happens then? He ends the story! Hello, do you mean to tell me you’re going to […]
Continue readingThe Table or the Trophy? If I put a trophy on top of a table, what do you think I want you to see, the trophy or the table? Of course it’s the trophy. We can look at narration and dialogue the same way. Narration is the table and dialogue is the trophy. The narration […]
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The quickest way to connect with your audience is to share your failures, flaws, frustrations, and firsts. Why? Because most people have failed, they have flaws, they’ve had frustrations, and they’ve attempted something for the first time. In other words, they can relate. Plus, your failure intrigues us because we want to see how you […]
Continue readingSpeaking involves a series of scenes that you create for your audience to experience. The better you establish these scenes, the better your audience connection will be. If you grasp the process in this lesson, your audience members will have no choice but to be wrapped up in your stories feeling like they were there […]
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Patricia Fripp once said to me, “Craig, people will not remember what you say as much as they will remember what they see when you say it.” In other words, we have to make our speeches very visual in order to have the deepest impact. Here are 3 ways to accomplish this: Tool # 1: […]
Continue readingWhat in the World is Projected Dialogue? Pretend you are walking down the hallway, you bump into me, and my drink spills all over the ground. You look up and see me staring at you with a huge snarl on my face. What do you think I’m thinking at that point? Let me guess your […]
Continue readingOver the years I’ve learned and taught quite a bit about storytelling, but there has been one secret I held close to the vest. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to share it but I needed a story that would illustrate it. What I learned from Keith Harrell It all started when I […]
Continue readingThere are obvious mistakes some speakers make that destroy their stories. However, I’ve found that most speakers have pretty good stories that would be great if they eliminated some of the following little-known mistakes speakers make. After you listen to the following quick story, you’ll see 4 of those mistakes. Lancaster 1. They don’t milk the […]
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