Stop Pitching and Start Telling Stories: they aren’t the same thing
My anti-pitch stance wasn’t well-articulated or even defensible position in the beginning. It was a feeling. Pitching feels wrong to me the same way pick-up lines feel wrong, like a poor substitute for getting to know people and their ideas. Something in the word gives me the heebie jeebies. The Webster’s 1913 dictionary offers five […]
Don’t Polish Your Stories
A client talked about telling only polished versions of her stories yesterday and I jumped in to correct her. Not great manners, it’s true, but this is a topic I have big feelings about. There are no polished versions of stories you tell. Every story you tell is always a story in progress. It’s a […]
How to Customize your Story and Connect with People
In the past, I’ve written about how you can start a story library and how you can pick the right story for the moment. Today, I want to share with you a method to customize your story for your audience while you’re telling them and offer you a free Audience Analysis Worksheet that identifies the […]
Why Personal Stories Help you Connect with your Audience
In the fall of 2014, I gave an orientation for new international staff at the Dutch university I worked at. In designing the program, I called on 5 years of experience teaching Intercultural Awareness and more than 15 years of experience living abroad. By then, I had lived in 6 countries on 3 continents. I […]