Getting the most out of your life.
If you’re looking for how to post to both WordPress and Medium at the same time, check out this article I wrote all about it:
How to Link Your WordPress Website To Also Publish on Medium
I have a friend who seems to run into people he knows everywhere he goes. He seems like the most connected person I know.
I laughed and asked him how he does it.
“How do you connect to so many people?”
He was at the airport and bumped into a friend from far away.
He said it’s not really a trick. It’s not like he knows more people than anyone else.
“I walk around and I actually take the time to look at people’s faces. I smile. Instead of looking looking, at my phone, I like to look around. When I do that, I see people walking by, and I take time to enjoy the crowd that I’m in.”
Most people just walk around looking down at their feet, or looking down at their phones. Even if they are up, looking around, they might be too full with things in their mind to actually see what’s in front of them.
We look inside of our phones and our devices for connection, and miss the world outside.
When you look around, catch someone’s eye.
Smile a bit. Be the person who gives a twinkle and a laugh. And then, when you see what’s in front of you, you might just bump into someone you know.
My friend was recently excited about a conference but terrified of going and getting overwhelmed.
He texted me:
“Help! do you have any good networking advice for introverts at conferences?”
Conferences are a great way to meet people, and it’s one of the best ways I’ve used to reach out to new people, connect with peers, learn, and find friends.
However, conferences are also one of the scariest places to go as an introvert: all that talking, all that stimulation, and a loud, crowded set of rooms with people all day long? Call me exhausted, because all of that extroverted energy is draining and leaves me wanting to crawl into a sensory-deprivation tank for three days just to recover.
“Sitting and writing and talking to no one is how I wish I could spend the better part of every day.” — Amy Schumer
As Amy Schumer explains, “If you’re a true introvert, other people are basically energy vampires. You don’t hate them; you just have to be strategic about when you expose yourself to them—like the sun.” (From her new book, which, while it has a few quotable good bits, I don’t recommend.)
So if you’re an introvert, how do you make the best of a conference situation?
Here are a few ways to manage a conference and make it work for you:
Those are just a few of my conference-going tips for introverts or people who need slow space to think and connect!
What about you? What are some of your favorite tips for getting the most out of a loud, noisy, awesome, social event that is *maybe* a little too much for you?
Today I want to share with you about a way to connect inwardly, with yourself.
But first, a quick story.
I work with coaches. A lot of coaches. I’ve worked with college coaches, swim coaches, book coaches, life coaches… you name it, I like doing it.
One of my most recent coaches has worked with me on deep, sticky, messy problems, and he consistently challenges me to level up in terms of how I grow. And how I even think about growth in the first place.
Suffice it to say, before our sessions, I start to get really anxious.
I don’t want to meet with him today.
I get a little panicky. I get frustrated. I yell (sometimes).
“Maybe I’ll just quit coaching,” I tell my husband in a panic. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
He laughs at me. Kindly, though. Because I do this every single time.
Right before our sessions together, I start to get frustrated and nervous. I don’t always want to dig into the stuff that needs work.brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
And then we meet. And we dissect, analyze, and talk through the puzzles that are presenting themselves in my life at the moment. Sometimes I cry.brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
And afterwards? brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
Afterwards feels amazing. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
Afterwards I am so grateful, and so thankful. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow
We unpack the stories, the narratives, the ideas, the messiness of mind, and we think about how it all layers together. And there’s relief, and freedom, and … joy. Joy in being human, in being alive, in being messy, in being like a playful little kid, experimenting, growing, and trying things out.
And my husband, he reminds me to remember that how I feel before is not the same as how I feel during, which is not the same as how I feel after.
When you’re feeling sticky or icky, or if you’re in a moment of decision-making, consider all of the layers of the feelings.
What you feel matters. It’s important to notice all of the feelings, not just some of them.
Communication is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership. Often I see young leaders and CEOs (myself included) getting frustrated because they said or emailed something once, and it’s not sticking.
Communication is often about repeating yourself. You need to explain yourself, explain it again, return to the idea at the end of the week, check in with each person’s understanding, and then do a recap later on.
Communication is like song lyrics. You need to sing it over and over again until people are humming along.
Just like a song has a chorus and phrases and repeats multiple times (and then is played again, multiple times), great communication isn’t about saying something just once.
Saying something once is very insufficient.
Sing it over and over again until people are humming along.
There are lots of marketing phrases and cultural habits that we have from the 20th century that no longer make sense in the 21st century. But, because of the ever-turning force of habit, we keep them around.
One of my least favorite sign-offs and marketing phrases is “Stay tuned.”
“Stay tuned” used to be a way to tell people to stay put.
Stay in front of the television while we deliver you more advertising messages, and create a hook for you to want to sit a little bit longer … before we come back.
Stay tuned … while we figure out our next move and return to find you in the same place.
It means: don’t leave, don’t move, don’t forget. It’s a convenience for the marketer, for the advertiser, for the seller. It’s not necessarily a convenience for the listener, the buyer, or the consumer.
Why make people wait? Why do we need people to “stay tuned”?
What can you offer that’s better than a very generic and disappointing “stay tuned”?
What phrases do you find strange and unnecessary cropping up into modern-day messaging and cultural conversation?
Leave a note …
I mean, stay tuned …
A lot of people have asked me about how to get feedback on their essays. How do they publish it? Who should they ask? And why do they cringe and worry so much about whether or not people will be kind and say good things (or terrible things) about their essays?
Part of the fear in publishing is about being taken down by other people and having people hate what you make. Criticism can feel absolutely terrible and really sting. So how do you craft an essay — and share it — in a way that elicits positive responses?
While I can’t ban all internet trolls from existing, I can tell you some strategic tips about asking for feedback. We rarely do it, and it’s really helpful:
Be direct about the type of feedback you want.
As a writer, it’s your job to proactively say exactly what you’re looking for with a review of your essay. It works really well if you are very clear about what feedback you’re looking for.
For example, here are some types of feedback you might be looking for:
If you’re looking for idea-based feedback, you might tell someone, “Hey, I have a draft with a bunch of typos in it, it’s not polished, but I want a gut-check that the idea is on the right track. Mind taking a look (and ignoring the typos) and letting me know if you think the overall direction is interesting?”
Because there are so many types of editing and feedback, it’s hard to know whether you want another person to tell them your ideas on the right track — or to nit-pick through the commas and the punctuation.
As a writer, it’s our job to give guidance to what we want. For me, this includes sending early drafts to friends that say, “Hey friend! I’m working on a piece and this is a super rough draft. I don’t need any heavy criticism just yet, but I’d love some words of encouragement and if you could tell me if you think this essay has some good pieces in it.”
I also love asking, when I’m ready, for people to “rip it up, tear it apart, let me know how it stands up to critique.”
There’s a great essay and resource from the Facebook design team about how to give great feedback. There’s a difference between critique and criticism, and it’s important to understand the difference. From the article:
This is a great list for understanding how to frame your feedback. Rather than saying “your idea is shit,” for example (although why would we say that!?), we could say, “It’s hard for me to understand the idea because the sentences are really long and winding. Can you try again with shorter sentences to unpack the idea more?”
Their guiding principle for giving feedback is that “critique should not serve the purpose of boosting the ego or the agenda of anyone in the meeting.”
When you give another writer feedback, you’re helping them to build up the essay. Consider yourself a collaborator and a coach that’s helping shape and tease out the best of their ideas. What questions can you ask that will help them clarify their ideas? How can they better explain things? Where do they need to give further stories and examples? What could be simplified or seems confusing to you?
This quality of feedback is immensely helpful, and when I get it from fellow editors, I am grateful.
When have you asked for feedback? When have you received useful feedback on your writing? What works, and what hasn’t worked? Are you nervous about sharing your writing?
Speaking and writing are such gifts: they let you put together ideas, deep ideas, rich ideas, and share them with an audience. In a world of quick conversation and superficial conversation, books and well-thought out presentations can still carry the weight of an idea across rooms and minds.
It takes a lot of work to put together a great talk or a complete book (sometimes years or decades of research) — and this wisdom is often the distillation of hundreds of hours of research and thought. Networking conversations and even dinner conversations don’t always go as far into a topic or an idea.
Whenever I have the opportunity to share what I’m working on, I know that it’s an honor to have other people listen to my ideas and words, and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I want to be as useful and helpful as possible.
My friend Ryan recently asked me for my thoughts on speaking, presenting, and teaching, so in addition to all the advice that’s out there on the internet, here’s my take on what to do (and what not to do) to put together a powerful presentation. In it, I go into my process of preparation in more detail, if you’re curious.
Being present is very hard to do.
Our minds run forwards and backwards all the times; by some estimates, we spend four hours in daydreams all day, thinking about things that aren’t about where we are right now.
I’ve learned a lot about presenting and speaking from my training in swimming, yoga, and meditation. I used to have to memorize all of my lines and use note cards, and think a lot about what I was doing right then in the moment. Whenever I’m working through new material, as well, I’m less able to improvise and be present with the room.
As I’ve gotten better at presenting (with lots and lots of practice), I’ve started to be able to tune into the energy of the room, and channel the right ideas to match the people and the pace of what’s happening right in that moment. Some people call this idea “Flow.” I think that in order to get really good at something, and be present, sometimes you have to move through periods of awkwardness, where you’re learning and practicing. As you get better and better at it, you can become more and more present with the ideas in the room.
As my swim coach used to say, “we’re practicing this much so we can take the thinking out of it.” As you rehearse and learn your material, both physically and mentally, over time you spend less energy mired in the moment and more time in flow.
And then it gets really fun.
One of the best things you can do as a presenter is slow down. My mouth moves at rapid speed, but it’s a kindness for the audience to pause and breathe during a presentation.
Just because you know the idea and you’ve worked with it for years doesn’t mean the audience knows it right away. Give them time to think, to respond, to reflect, to absorb. Sometimes the best part of your presentation are the moments when you’re not talking.
It takes a powerful presence to be able to stand still, without speaking, on a stage.
Often I see people get nervous that they’re wasting people’s time, so they start to rush through their slides and sometimes skip content. Don’t skip that quote! You put it in there for a reason. Read it, slowly, and enjoy it. Your experience of this moment is different than everyone else’s. Just because you’ve read it a thousand times doesn’t mean everyone else has!
Everyone has their own rehearsal techniques. Here’s how I rehearse:
I do a series of preparations that work really well for me. I spend a lot of time writing and organizing in preparation. Once I have a thesis, an outline, and a set of points I know I want to hit home, I put together my slide decks. In the beginning, my initial slides are all full of words — like an essay distributed across hundreds of slides. Over time, it’s my goal to move them all to images and visuals, with a few supplemental quotes or key phrases, and as few words overall as possible.
Some of my slide decks have hundreds of slides, with just single images on each one. It can take weeks of research to find great images to support the ideas I want to share. Once I begin to prepare the talk, I put my slides up and create a series of cue cards for the main ideas (usually 5-10) that accompany the talk.
Then — and this is my unique process — I use my slides to write out the story of the talk from scratch in Evernote sheets. It’s like writing and re-writing the stories and ideas in my head each time. I play with words and phrasing. I probably go through this process maybe a half a dozen times.
Then, I perform it. I don’t perform it more than a week in advance of the talk (typically), because I want the content to still stay fresh. I’ll run through it two to three times as a rehearsal a week before, and then work through different pieces of the talk a few minutes each day. Two nights before, I’ll give the whole thing; the night before, I’ll rehearse again.
On the day of the talk, I don’t rehearse out loud. Instead, I flip through the slide deck and write the first sentence down for each topic with a few notes. I also do yoga, focus on my breathing and presence, and like to sit quietly without any noise or distractions. I’ll do a few vocal and physical warmups as necessary, and try to drink tea (not coffee) to keep my energy stabilized. Then I’ll get excited and go give the talk!
I’m always proud of a rookie, because you have to start somewhere. You might be bad in the beginning, and as long as you’re learning, that’s okay. I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of mistakes, and I’m still learning.
In my own practice, I focus on one new thing with each talk. It’s hard to think and perform at the same time, so I give myself only ONE new thing to focus on in each new talk. In one talk, for example, I spent my extra attention focusing on my arms and my hand gestures. In another, I focused on adding pauses. In another, I learned how to stand still.
Each time, you learn a new skill as a performer and add it to your repertoire.
There is one thing that makes me cringe, though, when watching a speaker.
Here’s the one thing NOT to do in your talk: what makes me frown is when someone doesn’t prepare, and then they say so on stage. I find that to be so disrespectful. The audience, filled with dozens or hundreds of people, has spent valuable time, money, and energy to get here, to be in this location, and to improve their lives by learning new things.
When someone says, “I just put this together last night,” or “I should have prepared more,” what that says is “you weren’t worth my time or attention to bother putting anything together.”
Here’s the trick: even if you prepared last minute, don’t SAY so. Get up on stage and deliver like you’ve been working on this for months.
You shoot yourself in the foot if you disrespect your audience at your opening, and even if your ideas are great, people will be less likely to root for you or to listen. Give yourself a chance and prepare as much as possible, and even if you’ve only had a few minutes, smile like you’ve been doing this for years.
I know I’ve done a good job when people come up to me afterwards and want to continue the conversation. A great presentation connects you to people in a way that’s purposeful. I’ve met so many people who have become great friends, both from watching them speak or from presenting myself. We get to see more deeply inside of each other’s minds, and initiate a rich connection.
It’s okay to learn, to grow, and to change. There’s a quote I love — “You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.” The most important thing is to sign up for your first talk as soon as possible. Don’t worry about being great. Do your best, and you’ll be surprised where you end up in five years.
Maybe you’re simply looking to improve your craft. Maybe you want to self-publish a book, or you want to learn more about publishing. Perhaps you’ve got a side-hustle, and you want to turn it into a full-time business. Maybe you’re working on a book proposal but you’re stuck!
Either way, there’s a LOT to learn in the world of writing.
If you’re a writer, author, or want to begin publishing — then I’ve got something you won’t want to miss. Every once in a while, I get to participate in the creation of really cool products and offerings. Today, I’m part of an amazing round-up of resources made especially for writers:
My friends at The Write Life put together a package of nine ebooks and courses on freelancing, self-publishing, marketing, productivity and more.
You might recognize many of the names of the creators of these products, including Joel Friedlander, James Chartrand, Charlie Gilkey and Alexis Grant. Plus, if you look closely — one of my main courses is included as well. (Woohoo!) If you’ve been eyeing Content Strategy for Thought Leaders, then this will be a no-brainer: the entire bundle retails for less than the price of my class.
A lot less, actually.
I feel obligated to say this in writing: if you purchased each of these resources individually, they would run you nearly $1,100.
So if you’ve been wanting to join us in Content Strategy for Thought Leaders, which retails at $300, then you can do so today — for $99. And get eight additional classes as part of it.
What’s the catch? Because this is such a good deal, my friends over at The Write Life are offering it for THREE DAYS ONLY. That means if you want it, you should grab it now.
Download The Writer’s Bundle Here.
P.S. Here’s the link once more: Download The Writer’s Bundle.
When you want to learn how to describe yourself or your business, people look to storytelling as a way to improve their core message. But what is storytelling? And how do you actually get better at it? The word is vague and yet so appealing — but it can be difficult to know where to start, and how to use what you learn in your everyday practice.
This section will look at some of the core truths about stories and storytelling — and I’ll share a few tools that are practical and that you can implement quickly for many communication needs, ranging from a personal biography to the description of your company.
Storytelling is a fundamental human tool that we all do innately — but over time, we’ve been bombarded with terrible examples of storytelling that aren’t good models to look to. Our brains are wired for storytelling — because it helps us learn, explore, and retain information through second- and third-hand experiences.
When you recount events that you’ve done — even the simple sentence as you walk through the door, “You won’t believe what just happened — first I went to the grocery store, then…” — your ears prick up. You’ve set up the most basic form of a story: do you know what it is?
Here’s another example — “The beach was dark and quiet. It was eerie — the moon was dark and someone had turned off all the lights on the boardwalk. Alison felt uneasy as she stepped nervously out into the dark. Who had turned out all the lights?”
Both of these examples use a very specific form of storytelling that we’re all hardwired to understand. Do you know what it is?
I’ll explain it today as we deconstruct storytelling. But first, I want to debunk a few myths about storytelling. Somehow we think that only an elite few can be storytellers, and it’s a skill that we don’t have.
It’s sometimes thought that storytelling is limited to an elite few, or a professional clique. In reality, that’s not true—all humans are born storytellers, and we’re born to look for, hear, and describe our world in stories. Children are born telling stories — in fact, we play for exactly this reason. Play is our built-in mode of imagining the future and the past. In telling stories, and playing make-believe, we’re able to learn at a much faster pace than if we had to rely only on our own experience.
We are learning creatures. We learn by experience — and through our imagination. When something good happens to us, that’s a reward. When something bad happens, there’s a punishment. These incentives teach us over time. In stories, we get to pick up and enter into the landscape of someone else’s learning — and learn for ourselves, even though we may be sitting in one place, not moving. When someone comes back to us and says, “Avoid Atlantic avenue, it’s crazy full of traffic,” we select a different route because we got information — and a story – about someone else’s experience.
We use storytelling to connect inwardly to ourselves, outwardly towards others, and to imagine futures. Humans spend up to four hours per day inside of imaginary landscapes — in daydreams, thoughts, visualizations, and places beyond the present. We live in a world of stories.
Prior to written language, we had to keep important information about the world around us, somehow. We’ve constructed melodies, songs, and other modes of storing information. Is it any coincidence that “storing” and “storytelling” are related? We are hardwired to remember cause and effect relationships — I saw a spider, that spider killed my friend, spiders are bad. “REMEMBER THIS!” Shouts your brain.
In research in The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottfried, he talks about how we actually make up stories all the time, whenever we see two events happening. If we see a group of women and they’re all wearing tiny shorts, we might tell as story to ourselves about how they are all going to the beach. In research on people with their two brain hemispheres segmented or separated, they discover that our brains actually wire stories into our minds when presented two pieces of information. This brings us to idea #4.
In any situation or setting, a story is what you take with you. When giving a presentation or sharing your brand or idea, what someone walks away with is the story. They’ve taken all the information they’ve been given and distilled it into the easiest parts to remember.
Bonus tip #1 — at conferences and in introductions. At a conference, if you babble and ramble when introducing yourself to people, they’ll forget most of what you said. If you string it into a story, and you keep it simple, people will be able to take that with you. You don’t need to get all the perfect information into one sentence; in fact, being imperfect can prompt likability and curiosity!
A quick and easy test for how good your story is is to listen in to what’s being said. Introduce yourself to someone, and then listen to when they introduce you. I’ll often keep it simple — I focus on writing and swimming, and I’ll say, “I work as a writer; I teach writing, and I’m also an open-water swimmer.”
When I’m being introduced, Clay leans over and grabs his friend and says, “You gotta meet Sarah, she’s a swimmer!” — I listen to what people hang on to.
A story is what you take with you. Listen to what people catch from your descriptions, and guide your story towards what people naturally keep bringing up!
Unfortunately, we’re surrounded by terrible examples of storytelling. In Story Wars, by Jonah Sachs, he talks about all the sins of modern storytelling — from Vanity to Authority and more. Basically, the last century of mass broadcasting let the leaders in charge of storytelling get lazy. There’s too much talking about yourself, not listening to the audience, and shouting lists. Technology (like powerpoint) even encourages bad storytelling by putting bullets and lists as the mode of operation.
When you sell things, you tell a story. It’s not about the thing at hand — lists are bad. Think about a toothbrush. You’re not selling a plastic stick with a bunch of flexible bristles on it. You’re selling the idea of a cleaner mouth. Why is that clean mouth important?
Think about Listerine: you’re not selling a bottle of alcohol, you’re selling … a date. The ability to be well-liked. Advertisements are stories about who you are and who you should be, and they want to capitalize on something deeper than the physical thing that they are selling. What do they believe about human nature? What story are they telling you, implied or otherwise?
Too often we jump straight to the point. “It was the hardest day of my life.” “The thing is, simplicity matters.” “Never underestimate the power of a good friend.”
Whatever your core philosophical statement, usually it’s often unsaid. Just like the toothbrush examples before, the point of your story isn’t to beat someone over the head with the idea, but rather to SHOW it through lots of vivid detail and an example that highlights your core philosophy. For example —
[It was the hardest day of my life.] vs: I’d just finished a fourteen hour shift in the cement factory. I had no idea what my dad did, so that summer I signed up to join him at work. Three days in, and I could barely lift my hands. My forearms burned, and my calves were shot from jumping in and out of the trucks. I’d probably lifted more than a hundred sacks of cement mix in and out of the truck.
[Never underestimate the power of a good friend.] vs: I’d just found out that my grandmother had passed, and I couldn’t make it home in time. My job had closed the week before, our office putting up the ‘for sale’ sign after more than 8 months in the red. On the bus ride home through the foggy drizzle of Portland’s grey fall days, I wondered how I could pay for groceries for the rest of the week. As I got off the bus, I saw someone sitting on my stoop. Probably another homeless person, I muttered, thinking I’d be one soon myself. As I got closer, I saw that it was Alex, holding two bags of Indian food takeout. He wrapped me in a big hug. “I thought that you could use this today,” he explained, pointing to the food. “Let’s eat.”
Great storytelling is about detail — but a specific kind of detail. How do you set the stage and the context for what’s happening? What does it feel like to be you? Stories immerse us in an event far away from where we are, catapulting us into a new time and space. Key descriptions anchor us into this new space through the use of all of the senses — smell, sight, touch, taste, sound, texture, even kinesthetics. Begin by describing the world around you, in vivid sensory detail. The English language has thousands of words to describe the subtle differences in texture and weight and material. Tell the story of what the world looks like. Great fiction books often begin with these details — take a look at 1984 or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for great opening scenes that write about detail.
With written narrative, all we have are words — versus in film, where we can show rich detail through visual imagery. In writing, all we have are words — and choosing words and describing the environment and scene, in detail, is what brings someone into your story.
Here’s a secret about the human brain: we all like to be smart. We like to figure things out, and know the answers to things. Whenever we are presented with a puzzle, we like seeing if we can figure it out before someone else does.
In storytelling, a great way to engage your audience is to add a teaser at the beginning. By using a little bit of bait, you stoke the curiosity in your listener’s mind. Ira Glass talks about this often, and if you introduce a story with an underlying question (like “the house was eerily dark,” or “it was a different night than any other,”) the listener begins to wonder why it was so dark, or why the night was different.
This “curiosity gap” between a piece of information that asks a question, and the story that resolves the question, helps the reader stay engaged and curious about the story. A little bit of conflict introduces a puzzle to be fixed!
At the end of the day, a story is what you take with you — and we don’t remember every detail of every story, but rather, the highlights real. When you’re presenting your idea, biography, or product, start with something short and sweet.
What did you take away from this introduction to storytelling? How can you change your story to make it sweeter, simpler, and easier to understand?
Here are a few ways to take your work forward in your journal and practice:
PS: My new course on Content Marketing — how to grow your audience, understand your customers, and publish content that actually gets shared — goes live this Thursday, February 26th. We have 3,801 people signed up on the early-access list, and we’re opening up a limited number of spaces for 48 hours. If you want to join us, take a look and sign up for the early access list!