Episode 16: The Importance of Story Library Programs

Story Fruition
We're gonna talk.

Story Fruition
Actually, don't. Be loud and proud about your own story library that you're developing. Like I've said before, you are a walking storybook packed with wisdom that you have been collecting all along the way since you were a child. And now you're an executive and you have had a myriad of experiences that can be the wisdom that you part to your colleagues, your partners, to customers, to town halls. There's a million different reasons and opportunities for your stories to be crafted and used.

Are you doing media podcasts? You want to have a story library. And you want to have stories of moments when you were resilient, moments in your childhood that indicated why and how you got into this. Why do you love this particular style of music? How did you get into electrical engineering? What sparked that idea that made you go and get a patent?

What business partner did you have that was really disappointing? Did you ever start a business and exit? What was that like? That's gotta be a huge adventure. These are all stories. All of them that you can be creating. And then what we wanna do is you wanna capture them.

Because when you think about it, you have not only your own stories that you could use for your personal story library, but if you work for a company, they have stories that everyone eventually may tell. The founder's story or what I would call the story fruition of that organization is usually told by the C-suite, the sales and marketing teams, and especially your sellers. Okay. So do you know how to tell that? Because that's your brand's story.

Don't you want to make sure that your entire team tells that story properly? Well, how do you do that? Especially when there's lots of new people coming in and out of your company.

Put it in your onboarding. Bring your story library to your onboarding system and have it organized in whatever way makes you feel good. So you could have just a digital library and you can have vision stories from the CEO and founders. You can have customer success stories from every single sales rep, but you want to title them so that when someone's looking through trying to find a story that they might need to tell at this presentation that they're working on, that they can clearly see what the story is about.

You can add little write-ups just to give a summary, and then someone can go in there and retrieve a storyboard. This is what a storyboard looks like. At Story Fruition, we believe that all stories are mind movies. And so in order for us to help you and anyone learning the story, you want to have a map for it. You want to have the opening where we're using CROW, we're using senses throughout the whole story. And at the end, there's the lesson learned or the reason why we do this. And it's your why at the end. It has a point.

So this storyboard is a memorization map. And we oftentimes say to clients, this is the written out one. This is for people who are learning the story. It's not a script, but it can help you learn the story.

Because every story, once you start telling it, it's going to be a little bit different every time, depending on who you're talking to. We've talked about this before in this course. But once you get really good at the story, you might need to do the whole long story and then chop it into little pieces.

Remember my University of Michigan story that I told? That was a long story. That's not necessarily as long as I would ever go. But I wanted to give you all of that so that you could see the different things I was using to play with it.

But half the time, I could cut out so many of those scenes and just get to the gist of the story. Another very, very popular way of using storyboards is that you have at the beginning the more scripted version, but then you move it into bullet points. And you go through, and everyone should probably do their own because when you have the bullet points, now you're weaning off that script.

And for some people, they're like, woo! Because the first couple of times they're like, I have to memorize all these words. We're like, no, you're just learning the scenes. And then they get to bullet points as a storyboard and they're just freer. I've seen it so many times.

And then inside that story library, many clients, and we encourage this, is that the story has a video of someone actually telling the story properly. And now you have an audience of sellers and marketers and senior leaders who are learning that story and everyone can tell it consistently.

It is your brand protection. So again, have a story library, fill it with these storyboards, encourage people when they have a success to come in and talk about it, get into groups and figure out how to craft that story.

And if you need help, Story Fruition does that. We work with the workshops, we bring in masterminds with smaller groups and we help create these story libraries for you. So, and then you should have a showcase, because that's really fun too.

When you actually see your organization practicing the stories and people can see them done live, so golden, so golden. So that's my thoughts on story libraries. So.

Speak them loudly. Okay, thanks for listening. See you at the next video.