SPI 519: Great Storytelling 101: How to Be Remembered & Get Shared with Mike Pacchione

SPI 519: Great Storytelling 101: How to Be Remembered & Get Shared with Mike Pacchione

Pat Flynn:
When I think back on my career, which is a 13-year entrepreneurial career... I'm not talking about the architecture career before that, just my entrepreneurial career. I think about a lot of the pivotal moments that have happened across the way. Immediate ones that come to mind are when Matt and I started working together. He is now my co-CEO, has been very influential on how the business has been going since, and I couldn't thank him enough. There have been people that I've connected with in my mastermind groups who have provided everything from the name of my books in certain brainstorming sessions to a shoulder to cry on at times. But when I think about some of the most important skills that I've learned to get here, one important skill is storytelling, and storytelling wasn't always something that I was very good at.

In fact, I wasn't great at it at all. And it wasn't until I started, number one posting content and learning about engaged stories, keep people on a page, or on a video, or of course on a podcast like this one. But it's a skill that can be learned, and when I started speaking, that's when I really honed in on that skill. And there's no other person I can thank for this than Mike Pacchione, who was my speaking coach back in 2012. I started speaking in 2011, got really hooked on it, and like everything I do, I go and find somebody who is an expert at it to help me get better faster, to help me minimize the amount of mistakes I'm going to make. Not remove them entirely, because I need to make mistakes to grow, but to minimize them, and also to guide me. And Mike Pacchione is our special guest today because we are going to the depths of storytelling.

And we're going to tell lots of stories today, and break down how stories should be told. Because story is, like I said, what engages an audience. It's what brings emotion to the points that you're making. It is what helps transport a person from, "Hmm, I wonder if this is something I should keep watching, or listening to, or reading?" To, "Whoa, what happens next?" This is what brings connection, and connection is key, and storytelling is the key holder or the key bearer. I don't know what the analogy is, but story is important. We're going to talk about it today with my former speaking coach, Mike Pacchione. Here we go.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it's all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he once broke his arm trying to impress a girl back in first grade: Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to session 519 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Whether you're a podcaster, a YouTuber, or you're writing, maybe books, maybe on a blog, even social media, you've got to know how to tell a story. The better your story, the more likely it is you are to connect, the more likely it is those stories are to be shared, and here's the kicker, the more likely you are to be remembered. So here he is, Mike Pacchione, who is going to help us learn exactly how to do that. Mike from MikeTalks.co. Here he is.

Mike, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

Mike Pacchione:
Pat, it is finally happening. I'm so excited, man.

Pat:
I made a full episode for you, because you've been here once before in a little clip in an episode where we talked about what it was like to have a kid and be an entrepreneur, and you provided some really helpful insight on that; we'll link to it in the show notes. But here we are, full episode, welcome. I'm really excited for today. And I have to also thank you publicly, because if people don't know this already, you helped me tremendously back in 2012, 2013, when I was learning to speak on stage. You were my public speaking coach, so thank you for that. It changed my life.

Mike:
Well it changed my life too, Pat, and that's still one of my... what year was that, 2012 did you say?

Pat:
Yeah, 2012, 2013.

Mike:
That's still one of my very favorite projects. I accidentally... I don't remember why this happened, because we used to record those calls, and I accidentally stumbled upon that recently and I was just listening to it.

Pat:
One thing that you taught me was the importance of telling stories, and I've carried that over into my work on YouTube, into the podcast of course, and I wanted to bring you on today to go deep into storytelling, and how we can tell better stories and such. But before that, just real quick, how is the family doing? I know you have a kid and made some major life changes since you and I started working together. You used to work for Nancy Duarte, author of Resonate, and Slide:ology, I think.

Mike:
Yeah, Slide:ology.

Pat:
She is amazing, and you've since branched off to do things on your own. How's that been?

Mike:
There's a lot right now. We've just, I'm talking five days ago, moved from the Oregon version of Portland to outside of Philadelphia. Or I guess were moving to Philadelphia. My son is two, he is so great right now. It's interesting, you and I started working together, I was single, I wasn't even dating anybody, and you get to the other end of that... It's like I always tell people, I moved to Portland in a sedan, having crammed in as many clothes as I could, and I had a big TV. TVs in 2005, they had a big back to them. That's all that I had. I moved back the other way with a dog, a wife, a child, two of those giant pod things, and a giant SUV.

But it's been great; my son is so great right now. I'm basically at the stage where I'm like, "Oh man, I just need to seize this. Don't let anything happen to him." He loves running, he's composing sentences, he loves taking baths, he loves basketball. We watch basketball together. I'm a big Sixers fan; he can say some of the Sixers players. So you'd expect him to say Joel Embiid, he's the MVP guy in the team. But one day I got my son up from the nap, and he goes, "Korkmaz." Like the eighth man on the team. That's how he woke up from the nap.

Pat:
I love that. He’s showing appreciation to those who don't often get appreciated. And then you'll get him into the Iverson era, and some of the history I'm sure down the road. But I'm so glad to hear things are well with the kid, and your wife, and things with the move. A lot things happen all the time for everybody, but it's been a crazy time for sure this past year, and we need to catch up. Just you and I need to get together and catch up, so we can save the rest of this part of the conversation for later. But I do want to talk about storytelling. Why is storytelling so important?

Mike:
My short answer to that, I think storytelling is the most portable way of communicating a point. If you think about it, think of a great story that you once heard. You've had so many on your podcast. When I went to FlynnCon, the one that stood out to me, that you've referenced several times in your podcast is Shane Sams telling the lawnmower story.

Pat:
It literally has a name; it's the lawnmower story.

Mike:
Right, the lawnmower story. The power of that, because it's such a good story, and he does almost everything that I train people to do with storytelling. Because it's such a good story, other people are able to tell that story for him. He doesn't call me every day and say, "Hey Mike, can you tell my lawnmower story for me?" But I'm able to do that because it's so clear, there's a clear point to it, I can picture the whole thing happening. That's the essence of story. If you do it well, it can be passed on from person, to person, to person. Honestly if you think about the world pre-iPhone, pre-iPad, pre-laptop, pre-computer, pre-typewriter, pre-pencil-and-paper, pre-quill-and-ink, where did our history come from? It's from story. Person A telling a story to person B. It's a lot easier to understand story than it would be to just understand random points.

Pat:
That story is so great, the lawnmower story. For those of you who might not remember, episode 122 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast with Shane and Jocelyn. He was telling the story about when he first discovered the Smart Passive Income Podcast, and he was sitting in a lawnmower, turned on SPI, and then stopped mid-mow to run to his wife, Jocelyn, and go, "This is how we're going to change our lives." And she was like, "You're bat crazy right now." And so you could kind of imagine that happening. Of course he told it with more eloquence, with more detail. I do want to talk about how to provide those kinds of visuals within the spoken word in a minute; the beauty of that is it was the origin of when he discovered the podcast.

And I think a lot of people struggle with, "Well I don't have a good story to tell. I didn't have a life changing moment, to tell a story about that was like that." Or a lot of entrepreneurs especially tell stories that are about the time they got into a car accident, and their life flashed before their eyes, and that's a very oh my gosh moment. How do we tell stories when we don't have an, “Oh, my gosh” moment. Can we even?

Mike:
And the key is you actually do, but I know that exact feeling. I used to think that motivational speakers were all people who lost a limb to a shark or something like that. It's easy to feel like, “Oh, I don't have anything." But your story is simply... okay, so here's the way I explain story to people. There are three acts to it. This is true whether the story is thirty seconds long, or it's a two-hour-long movie. There are three parts to it, so there's a beginning, there a middle, there's an end. The beginning and the end are actually what you figure out first. So the beginning, who you are at the beginning, the end, who you are now. There should be some level of transformation. If there's no transformation, there's a problem with that.

So you need to figure out what the transformation is from beginning to end, but by nature of anything, there would be a transformation. Sometimes the transformation is, "I was a normal guy, I was math teacher, science teacher, history," whatever Shane taught. It's just where you were, and where you are now. That's what it always always is. And I think what's important to remember, because it's really easy to get... I guess I would call it origin story jealousy. It's really easy to, “Oh, man. I never got fired. I never slept on my sister's couch." I just was successful on the side. But your starting point is going to be a common starting point for someone out there, and I think that's important to remember.

Pat:
I'm remembering a story that I once told on stage that I was just going to tell because it was something interesting that happened, and it had a little bit of a lesson to it. But I didn't realize that in the way that I structured it, it was in fact a three-part story, it in fact had transformation, and it literally had people laughing and crying at the end, and I just was so surprised by that. I think perhaps that came from practice of telling other stories, and just now I'm in automation mode with a lot of the stuff after having done it for years. It was the story about... and I may have told this at FlynnCon, but it was the story about my son wanting to play the iPad in the car on our way to lunch, where I was like, "No you can't, but maybe you can if you can convince me why."

And then we go through this little back and forth, and I try to play role of Keoni when I'm telling the story of, "Please, I just want to play Minecraft." And how he first started telling why he wanted to play it, but then transformed to why that would benefit me, the parent. And the punchline was he said that, "Well if you let me play Minecraft I can become a better architect, and I can teach you how to be a better architect too." That had people rolling, and applauding. I was like, "Wow, that's actually really cool. I'm going to tell the story over and over again." Because that's the other thing that I learned, I learned this from Ramit Sethi; he said, "You've got to build a story bank." Stories that are crazy origin, Marvel Universe-type stories, to little moments like that during the say when your son wants to play the iPad in the car. They can all become things that could be part of a bank that you could pull from later, and that's been one of the most useful things.

So to combine the art of storytelling which you've taught me, with the just collection of stories that happen. I write things down at the end of every day, just little things that were different that made me think those could potentially be then extracted into something that could really make an impact online. The lesson in that story with Keoni was, know who your audience is, basically.

Mike:
And what you just said there, I guess you're saying what Ramit said, which... most things Ramit says are pretty good. The more that you have stories in your back pocket, it's the best, because what appears to the audience, "Wow, Pat really thinks on his feet." Was just Pat had the story in his head from three months ago, that his computer brain just said, "Let's dial this up, and we're going to pull it out, and I've told this story a bunch of times, and I'm totally comfortable with it. I know when you're going to laugh." Boom, win.

Pat:
Oh man, at dinner parties, I've used the stories that I've told on stage, because it just... Like you said, "Oh, there's a story that I have that fits in this moment, let me tell it." And then I tell it, and they're Like, "Wow, you're like, the life of the party." And I'm an introvert; I just happen to have practiced those things. And it feels a little bit... not manipulative, just calculated. Which feels weird in a conversation that is supposed to be organic, but honestly it's been really cool.

Mike:
And a lot of people have resistance for that exact reason that you're saying, because it feels to them... manipulative is the wrong word, but I know what you're saying. It feels to them like it's not organic maybe, is the right way of saying that. We're trying to entertain the audience. If we're speaking on stage, or we're having a video, presumably want to get your point across, so you want to sell your idea, your product, your course, whatever. A story will help that point land. On a really basic level, Pat has an idea in his head that he wants to get out into the mind of his audience. If telling a story of his son doing that helps that point land, that's gold, and that's what you should do.

Pat:
People remember the stories, they, like you said earlier, can tell the stories to others, versus if I just go, "Hey, if you want to share a message..." just know who your audience is. Okay, 50,000 other people teaching entrepreneurship say the exact same thing, here's my way of making it unique in the way that also is very, "Pat Flynn-like," with bringing the family in, and poking fun at myself, and those kinds of things. And then over time, there area certain moments that... and I'd love to talk about this too. It's like the ethics of storytelling, meaning... so that story was true, but there were things in that story when I eventually told it over and over again that I added on to make it even more of a hit. Like there was a moment in the story which honestly didn't happen. I'm just going to tell all of you, it didn't happen, but it made the story that much more funny. And maybe that was the wrong thing to do. I'm not telling lies, but I'm kind of.

So the part on the story that I added in just for fun to see what would happen, and I kept it in ever since, was the part after three or four back and forths between me and Keoni. I eventually get down on one knee, and I go to him, and I look him in the eye, and I'm holding my iPad, and I said, "I want you to sell me this iPad." And he goes, "You want me to sell you your own iPad back to you?" And then I just get frustrated. That moment didn't happen, but it kind of sums up how I felt in that moment, of just, "You're not getting it right now. The words that I'm saying are not getting through to you." What are your thoughts on things like that?

Mike:
You're asking me if I believe in lying?

Pat:
That’s it. Remember, this is recorded for your kids to listen to, this is recorded for your family. "Dad, you remember back in 2021 when you said this?" Click.

Mike:
"That's why I didn't come home last night." In all seriousness, one of the tips that I've given people... so this is specific to the ending, but it really would work where you are too. Okay, so you need to make the story emotionally beneficial to the audience, that's what you're doing with that part. Now one of my favorite stories I ever heard was a pastor named Andy Stanley. He tells a story about being a little kid, and they had a pet snake, and for some reason the pet snake gets out, it gets out into the house. And he's like, "We looked for him for 15 minutes, and then we couldn't find him, so we all went to bed." And you hear these gasps from the audience, they're like, "What?" And he's like, "No, we didn't do that. Of course we kept looking for him."

The lie... I don't know if you call that a lie, but the temporary lie is to give the audience the emotional satisfaction that they want in a story. So you have to decide for yourself how you want to edit that part, but to me what you should do in a story is you should give the audience an emotional benefit, and the way that you do it... If you felt bad about that, the thing to do would be to say, "I didn't do this but here's what I was thinking to myself." Because it would probably accomplish the same goal.

Pat:
Or, do the thing, and then go, "Well that didn't actually happen, but that's how I was feeling." It's like your pastor friend said. Okay, that makes sense. So if anybody has ever heard that story, I'm sorry. Everything else is true though, everything else.

Mike:
It's an interesting question. So a lot of the stuff that I teach comes from memoir writing, which... I've never published a memoir, but I've written that extensively. There's a whole debate in the memoir community about editing for memoir. Because what some authors will do, just for clarity of reading, is they will fuse multiple characters together just so there are less characters in the book. And then other people feel like that's not accurate, so to me that's a decision you have to make for yourself.

Pat:
"The fish I caught was this big," right? That's the classic line of stories and how they get re-embellished, and then... it was just a minnow, but now it's a shark after so many people tell it. Anyway, what are some things that people online especially are doing incorrectly when it comes to storytelling? This way we can maybe avoid some of these things.

Mike:
I've got basically seven things that I tell people to do. Now you don't have to do all seven of these, but let me just go through these somewhat quickly, and you can ask questions along the way. Do you like how I'm taking control of your podcast? So I'll do this part.

Pat:
This is exactly what I want. I can just go take a bathroom break, and you can still just keep going.

Mike:
I always tell people the very first thing you need to do is plan the resolution or lesson to the story. What most people do is they assume that the audience will get why you're telling the story. And sometimes it's so obvious that it would be almost insulting to the audience to declare the lesson learned, but most of the time you should actually say, "Here's why I'm telling you this," or, "Here's what I learned from that."

Pat:
No, that's really good. In fact, if I told this iPad story and I didn't have the lesson, it would require more calories for people to just understand it, which would then either tire them out... literal calories being used to figure out, "Okay, well what's the point of this?" And maybe some of them get it, maybe some of them don't. Or I can make their life easier, and just go, "Here's what all that really means." And now it's the lesson wrapped in the story that can get retold, that gets remembered, et cetera, and brings emotion to it. That the other part of the story that—

Mike:
Totally. And what's cool about that is a good story can go in a bunch of different directions. Because the same story that you're telling is know your audience... because you could tell that same story, and the lesson could be, "I bring this up because my son felt like, what did he have to lose? 'I may as well take my shot.'" So that's one of the things I love about good stories, is... I'm going to be careful about the way I say this. So I picture this. I always have an Excel file. Column one, name of story, column two, approximate length, column three, purpose. And a lot of stories can have more than one entry in that purpose column, just like the one that you just told. But I always tell people, "You have to figure out why you're telling the story." You can just tell a story just because, "Oh, it's funny. I heard people like stories." Sure, but it's more effective if you declare out loud what the resolution or lesson is.

Pat:
Love it. So the mistake would be just telling the story without any real point, or purpose, or end goal, or end lesson?

Mike:
Yeah, totally. The next one is to prime the audience. This one feels very obvious, but plenty of people don't do this. Okay, so picture you're at a cocktail party talking to someone not very interesting, you want to get away from this conversation, and then they say, "Let me tell you a story." You perk up, your posture gets a little bit better. We are excited about stories. You hear them say something like, "I heard a great story about that. Oh my gosh, I have a great story about that." What you're doing is you're priming the audience to enjoy it. What most people do is they jump right into it.

Now picture this, especially if you're doing something online, YouTube video. You are very likely one of several tabs that are open, and same thing. If the audience hears, "I've got a story," or, "Let me tell you a story," it's like, "Ooh, let me go back to that tab. Let me stop emailing and let me go back to that tab." So I know that it feels really obvious to most people, but that helps tremendously. It lets the audience know they're about to hear something good.

Pat:
I've experimented a few times on YouTube videos and on podcasts starting out by saying, "Hey, let me tell you a quick story." Before I even get into, "What's the purpose of this episode," or who our special guest is. And I've noticed that retention rates are in fact higher, because what I feel happens is people go, "Ooh, story time." Like you said, versus, "Is this going to be even worth my time or not?" The story, hopefully, with a good ending or a good reasoning behind it will lead to, "Okay, I'm committed to this." And plus what you're doing online is part of the storytelling... obviously you've got to be decent at telling the story, you can't just tell a story for 20 minutes and expect people to stick around if it's not great or worthwhile.

Let's say, for example, you tell a 45-second story at the beginning of a podcast that relates to why they should stick around. Well, now they've committed a whole minute to the podcast that would then lead them to stick around, or probably put that phone in their pocket, or go on that drive, and now they're no longer able to or likely to exit. So I love that idea. Imagine we were at that cocktail party again, and you were with somebody not so interesting, and they go, "It was a dark and stormy night." You're just going there, and now I think you're more weird because I'm not even interested.

Mike:
That's an amazing thing to picture, just someone, they can tell they're losing Pat, he wants to go get another drink and they just, "Hold on. It was a dark and stormy night."

Pat:
Or even not the hold on, just going right into it. I think it was Kevin Hart who had spoken about storytelling once when I was doing a lot of research on storytelling. And if you watch Kevin Hart whenever he's on stage and especially when he's in a group. Comedians especially tell amazing stories. He always says he's got to get the attention of people around him first before he tells a story. Actually, he told this on Joe Rogan. He said that whenever he's in a group of people and he's going to tell a story he goes, "Hey guy, guys, guys. Listen up, listen." Step one, get people's attention, and that's priming them, getting ready. He goes, "Guys, guys, Tuesday, this incredible thing happened with my car." It's like, "Yo, what happened to your car?" And now they're in. So I love that tip, that's a really good tip.

Mike:
That's so good. And then along with that... so the next tip is to create tension. This is really what story is all about. So if you were to take a screenwriting class... and you certainly don't have to. But if you were to take a screenwriting class, one of the things you would be taught is that in a film every single scene should either create tension, or release it. Create tension, or release it. That makes sense. So what tension feels like to the audience is then thinking, "Wait, what happens next? What happens next?" Now it's certainly possible to string it out for too long, and a lot of people do that.

Generally speaking you want stories to be a minute or less. We want to create tension, and some ways of doing that, one way is to use the present tense instead of past. If you use the present tense, it's a way of tricking the audience into feeling like you are in that moment and watching it. It's interesting, I was listening to that Shane Sams story today. Shane, you didn't know you were going to get this much play today. The exciting parts of his story, he dips into the present tense. What that does for the audience is it makes them feel like, "Oh my gosh, what happens next? What happens next? What happens next? What happens next?"

Pat:
Instead of saying, "Oh, I told Jocelyn that this was going to be the life-changing podcast for us," versus, "Jocelyn, Jocelyn, this podcast is going to help us become millionaires."

Mike:
"I run inside, I say, 'Jocelyn, Jocelyn...'" So if it's present tense it feels that way, there's tension in there. And then we need to release the tension, and the best way to communicate that is... I'm going to use the word... the release is the punchline. Now to be clear, not every story needs to be funny, but the punchline is the payoff for the audience. The most popular TED Talk is Sir Ken Robinson, it's like 70 million views or something.

Pat:
On education, right?

Mike:
Right. And the first half of that TED Talk is basically him telling stories. He's so good at it, and if you take a look... and I've studied this extensively. I'll just tell you one of the stories, I've heard it so many times. He's like, "I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, it's about a girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, she was in the back drawing, she hardly ever paid attention. In this drawing lesson, she did." By the way, it has a British accent, so it sounds better than me. "But in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over and says, 'What are you drawing?' And the girl says, 'I'm drawing a picture of God.' And the teacher says, 'But nobody knows what God looks like.'" And now here's going to be the release of the tension. "And the girl says, 'They will in a minute.'"

So the release is the punchline. Tension release is a big thing. So present tense is great for that, asking questions of the audience. You might say something like, "Now you might be wondering that that means," or, "You might be wondering why that matters." Another thing you can do is to give them insight into your own brain. "I remember thinking to myself, 'What's he going to say now?'" Something like that builds tension, and then we need to release the tension.

Pat:
It's almost like there's some classic movies that start out that way, some crazy scenario like, "What the heck is going on?” “Pause. I'm Ryan. You might be wondering, how did I get into this situation?" Or Ratatouille, that happens in the beginning of Ratatouille also.

Mike:
I didn't even think about that. That’s Fight Club, that's my favorite movie.

Pat:
You're right, you're right.

Mike:
At the beginning he's like, "How this all started was..."

Pat:
And then two hours later you're like, "Oh, okay." Dude, I've got to send you that video to the Kevin Hart interview, because that story he tells at that time... he tells a story about a fan who wanted his autograph, but he was at a restaurant, and he was going to the bathroom. He was like, "Yeah, just chill out here, wait up. I'll be in the bathroom, I'll come out, I'll sign your autograph." He was like, "Cool, cool, cool." So he goes, and he's in the stall, and he notices between the cracks in the stalls, this boy comes into the bathroom and is waiting for him where the sinks are. And he's like, "Dude, I just told this guy to stay, what is he doing in there? Is he going to murder me? What's going to happen?" And that's the tension part. And you're just like... how could you leave that story? You have to stay till the end for that.

Mike:
"Eh, not interested, turning this off." It's so good, it's so good. So that right there is an example of my absolutely favorite tip, which is we need to put the audience in the scene. So they need to feel like they're in the scene. Another way of saying this is we want to be more like country music than rock music. So let me break apart what I mean by that. So listen, I love rock and roll, I love country—I’m not telling you to listen to one over. But like every rock and roll song is like, "Why won't you ever love me? And we hurt each other, and we'll do it again." Those are rock and roll lyrics. Those are really abstract, and country music is concrete. Country music paints a scene, it's like, "Me and my lady..." this is Kenny Chesney. This is not my favorite country song, but I'm just saying, it tells a story.

He's like, "Me and my lady had our first big fight, I drive around until I see the night. Neon lights of a corner bar and it just seems so right. So I pulled up, not a soul around but the old barkeep down at the end looking half asleep." You're picturing this whole thing happening. Your audience is more likely to be bought in if we paint a picture of the scene versus just speaking abstractly. The lawnmower story works because it takes place on a lawnmower. It's not just, "I listen to Pat's podcast." It's, "I was on the lawnmower, and I pause, and I run inside." That's how it feels.

Amy Porterfield, if you hear her origin story, one of the things she talks about is she gets a phone call while she's on the tarmac. So she's walking on the tarmac, wheelie bag in one hand, phone in the other, getting screamed at. You can picture that whole thing. That makes us feel like we're there. Ultimately that's the power of story, is we're dropping the audience into a scene from our life, and the more that we can add little detail, the more credible the story is, the more the audience is bought in. And that almost automatically adds tension.

Pat:
Thank you for that, that's a great one, and how do we do that? Is it like, "If I'm going to the grocery store, I park my car, the rubber on the wheel felt greasy to my hands. I open the door and the squeak sounded louder than ever before..."

Mike:
Right, because there's such a thing as overdoing that, and we can all probably think of a bad storyteller in your life who's... I'm just thinking of someone who will remain unnamed, and she would tell stories, and she would just add every last detail. It was like, "And I met up with him, and he was drinking a lemonade, and I'd had on argyle socks that day." And as an audience member, you're storing those details in your head, "Okay, argyle socks are going to matter. Argyle socks are going to matter." It never matters. The key is that we just need to add one or two vivid details from the key part of the story.

Pat:
Perfect, that's what I was looking for. How many things do we describe? So when you tell the story of Amy Porterfield with the suitcase, she's obviously going somewhere, it's in her hand, we can imagine it, and then something happens and her life changes. So the lawnmower, that's a vehicle that was basically representing doing the work, and grinding, and getting it done, and then boom, here comes a podcast that interrupts that, in a way almost symbolically.

Mike:
And we don't need to know that Amy was sitting in seat 7A. That's too much, that doesn't matter. We just need to know that-

Pat:
In 7B was somebody else, and then the numbers matter.

Mike:
Right, exactly. Or if 7 was her anniversary, and she was missing her husband, something like that maybe matters. Something like that. Just to give a little bit of the science on that, if you read the book Made to Stick, they do this great study. So they do this great study, this was a mock trial study done in college, and you know how these things work, AB testing, basically. Group A, they say, "The children went to bed and they brushed their teeth." Group B, "The children went to bed and they brushed their teeth using Darth Vader toothbrushes." And the people who bought story B with the Darth Vader toothbrush, the results are through the roof. That little detail sticks out to us.

Pat:
That's true, yeah.

Mike:
I could overdo that, but that's my favorite thing. Beware of overdoing it, but just one or two vivid details at the key point is what you're looking for.

Pat:
Before we move on to the next tip, I'm just curious. I know from my own experience that I need to practice telling these stories, and I need to tell them in ways that are terrible in order to eventually tell them in a way that can hopefully be great. What are your favorite ways to practice storytelling?

Mike:
I can always tell someone has not rehearsed a story, because here's how it'll sound. They'll say, "I was doing a podcast interview with Pat, and I hooked up my microphones, and so I realized the microphone wasn't working well." So there are no periods on the end of sentences—

Pat:
This is a true story by the way, y'all.

Mike:
There are no periods on the end of sentences, there's a lot of, "And," there's a lot of, "And so." What we actually want to do... and this is going to sound staged, but I promise this was my next tip, is err on the side of shorter. So it's almost like the shorter you can make it the better. The most popular Sir Ken Robinson story in that talk is 24 seconds long. It's 24 seconds—that’s it. Unless it's a truly incredible story, it should be a minute or less. And what you want to do is run it through a bunch of people. I would try to talk in 7 to 10 word sentences, and if you wrote it out, it should be like 200 words.

Pat:
Would you recommend writing out the story, and essentially your script for it?

Mike:
I would recommend writing it out, but not feeling like you have to have it memorized. There is something—

Pat:
If only I knew that when you and I started working together. Do you remember?

Mike:
It's like the very first thing I said, I was like, "Well what do you do now?" You were like, "Well, I write out the entire 60 minute talk, I memorize the entire thing, and I walk in..." I forget what your walk-in strategy was, but it was three points on the stage. I'm like, "Why are you doing that?"

Pat:
Because I don't know. I used to write every single word.

Mike:
And because you're Pat Flynn, you're still an achiever, but you've gotten more efficient with your way of achieving, that's the reason why.

Pat:
I appreciate that. So write it down so you can just see it, and move it around, or deal with it. I love Post-it, actually. This is how I prepare my stories now. I use Post-it Notes, and I have act one, act two, act three essentially, and then I have one Post-it Note per idea, moment, or quote, or story, or something, and then I move things around. And I might remove some, I might add some. Now I'm at a point where I'm confident enough where if I have experienced something, I can just tell it, and I'll practice with real people before I write it down. And I might eventually get to a point where I write it down before a big stage talk, but like you said, I never go exactly according to what I write down. In fact, oftentimes it goes in ways that I didn't even know it was going to go, because I'm just having fun on stage at that point.

Mike:
And also, let me give a more concrete answer to your question about how you can rehearse it better. One would be to rehearse with someone, hear how many times they say, "Uh-huh (Affirmative)." If they say “Uh-huh” (Affirmative) more than once, the story's too long. So that's one thing you can do. If you're telling me a story and I'm like, "Uh-huh (Affirmative), Uh-huh (Affirmative)," that story's gone too long. Another thing you can do is rehearse with... I don't mean literally me, but rehearse with me or someone else, and have them tell the story back to you, and see what they actually remember. Because those are probably the good parts, and that's really a good thing for any speech, because especially for a story that's helpful.

Pat:
That's good, that's good. Talking it out loud by yourself, is that considered good practice?

Mike:
Yeah, the more you do it, the more you'll realize, "Oh, I don't need this part." This is similar to what Laura Belgrave says about copywriting. Laura in copywriting says, you can almost always delete the first paragraph. Start writing the email, and then go back, "Oh, I don't need the first paragraph." That's almost always going to be true with the first draft of your story. Because your temptation will be, "This takes place at sixth grade, I was in school in Connecticut, it was December." And you go back and you hear the story like, "Oh, nobody needs to hear that stuff." But what's really happening there is you're recalling the details for yourself. And that's the same reason why the bad storyteller's telling you, "I was wearing argyle socks that day, and I was drinking lemonade," is because in the moment she's remembering those things and it's kind of fun. It doesn't actually help the person hearing the story. So there you go. Err on the side of shorter, is my... we just spent a lot of time on that, ironically, to say, err on the side of shorter.

Pat:
That's good.

Mike:
So the next one is totally optional, but if you do it well it can really add a lot to the story. Which is, if there's a character other than yourself in the story, if you can describe that character in a sentence, that is gold. Because if I'm telling a story about you and the audience doesn't know you, they don't need to know, "Pat lives in San Diego, and his birthday's in December, and he has two kids, and he's happily..." They don't need to know all that stuff, they just need to know the part of you that is essential to the story. Truthfully I have this about Pat Flynn before when someone's asked, "What's Pat like?" I'm like, "Pat's the type of guy that you give him homework and he does the homework." So if I'm telling a story, I need to mention whatever helps the story.

Now if you were really in one of my stories, that needs to either inform who you are, or it needs to be used ironically. So it's like, "Pat's the type of guy who does the homework, but for some reason today he didn't do it, and now look what happened." That's the way it needs to be used. So some other ones that... “My friend Sarah, I always describe her as the type of woman who eats quinoa as her cheat meal.” So the point is, instantly you know that person. You don't need a whole background, and, "She went to college here," and, duh, duh, duh. Grant Baldwin, you know Grant. I describe Grant in a story. I'm like, "Grant's the type of person who shows up at Disney World, and he's got a plan. He knows exactly what rides they're going to go on." You know that person immediately, and it helps the story.

Pat:
That is very true about Grant. Love you, Grant. That's good, so is that, "This is the type of man. This is the type of woman. He's the type of kid." Is this a good formality or structure for it?

Mike:
Yeah, totally. "This is the type of guy who [blank]. This is the type of woman who [blank].” Here's a hint: Pat and I both love the Enneagram. To some people this sounds like Indiana Jones or something when you talk about the Enneagram, and we could do a whole separate podcast on that. But if you know the Enneagram, and you know the person's Enneagram number, you can basically just drop one of those traits into describing them. Does that make sense? So it's like, "My..." Ooh no, let's not talk about my wife. Let's rewind.

Pat:
I was thinking about going down that direction too, but I shouldn't. No, my wife, April, many of you know of her or have met her perhaps at FlynnCon. She is an Enneagram six, who is a loyalist. She's the type of person who's only going to have a few number of friends, she's not going to be caught in a large group, but she'll take a bullet for any of them.

Mike:
Perfect. Yes, that's perfect. Steve is the type of guy who will fly to the Maldives tomorrow because it sounds fun. That's an Enneagram seven, if you know Enneagram. But even if you don't, frankly, it's a fun writing activity anyway, but it helps the story because the audience instantly feels like they know that person.

Pat:
The quinoa one was great, I love how you said that, that's good. I need to do more of that. I've never done that before in a story, I've got to do more of that.

Mike:
It's fun. Well, even in the Sir Ken Robinson one, he's like, "The little girl hardly ever paid attention, but in this lesson she did." So she hardly ever paid attention; you can picture that person. This is not the A student; this is the girl in the back of the room, probably didn't do really well, but in this lesson she does. It helps inform the story.

Pat:
I like it, these are all really good. Let's finish off.

Mike:
Last thing is to obsess about the ending. So many people, whether it's onstage, video, whatever, run out of gas at the end. Okay, so let me say this differently. What we're trying to avoid in a story is the ending like, "Well I guess you had to be there." "And then we got away."

Pat:
I would rather not even hear the story. Because I've invested this time, and it's like, "Eh."

Mike:
If I had to be there, I didn't need to hear the story. Pat, I feel like The Sixth Sense is the all time best ending.... at least the first time you watch it, it's like the all-time best ending to a movie. If you rewatch it it's not that great of a movie, but the ending is like, “Oh, my gosh." Now I'm not saying that we can always have this ending that has people pushing themselves away from the table and covering their mouths in shock. That's not always possible. But the ending to a speech, the ending to a story, the ending to a video, we want the audience feeling this emotional high.

So a lot of times what we need to do is to actually change the order of the story, or to end it before the experience ended in real life. So let me give you an example. There was one guy that I coached, he wanted to tell a story about playing basketball with Adam Sandler. That's how he started the story. "I live in Santa Monica, and one day I went down to the court, and Adam Sandler was there, and he was my teammate." So he was telling the story, but the best part is four seconds in, and the rest of it is just hearing about Adam Sandler's basketball ability, which is not—

Pat:
I've seen him play basketball. He's the type of guy...

Mike:
Oh, good one.

Pat:
Adam Sandler's the type of guy to play basketball in 2XL basketball shorts with a polo shirt.

Mike:
Let's make the story even better. I didn't have that one. So here's the way I actually told him to say it. I'm like, “Okay, Nate, it needs to be, ‘I live in Santa Monica, went down with a friend to play basketball, and after a while there were these two guys who were sitting out on the side. They were like, “Can we play?” And finally we said yes. So this pickup game, we pair the tallest guy with the shortest." So Nate's 6′5″, you see him on stage. "I'm obviously the tallest guy, and they put me with the shortest guy. So I introduce myself, I'm like, 'I'm Nate.' And he says, 'Nate, it's nice to meet you.' Doesn't say his name."

"So the game starts, Nate's posting up, he's the tallest guy. His teammate's good enough, but he's..." and let's insert Pat Flynn's addition here. "But he's the type of guy who's wearing 2XX shorts. He can dribble through his legs and everything, but he's also acting a little goofy. He says, 'I can't even call for the ball because I don't know the guy's name.' Then after a few possessions I'm on defense, and I'm sitting there, I'm thinking about it, I'm like, 'Why isn't this guy telling me his name?' And look over at him guarding my buddy, and I realized why he never introduced himself. It’s Adam Sandler." Do you hear how that's a better story?

Pat:
That's so good. The cool thing actually was saved to the end in that case, that's really good. And there was some detail in there, guy sitting on the bench, little bit of picking team little bit of, "This type of guy is not very great... posting up." I'm there with you, like you said earlier, imagining that I'm there with you. And I'm imagining me looking over to this guy guarding my partner, and then looking and going, “Oh, my gosh. That's Adam Sandler. That's Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore." And then that's the end, it's just like, "And that's Adam Sandler"?

Mike:
Yes. I forget what the lesson is in that story.

Pat:
Okay, the lesson, that what's needed. The lesson is, celebrities don't want you to know they're celebrities, because they feel like paparazzi is on them all the time, and they just want to be regular people.

Mike:
Sometimes there's value in anonymity, or sometimes the best thing we can do is to not get in someone else's business. It's a little bit of a stretch. But the actual point of the story is just to tell at a cocktail party and have people excited. But it's better if it ends with, "It was Adam Sandler," versus, "He didn't pass enough."

Pat:
That's true. No, that's good. So whether we tell these stories in videos, or on a podcast, or in person, or on a big stage in front of a crowd, all these tips that you mentioned are so great. And like you said, you don't have to use all of them, but any one of them can enhance the message, and the ultimate lesson. And that's the one thing I think entrepreneurs are great at. We know the lessons what we want to teach, and we just kind of go right to it right away, and we just blend in with everybody else who's going to it right away, and these stories from your life and wherever. The final question I want to ask you is, where do you get your inspiration for stories, and where might people look to find these stories that are around them to include in their content?

Mike:
Everybody I have ever worked with has reached a point in a speech, or a podcast, or whatever they're working on, where they're nervous that they're telling people things they already know. That is why we often speak over our audience's head. The dumbest feeling for us would be to explain... you need to think about your audience when they already know that. One of the reasons why story is so effective is because it's impossible to tell a story that's beneath your audience. If it was really basic I guess maybe you could, but the story is a different way of expressing the same point, and it hits people on a deeper level. So that's one of the reasons why it's so valuable to do. I recommend, like you said, a story bank, story vault, whatever terminology you want to use there. I literally have a Google Sheets file that, just like Pat said, I just jot things down.

Sometimes it's a micro-story, and by micro-story I mean something that doesn't need to have this lengthy exposition, it's just two or three sentences. Sometimes it's something longer, but when someone tells a great story, there are certain people in my life that I literally... My one friend Chris is a park ranger in Denali, and every year he has one insane story, and I'm always like, "Chris, let me record this one." I'm not saying you have to be that weird about it, but writing them down, writing them down, writing them down. And one of the things you can do, a great place to start is thinking about childhood, thinking about first grade. Go to first grade, spend two minutes thinking about the people who were in your class in first grade, second grade, third grade, fifth grade. I don't know why I skipped fourth. Fifth grade all the way through middle school.

Middle school's really good because a lot of those stories are really painful, and painful stories are great to recover from. So if you think of a story as transformation from beginning to end, that's a really good starting point, how awkward you were in sixth grade. I had braces three times. I had the biggest file in my orthodontist's office, so I wasn't that cool, is what I'm saying. So that can be a really good starting point. So thinking about your life as one long timeline, that's really good. It can also be helpful to think of important people in your life, and stories that happened with them. So drop yourself into college, and I'm thinking of my college roommates Chris, and Josh, and Peyton. And I think of Peyton, and a few stories jump to mind. And again, I don't need to write out the whole story, just a few words that remind me of the story. So it's like, "The Jethro Tull story." I know what that is, I don't need to write out the whole thing.

Honestly, spending an initial half-hour on that would take you so so far, and then just jotting those stories down. Like Pat said, at the end of the day, whenever it's coming to mind, that's great. I read magazines, which I know is kind of outdated, but I get physical magazines. One of the reasons why is because they have great stories in there, and the magazines I read are not read by that many of my peers. So I'm 43, but I think I'm in the age 65 target market; like, I get Reader's Digest, and the ads for that are really funny. So I get Reader's Digest, Alaska Magazine. Because these are not things that most people are reading, and that adds a degree of surprise to the stories that I read there. You didn't know that about me, did you?

Pat:
[crosstalk]. Now every time I look at a Reader's Digest, I'm going to think of you.

Mike:
When does that happen though, that's the question?

Pat:
I don't know if that’s kind of [inaudible]. Bro, this has been absolutely incredible, thank you. This has been a nice refresher for me as we are starting to get back into the speaking circuit as I'm getting into YouTube a lot more now, and of course continuing with the podcast, and such. I hope this was helpful for everybody listening. Mike, where can people go to connect with you? How might they be able to work with you? Where should they go?

Mike:
I help people give the best speech of their life, at least the best speech to that point in their life. And as such, my site, BestSpeech.co, dot C-O. Welcome sequence, it's just six great stories to get you started off. So you'll get that in your email. I also hot the Best Speech Podcast. I think for this audience, Pat, here's big surprise for you. If you go to BestSpeech.co/Pat, I'm going to deconstruct a Pat Flynn story. I know. So why it works. Pat is... he so good at... theatrical is the wrong word, but one of the things I love about you is a speaker is you are not fearful of doing things that feel a little bit risky.

So we'll deconstruct what works so well, if there's anything that maybe, "Ooh, we could have done this, or this, or this." But we'll deconstruct that. So again, that's BestSpeech.co/Pat. When someone's like, "I heard you on Pat Flynn," or "I heard you worked with Pat Flynn," I get excited. In that moment I'm instantly thinking to myself, "Ooh, this is going to be a good person." So I know you're always Team Flynn for the win, but that is more than just you, my friend. I love working with the SPI tribe.

Pat:
Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Everybody go check out Mike. One more time, a link, and where can they go get that deconstructed Pat Flynn talk?

Mike:
So BestSpeech.co, and BestSpeech.co/Pat.

Pat:
Thank you, and for everybody out there who's seen your name but doesn't know how to say it, can you just debunk exactly how it's pronounced right now for all of us.

Mike:
It's Michael Juan Carlo Pachione, so Mike Pachione. Pachione if you actually want to sound Italian, that's the true pronunciation. But we've turned it into Pachione, Mike Pachione.

Pat:
There you go everybody. So now you don't have to worry. Thank you everybody, I appreciate you, and Mike, you're awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.

Mike:
Much Love Pat.

Pat:
All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Mike. Mike is always such a pleasure to speak to. I always learn something when I'm speaking with him, and even if we're just having normal conversations on the phone or anything like that, I'm always trying to decipher, "Okay, how is he going to tell me this story? What's the structure of this? How is he going to bring the punchline?" And he always does, and it always impresses me. And it just takes practice, it takes practice. Mike, thank you so so much. If you want to check out what Mike has to offer you, go to BestSpeech.co/Pat. Again, that's BestSpeech.co/Pat.

Thank you so much for listening today. I hope this helps, and I hope you use some of these strategies, maybe even later today at the dinner table, or at work, or perhaps on the next phone call with a friend. Give it a shot, try it, and of course, in your content as well. Thank you so much, make sure you subscribe. We've got some more stories to tell you, we've got some more content coming your way, and some amazing guests of course. Hit that subscribe button, and I'll see you in the next episode, and until then peace out, take care, and as always, team Flynn for the win.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess, our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We'll catch you in the next session.