Does Your Story Spark Joy?
Now, hang with me here — because this is leading into something relevant to storytelling.
If you’re not familiar with Marie Kondo and the Netflix series — the gist of it is she has a 4-part system that is helping people all across the world declutter their homes, clean out their closets, and organize their bathroom drawers. But it goes so much deeper....
In each episode, Kondo — who is Japanese and travels with a translator — arrives to help a particular family by showing them how to systematically go through their clothing, books, paper, and miscellaneous areas like kitchen drawers, garages, and sentimental items.
What’s so fascinating about the show is the storytelling. You can learn so...
Video, Video, Video
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But Video is something I know a lot of about — and I want to take a minute to share some insight with you on why You should be embracing Video in getting your own message out into the world… no matter what industry you are in, no matter what your business is.
A Mantra To Keep You Going
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Brain Dump- A Journaling Exercise for the Cluttered Mind
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I have to say, I think journaling has been instrumental to my love-affair with storytelling. The two just go hand in hand.
Stories don’t come to me on a silver platter…. I often have to go hunting for them. And more times than not, I’ll find them inside my journal.
One of the things I do the most is a basic brain dump. Whatever I’m thinking, I write. It’s stream of conscious writing where you literally write down every word as it comes to you in your head. It doesn’t always make sense…. but you write it down anyway.
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The Stories hiding behind Your Pivotal Moments
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I want you to examine the Pivotal moments of your life. Everyone has pivotal moments they’ve been through that have affected their career, relationships, finances, spirituality…. so take some time today to examine yours.
Where in your life have you experienced big changes, abrupt endings, new experiences that shaped you and shifted you?
I’ve mentioned on this flash briefing before that one of the best ways to sharpen your storytelling skills is to first sharpen your journaling skills.
Taking some time each day to put pen to paper inside a journal helps you mine the stories that are inside of you….. buried behind a lot of day-to-day monotonous details …. but once you excavate...
Do you have a vulnerability hangover?
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www.facebook.com/groups/lightbeamerscommunity
There’s a little-known side-effect to sharing your story that not a lot of people talk about — so let’s talk about it!
For a lot of people, the idea of having other people look at them, hear them, and observe them is truly unnerving. Think back to your school years, the courage it took sometimes to raise your hand in class and answer a question. All of the other students in the classroom would turn and look at you while you spoke.
Or, if you ever had to get up in front of the classroom to make a presentation — you likely felt like a ball of nerves.
As we grow up, that stuff doesn’t necessarily go away — it just manifests into a whole different type fear and feeling. I call it a Vulnerability Hangover.
Part of learning how to share your story is learning...
Don't Try to Boil the Ocean
I heard an expression last week I’d never heard before… and it’s one that keeps boiling to the surface, so to speak, in a way that’s captured my attention.
As I mentioned yesterday on this flash briefing, I hosted my first LIVE event in Dallas this past weekend…. and all last week, leading up to the event, I was a buzz with activity, trying to make all of the last-minute arrangements and take care of details.
Every Thursday, I do a FB live interview called Bright lights — and the women I was interviewing, Susan McCuistion, was sharing her ideas behind her social campaign called StandFor … which is all about focusing on the things we stand FOR rather than the things we stand against.
She was talking about how often times, we get so intent on standing against something …. like standing against discrimination…. standing against war…. standing against hate…. that what we end up doing is calling in more of...
Turn On Your Flashlight
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I’m coming off a huge weekend high, as I launched and hosted my first LIVE event in Dallas Texas on Saturday — the first Storytelling Symposium to empower women.
4 other Speakers joined me for the half-day workshop, as we poured into the audience our best advice, tips, and inspiration to help them step more fully into their own story — and use it to shine a light into the world.
I shared with the audience a vision I had recently while meditating at a women’s retreat I attended last month.
The meditation had me imagining a golden light shining down on top of me. I immediately saw this light in my minds eye, and could see myself as a dark shadow under this golden light.
And in that moment, I heard a click — and it was as if I turned on a flashlight. Suddenly, the dark shadow was gone and below that big golden...
You Can Be Like Debi
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I want to share with you an example of how one of the Community Member’s used this prompt recently.
The photo was a winter wonderland scene where the entire landscape was covered in beautiful white snow, except for one tree, that was sticking out in the middle of the photo — a beautiful red Japanese maple tree — the contrast between the bright red leaves against the all white landscape is what made photo interesting.
One of the women in my community later shared how she’d taken that photo and written an entire post for her LinkedIn Profile.
Debi is an accountant, who has her own business helping other small business owners with their accounting and bookkeeping needs.
She...
A Critical Piece of Your Story -- The Transformation
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Yesterday on the briefing, I took you through an exercise to help you work on your origin story — one of the 3 foundational pieces of storytelling you need to share with your audience. Your origin story is a piece of historical context that you can trace back to the beginning of your own story
Next, I want to introduce you to the 2nd foundational tool, which is your Transformation story.
With each of these foundational stories, you want to consider the message you are spreading to your audience with your work. Whatever it is you do, however you have an impact on others -- that’s what you want to keep in mind as you evaluate your stories.
Your Transformational story is that moment or series of events in your life & business when you experienced a big shift — a complete change in your perspective.
It’s sort of like...
