00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 709 of the inspired stewardship podcast, Um, wisdom, Clements, motivational speaker, and limitation breaker. I challenge you to invest yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world using your time, the talent and your treasure to live out your calling. Having the ability to recognize your limitations are an illusion and develop.
00:00:26 Resilience is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. This is why market research learning more about your customers or just being in relationship and paying attention to people and what they need and what they want and how they express allows us to begin to develop our influence with others.
00:00:59 Because the more questions you ask, the better you understand the other person, the easier it is for you to connect with them. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast will learn to invest in yourself,
00:01:26 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why narrative always has more power than simply facts and statistics, how the facts, however, can be used to create the story. And I also share how you can use this to influence others.
00:01:58 You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from.
00:02:25 And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. I think we've all probably heard the expression facts tell, but stories sell at some point or another. It's usually talked about in terms of marketing and salesmanship in terms of business,
00:02:53 but the truth is that it really applies to all areas of our life. When we're trying to communicate with others, the truth is that narrative and stories often communicate information more clearly than just a list of facts and statistic as an ideas. Now I'm a, I'm a very fact driven person. I love facts. I love statistics. I love data. And the truth is even for someone like me,
00:03:20 stories still have power. Narrative has a power that facts don't have. There's a lot of different reasons for that, but some of them is stories tend to be simpler to understand they connect to things that we're already familiar with. We're exposed to stories and lots of different ways, not just in movies and books, but even at just our normal communication. Hey,
00:03:45 did you hear about, and then a story follows. And so it connects to something that we're familiar with. They also stories tend to create curiosity and interest in a way that facts don't numbers just blurred together, but the stories have a beginning and a middle and presumably an end. And we want to see what's going to happen at the end. We're following along.
00:04:08 They tend to be easier for us to understand and digest, and they connect to us in a way that gives us ownership. In many ways, if there's a character in the story that we relate to, we can feel ourselves in the role of that character. We have an emotional connection to the things in the story, because they're not things there are people,
00:04:30 there are people on a journey like we're on stories, allow you to make a personal connection between the Pearson telling the story and the poor person leave. Listening to the story. We have a tendency to think of these as believable things that connect in an emotional way, they seem more real than facts because they are. And these stories allow you to tell things and communicate things about who you are or what your product is or what you want to have people do.
00:05:06 This is why great leaders learn to tell good stories. But the interesting thing is without the facts, without the underlying data and without collecting data about what happens to these stories, the stories themselves are not enough. It's all well and good to tell someone a story. But if you haven't thought about what kinds of questions does the person come to this with?
00:05:33 What do I need to answer with the story? What do they expect from this relationship or from the product or from whatever idea it is I'm trying to convey? What past experiences do they have? Both with me and with this idea that might change how they relate to it. And then what information do I need to convey within the story that allows them to clearly see themselves and what steps they should take next?
00:06:02 Do they know where to go from here? See, I think about commercials for a minute. You've probably seen some commercials that have really witty, entertaining stories, and there's an arc there. And at the beginning of it in the middle of it and the end of it, and you still have no idea what product it was actually selling. That's actually a really bad commercial because the idea of a commercial is to sell a product.
00:06:27 That's their goal. So you have to think about your goal and then craft your story to move you in that path. It's what allows you to begin to drive towards a story that connects to people, see stories, there's a science to them, and there's an art to them. The science part is the facts, the data, the information that helps us create a story that's memorable that that has carried on that other people can tell and that they can see themselves in.
00:06:59 And there are times where all somebody wants is just the facts. They just want an answer to their question and telling them a long drawn out story. And that situation does it help you, but in general, people are more connected to stories than they are to facts. But then we actually have to think about and gather data and see, did the story actually do its job.
00:07:20 Did it connect to people? Were people able to take action after that story based on the story and know what to do. So there's data involved, both during the story and after that connects to what people do and say, and how they actually move forward more effectively. You know, the truth is that a list of facts communicate much. Okay? One of the things too,
00:07:45 that has to be done is you have to learn how to craft the story. From the point of view of the person receiving the story. See, this is something that happens to us all too often, where we, we run into something and we think to ourselves, you know, this, this story, I mean, this is obvious. Everyone should see this the same way I do,
00:08:06 because the way I view the world is often the way I feel others should view it. But the reality is, if you can understand that other people see the world differently, and if you can understand how they see the world, then you can craft the story in a way that connects to them. Freedom is important to them that how does this story show them that they can use this to become free?
00:08:31 If, if loyalty is important to them, then how can you craft the story to hit on the benefits of loyalty around this? You have to really understand the person who's receiving the story to craft the story. Well, this is why market research learning more about your customers or just being in relationship and paying attention to and what they need and what they want and how they express allows us to begin to develop our influence with others.
00:09:02 Because the more questions you ask, the better you understand the other person, the easier it is for you to connect with them. So one of the best ways to tell stories is to listen to other people's stories. And before you try to tell them your story, make sure you really understand theirs. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast,
00:09:34 as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the U S you can text four,
00:10:03 four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact.