take the mic

The first step in taking the mic is developing a competitive advantage by appreciating the primal aspects of strategic storytelling within the human operating system. You’re going to go below the waterline of human nature and develop an understanding of the invisible realities of what our brains need in terms of influence from storytelling, so that it helps resolve all the insecurities and self-doubts you might have going into this course. It will also help you understand why some of the things we will ask you to do seem counter to the culture you know but are imperative to effective engagement.

We take it very seriously when we say that you will leave the world of being a presenter and a speaker and assume the mantle of storyteller. You will live the life of a storyteller. This means that you will train, prepare, engage, and recover like a storyteller does and has for thousands of years. Engagement is the management of energy, yours and those around you. This phase is designed to introduce you to each of these critical components that accompany the life of the storyteller, so that no matter what your industry is or how niche you think your technical applications are, you will see that storytelling is such a primal component of our humanity that just by letting the life of the storyteller be the 1.0 hardware running in your human operating system, it will inform and elevate any technical or tactical need you have engaging in any industry, private or public sector. You will leave this section with a full understanding of how to live the life of a storyteller, and the principles that go with it, with relevant actionable steps to integrate into your daily life over time.

With these foundational elements in place, we’re now ready to birth powerful stories into the world that allow you to take the mic and own every room. You will be introduced to the seven-step model known as the Scar Story Framework. This model is designed to take your engagement from point of conception, where you bring a lived experience that has relevance, potential relevance, out of your head and into the world by writing, then telling, editing, expanding the story into your body through play, rehearsing, and preparing for the engagement that you will do, engaging in real time on any platform, offline or online, and finally, recovery, resetting your instrument so that it is prepared to engage again.

Once you’ve gone through the overall model, each week we will take a step from the framework and begin to birth an impact story, a scar story, that you will be able to put into the world in real time.

This step will teach you how to design a story that feeds your listener’s brain exactly as the brain expects to hear it. It turns out, over the last several years, neuroscience has allowed us to look inside brain activity when storytelling is underway, and we’ve been able to ascertain not only the essential elements of what a brain needs from storytelling, but the order in which they should be delivered. In other words, we’ve never been clearer on how frameworks for stories can achieve the most resonance with your audience. This step will help you bring your lived experience into the world by writing out the initial shell of your story.

This is where powerful narratives are born! Speaking from the stage involves storytelling and stories that are born in the tell. The writing step is just to get the juices flowing and get you ready to speak your narrative into existence. You will speak your story into the world for the first time, first with yourself, then with a story buddy or your coach. This is where the real work begins. The clunky, bumbling feeling of your story will start to take form, and it will start to take shape on its own.

This is a critical module that happens after the writing process and the tell step. Both steps are necessary to formulate an effective editing process. It’s more than just editing your sentences and punctuation. Our coaches will take you through a detailed edit of your story, using our unique story filter that brings forward a series of focused questions based on the latest neuroscience of storytelling and brain activity that dial your story in exactly the way that it can be of most service to your audience and feel most aligned in your body. This will include inserting the right amount of detail as well as imagery to transport your audience into your story for full immersion.

This is another unique mechanism of our story coaching process. Most story courses are from the neck, up. In other words, you learn how to communicate by the spoken word, with no emphasis on physical delivery. You wouldn’t know it by all the podiums and Powerpoint slides out there, but storytelling is a physical act. In fact, recent studies show that 60% of interpersonal engagement is physicality, and 30% is voice tone. In other words, your instrument of body, voice, and mind are 90% of how you influence, teach, and inspire. Only 10% is the spoken word. This is where we work your story off the page and into your bones.

Therefore, the delivery of your story is critical. These next three modules will enhance the delivery of your story. Play is a necessary component, because tension as you develop your story, particularly around aspects of struggle, is debilitating to someone wanting to take the stage. Imposter syndrome, anxiety, and other forms of internal resistance can manifest as tension and cause you to look like you don’t trust yourself on stage.

This is why we must integrate the step of play before you ever take the stage. During this step with your coach who is seasoned in the physicality of storytelling, you will learn rituals and techniques that will help you get the story off the note page you’re holding and into your bones as you develop it. You’ll also wake your body up and get it integrated and involved in the storytelling process. It’s one of the most terrifying, but liberating things you’ll do as a storyteller.

And finally, you’ll learn rituals and techniques that will help you for warm-ups prior to speaking. This step is usually the favorite of our students.

This is a hidden gem in the engagement process. In 12 years of coaching dynamic speakers, less than 5% of the clients I took on had some type of rehearsal process for their engagements. Yet the stakes of their engagements were immensely high, and failure was not an option. Their success rate for influence was somewhere between 50 and 70%. A big reason for this was because they did not rehearse. A focused rehearsal process took their influence and close rate above 90% in most cases.

The moment life taps you on the shoulder and tells you that you have a keynote to an audience or a presentation to the boss, you are now in the preparation process. Two-thirds of your engagement success will come from how you prepare. This step will take you through a detailed process that I learned for preparation, starting in the no-fail world of special operations, and then moving into TED Talks, theater, and media. The synthesis of this eclectic body of work will give you a preparation process that I will put up against anything in the world, and you will have one of your own.

This is game day. This is Super Bowl Sunday. This is what pro athletes train for all week and execute for a few hours, but it is where all the return on investment resides. The same is true for taking the mic and engaging with strategic impact. It all comes down to influence. Will you or won’t you?? Whether it’s a keynote, a presentation to your boss, a TED talk, or a podcast, engagement is a skill in this time of Churn. Most people struggle with this.

When the lights come on and they stand and take the mic, instinct takes over, and our reluctance and social proclivity to just blend in causes us to try and minimize ourselves. Tension and bracing occur. Our rate of speech increases. This step is where you will access exclusive content to help you hold space, be present, and be the most relatable and relevant person on the stage. You will take those techniques as you practice on your own and rep your story live, on zoom calls with multiple coaches in a replicated audience. You will get notes from the coaches and then you will rep it again. There is no substitute for live training, and this step will give you all that you bargained for in that regard.

This is another buried gem and unique mechanism of our story training. I don’t know of any other story training out there that focuses on recovery as part of the storytelling process. The reality is that engagement expends a tremendous amount of energy. Because we approach our engagements with a generosity of scars or repurposing our struggles in the service of others and attending to the audience while we do it, it is a high energy suck.

Energy is a finite resource. Engagement is the management of energy. So, we must ensure that our life of the storyteller process includes recovery as part of our way of being in the world. This step will show you how to conduct post-engagement recovery immediately following your talk, but it will also show you ways to conduct episodic resets throughout your day and macro resets over time that go on your calendar.

All of these are designed to not just manage your energy, but your stress and your anxiety levels, so that you can stay in the engagement game for the long time. This is the stuff that no one else will tell you. We will do more than tell you. We’ll show you HOW to do it so you can build your own rituals for it. You’ll emerge from this step with a comprehensive process for recovering in real time. Your wife, your spouse, and your kids will thank you for it.

This is a meeting with your coach that involves situational coaching to review and summarize everything you’ve learned through this comprehensive training. It’s also an opportunity to go back and complete on any aspects of the training where you still need some reps or deeper focus. This kind of spot-checking and situational focus is a great way to button up this comprehensive training program.

This is final session gives you the opportunity to ask any questions that you might have about your specific context and how you may want to take the mic in your arena. Your coach has run a lot of miles in stage mastery. This is where you get clear on how to put your craft into action. You will discuss techniques for real-world application, specific notes to keep your craft strong and ways that we can stay in contact as you take your own mic and step into the amazing world of storytelling and high-stakes engagement.