BreakPoints
Storytelling
I have been spending significant time lately creating videos for my speaking business and to promote fundraising for Armstrong. I am using iMovie, which has been a lot of fun. While I continue to craft the stories it is interesting how including pictures and combining that with audio can create powerful stories.
In a world that is moving to instant gratification and needing to get your message across in a short time window, telling impactful stories in a short time becomes even more important. In my recent TEDx Talk I was required to get my story down to 18 minutes, which was challenging but doable. When creating a video for Armstrong I was told to get it down to 90 seconds. That makes you focus on the most important concepts that you want to get across. How can you cut out the things that don’t matter? That is something I will need to master if I want to reach my personal objectives.
Over the next few years I will be focusing time on building a speaking career and telling compelling stories will be critical to my success. I am starting to work with an NSA Hall of Fame speaker and we will focus on storytelling. I am excited about the journey I am on and can’t wait to develop “the” keynote that will be my signature talk. BreakPoints is the focus of the talk, which is perfect since the book was just nominated as a Finalist in the International Book awards. I will focus on weaving my own personal story into the talk rather than telling other people’s stories. I know that when I tell my own story I have the deepest connection, so that will be my direction.
I have been interviewing speakers bureaus and we will see which is the best firm to help me get my story told, because I the end it is all about telling the story.
‘Til next time …….
Getting S**t Done
I have been in the business world for close to 30 years now and it continues to amaze me how few people can actually get things done. Cutting through the clutter is critical for getting things done, but I believe the biggest reason people don’t get much done is their need for approval and their fear of failure. The need for approval issue is deep rooted and one that I am not an expert to discuss, bit failure, I know failure.
Our culture has gotten to the point where everyone is a winner and everyone gets a trophy. This could be part of why things don’t get done. Without failure we rob ourselves of the ability to succeed in any major way. The more we live in small boxes and do everything to avoid failure the less we accomplish. So where does this fear come from? I believe part of it is our education system and much of it is parents not letting their kids fail. They are afraid that their child will get hurt, but getting hurt is part of life.
Here is the biggest problem with this mindset, failure is what makes us who we are! I have learned so much more from the failures in my life than the successes. When you fail we get the opportunity to deal with stress and challenges. There are some major points in my life that in the moment seemed like a terrible day, where failure and stress abounded, but when I look back years later I realized that those days taught me so much, shaped who I am as a leader and have allowed me to be as effective as I can be.
Failure works it’s way through a business in the same way. When leaders don’t like failure they don’t let their teams fail, so they are just limiting the ability of their teams. In the end people that get things done tend to be those that are not afraid to fail. How do you see failure?
‘Til next time …….
Larry Kesslin 