so i discovered that you had written this book because there was just a little tiny article in the st paul pioneer press that you had won an award for your books are placed and not you're being honored and it is for remarkable book of merit which is fantastic so it caught my attention and i had somehow missed that you were writing about this even though we share a passion for stories help tell us a little bit about where you've come from and where this idea for the book came from ok great well i'm a communication trainer and consultant and writer i live and work in the twin cities and have been here for about twenty years or so and living proof is based on the training work that i've been doing with my colleague tim cage he's based in new york i'm here in minneapolis and what we've been doing over the years in addition to a wide range of communication training but we've been doing more and more work with people who are telling their personal stories as advocates or spokes persons for a cause or an organization and so what we based the book and was that training work that takes people through that process and this idea that telling your personal story as a way to to get their attention get people to buy in essentially how long have you been focusing on that idea how long has that been on your mind you know its story why should i back up and tell you a little bit about about our story tim and i met as graduate students we were in a communication studies program at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and we met in a course about the power of performing stories so the work with narrative and work with the power of story has always been a part of only our education but what we bring to what we think we bring to communication training but over the past probably twenty years or so interesting thing we had was happening we thought that we were getting more and more requests from clients to say what we really need help on is our stories because we work with with people who are getting writers speaking a lot of different situations but more we were getting calls for we have someone who we need to have on camera or appear at the next event and they really need some help on telling telling their stories so they're the requests became more and but also we found that we were incorporating into our training of that education that we had that was based in narrative and so you've been working together on this for many years really so you've already accumulated some ideas but let's talk a little bit about why why does it make a difference when there's a story associated with a cause what does that mean we may understand it completely practically but we also know when it's not there and mean you're not sold sell how did you how did you help people think through that process well i think as you know when there is that we're in the presence of stories something changes when we go beyond the bullet points beyond brochures speak when we're presented with and very often we are talking about mission driven or cause related organizations right where they're showing here is the need here's how we satisfy the need and logically we could understand that but it's often not until we hear the story of the individual that makes a connection with us not only that it moves us perhaps emotionally but we make the connection and say is this is that something i've seen is that something i can relate to in my life or how different that is from my experience and it certainly opens up a new way for us to look at something and i think just the very fact that stories draw on the more imaginative emotional parts of our brains that it suddenly the abstract is made concrete those those numbers suddenly have a face which is  cliche we often hear it's put a face on it you know i was at a speech recently and the person i know was coming from a standpoint where she just wanted to make her case and she used a ton of data none of which i could remember when i walked away and i wouldn't remind book and there's a little section about the world bank where they were trying to get up a group of passionate advocates for work at the world bank and they kept using data and it wasn't till they drilled down into the story that suddenly they let you know the whole thing group of people on fire to get going so how do you find that people are skeptical about the use of story it depends on how they approach story and i think  very often we it's easy to fall into this trap that story is magic that it's just a matter of insert story here and unfortunately i think we see organizations and causes sometimes doing that is that this just put the story out there and everyone will believe i think that's people when people become skeptical of stories i don't just tell me another story link it to a message what are you trying to show me with the story and i think that's when people suddenly sit up and real and start listening to the story and it in a different way of semi going to gas i think it really does it helps that it does distinguish the difference because i think we are very skeptical about the story seems to be everywhere right now what do you think i'm just curious as to why do you think that is that they're selling much attention to it is it is it that it's working i mean that and you and i may hope hope that that's true but why why the attention now i would love to see the study by someone who is much more qualified than i to look at it over to say story is important now a story has always it's always going to vary but what is it that makes a trend i mean i think it's a great great question is what is it culturally that's going on i mean you know tim and i have been talking over the past year as we've met morgan is ations more individuals who are saying help us with story helping with story that in this is purely anecdotal but we get this sense that people are almost hungry right now for a personal connection through story now whether that's because we are fed this constant diet of mediated stories that our stories as entertainment or reality t v where people are are are often have to do work to figure out the real truth or the make the personal connection that sometimes that's what we're finding is that people are just can we strip it right down to how do we sit across from someone and tell authentic story and have it make the connection that way so i don't know if that's part of what's going  through the ninety's into the early on it's what we called branding is really about companies organizations finding that the more coherent their stories were the more vibrant they were the more people there would come to them the story of apple the story of starbucks and how we could hook something together and that that narrative made sense to us so we wanted to be part of it especially so you've chosen to focus on advocacy which makes me very happy where this is you know the purpose of this show and others is to let me help connect the dots for people about how do you how do you connect more to your community so when you think about at what what turned you to this theme of using story for advocacy what  that i think is the more we worked with individuals in this situation and that and i should be clear these the people we work with very often have made the choice i have an experience i have a lived experience i have a story that i believe if i share it with others it can do some good in the world for a cause or an organization but it's also people who are being approached by organizations or cause and say could you please contribute your story and it was really interesting as we work more and more with those individuals to see that it wasn't just about storytelling it wasn't just about being a good public speaker or being good on camera that there was a lot more involved it's part of it is even negotiating that i am a public persona what does it mean to go public with something that is part of your lived experience so we became just very interested in how this was a combination of all of these different going back to our education think things that we had studied and excited us communication studies story public relations it all seems to come together in this simple act of i'm going to go public with the story so i think the complexity of it and also the power of it has really drew us both both to it well one of things i like about the book is that you do start like you actually start with a great story i do a lot of work with family businesses and i love the very very first little story which is is it true is i your ocean robin strasser is a story about baskin robins oh yeah yeah right it's so do you want to share with that little story is sure absolutely i you know one of the things we decided in the book is that we follow the stories of about six or seven different advocates some of whom we've worked with and others who we've just become familiar with seeing them online or seeing them live tell their stories and use them as examples of the full range from you know the mom who's whose son has severe allergies and she's asked to come in and speak to other parents to people who are on the national stage like ocean robins ocean robins is the grandson of the man who founded baskin robbins ice cream and ocean robbins is an advocate for peace he's an advocate for environmental stewardship invite advocate for getting youth involved in civic involvement in the story he often tells to kick off his his speeches is how his father john robins who was set up to inherit the baskin robbins fortune  grew up with a ice cream cone shaped swimming pool and all thirty one flavors at hand in the freezer all the time turning a large freezer very large freezer turned away from the family fortune and his grandfather said what are you doing where are you crazy how could you do this and he said you know we live under a nuclear shadow there are people starving all over the world who are doing things to the environment i don't think creating a thirty second flavor is how i want my response what might want my response to be and it's just a beautiful little story that that really tees up what ocean then talks about is is the choices we make to do something else in the world so it's a wonder so many uses that personal anchoring people kind of get his his idea but that he says i have turned myself in a different direction absolutely so that gives him in your opinion that gives him a lot of credibility do what he's doing i think one of the i think absolutely and one of the questions we often ask advocates what is the change between then and now and i think when an audience what's a story basically it's a story something happening to someone somewhere there is some change that occurs right and so we ask advocates very often what's the change that occurred from where you were before to who you are now audiences listen for that in a story and i think our most powerful advocates are able to say i was blind and now i see you know or i thought this and now i think this and is that part of the service that you tend to do for their clients is help them make sure that they've made that transition absolutely want to make that transition and they're able to articulate it there is always some some change there we believe in a good advocacy story right and one of the things we we do in the book is that we focus on what we think are the five qualities of an effective advocacy story and we want to that i selected so if you're just joining us i'm speaking with john capeci the author of living proof so do you want to talk about those five yeah i'll give you an example of one of the ok and we know they're essential because sometimes they seem so obvious but for example a good and effective advocacy story is crafted is it has some degree of craft and whether that is simply saying i'm deciding to tell this and this and this and not all of this or i'm going to work with that phrase to make it more evocative or or stick in people's heads or i'm going to spend a moment to really describe in really evocative ways what that felt like what that see there is some craft there and again that seems obvious but when you're working with people who are telling their personal stories sometimes it's a little bit of pushback  story i want to turn it into a i don't want to i don't want to make it something else is that there are a couple of points i thought were very helpful in the book and one was what we were just talking about which is this this that they have to have turned it through the transformation you gave an example of someone who  you know was had a personal tragedy except at the interview with a reporter but it ended up just being completely lost in the message because they had not yet turned that corner from their own grief to what is my cause and how my connected to it so that that part seemed very important to me and then it was also this that architecture this connecting the dots that the story isn't isn't just the story the story is for this action and you explain that well with ocean robbins too that he's got multiple actions but what he's actually act asking people to do is is take action so let's talk for a minute about some of the pragmatics about  what makes for well this personal experiences that you talked about to where someone has gone through that change they were one way and they change their mind and now they've become another it seems like there are a lot of examples that where that's really what's happened the advocacy that's going to occur as i didn't either expect this to be part of my life or i've had an experience that's changed me in that direction and i want to talk about it because we're all struggling to find ways to talk with each other and what we're constantly a polarized environment how can this technique be helpful to us in that that's a great question and you're actually you've you've hit on two of the other qualities that we think are essential to the use of story in this context and i think this is a very specific context there are times you know we tell our stories too to confront ourselves to deal to process or to heal but when we tell a story within the context of advocacy one of the one of the essential as we feel is that it has to be positively charged it has to point to that positive goal that we're aiming toward that doesn't mean we share code it doesn't mean we don't say talk about what what perhaps was a very dramatic or traumatic moment in the story but it always signals a positive change so i have been through this in order that that others do not go through it or others can learn what i've learned or others can be as successful as i have they always points to that positive change and i think that's within this context i think is very important and it seems to me too that there are some good examples of where they've taken that change that experience and said so i now stand for this and what i was thinking of is some good example it seems as though there was a very pervasive campaign that used this technique during the last election at least one or two and in minnesota it seems as though the vote no campaign use that technique where they train by you or is it just that i'm a great example no but i was so excited to watch that campaign develop by give us an example of what you saw well i think every every campaign cycle we see causes campaigns politicians putting a face right and so the stories come become come trotted out i think sometimes successfully sometimes not so successfully what i thought was really interesting about minnesotans united for all families in project five fifteen in those who were who were putting stories out front it was not simply to put a face on a campaign it was to have the conversations and that was the phrase they use and so i think we're where their power in that campaign was that they focused not on just insert story here but it was open the conversation stories are magic stories open conversations and i think that's i think that's a power of that would have been there so let's talk a little bit about why is advocacy so important to us today what you know where we've got tons of issues on the table a lot of nonprofits vying for our attention and you know what is it about shaping this advocacy that you see is important well you're right you know i just i think we mentioned it in the book that last time we looked  at was something like one point five million nonprofits just in the u s we think about how many of them are relying on people telling their stories to support their mission it is it is overwhelming i think it is always is always going to be important for us to make the personal connection with a cause or with an organization why we think it's important now is that we do see where it's being used really well and it's being done well and where better apps not working as well i do think we can become numb to story when it's not when we don't look at some of the whole context that it's not intentional that it's not i hate to use the word authentic but we do judge right but we do know when it's not convincing you know i was at an event which i was totally predisposed to support but i will say that there wasn't a single example or story used effectively and i walked out and didn't write the check you know i mean i was totally new i was supposed to write that check and i i support that organization but it did not happen because i thought you've taken light time and you didn't deliver some me that i expected to have delivered and so i wonder how obviously i should send him a copy with you please but can you know i like the fact that the book has a lot of practical aspects to it this is something you can do at home and it works well if you have help but the purpose i think was for it to get people to do this at home can you talk a little bit about how you structured the the task so that others who want to be better advocates it's timely because people are up at the capitol telling their story get off this is the season of making the case talk about a couple of different parts of it sure one of the things we decided early on was that this had to be an accessible and practical and usable guide and that's part of the impetus for writing it when we would conduct trainings with organizations or individuals very often they'd ask for what additional resources and we could only point them to books about story books about communication books about but nothing that everything pulled it all together and the last thing you want to do is hand people a bibliography and say maybe this will help next week so what we tried to do was was really boil it down to the essentials we don't get into a lot of the theory and academics behind it but it's certainly grounded in those works and we made it very work bookie we were really happy when we saw some readers last year show us their books that had yellow post it notes all over it and they were writing all over the  margins we really tried to make it a workbook and we also wrote in very short and digestible sections so that if you're getting ready for an interview next week or for a presentation or a talk next week and flip to those sections what do you need to know about doing a local interview a television interview or a phone interview if i've already been telling my story and i just need to fine tune it i want to refresh it or figure out how better to get it into twenty seconds you can flip to that section as well so you can dive down as deeply as you like i think with the book is what we aim for but also you can grab and go and use some quick suggestions what kind of successes are you hearing about can you give us an example of someone who's who became a better story deliver and got a result our dear friend written a who wrote it all over the margins she's the person i was just thinking of when i was talking about when she said look at my book i read your book has been writing for five years now in the malls and the m s ride for life i think it is going on and for her in in honor of her daughter who has multiple sclerosis and so this is the fourth year she's written she's been in the in the race each year she goes out and tells  story to her friends and families to say please support me in this but she felt it was stale and i'm going to go back to them with the same story and she used the book and she said i found a different way to look at it she raised more money than she ever had which was wonderful she had more people sign up to was very interesting was that it's not just the story you you give examples where the story is is the spine and then you had a couple of different departure points that connect the dots to the cause right but you had multiple ways to embed the story if you will to help people understand do you have examples where people try each of the different ones and and do you know if they try different approaches to it i don't know but that is one area that people very often how do i organize this do i just start from the beginning of the story and then end the story and leave it really depends on the context you might be you might be also responsible for delivering some key messages for an organization so how do i weave those in there as well we give some also some tried and true models for how to structure a good persuasive presentation for example and perhaps that's the model we really try to give it as many options as possible because there is no one recipe i think is actually so how did you come up with  the title living proof i'd like i'd like that title because you think i i don't remember i just remember we had about twenty twenty five different titles and called on all of our friends and family so what's going to stick that's going to stick  and we had to think too about what shows up in searches and we wanted to make sure get good telling your story in there yeah i like that but i think this idea of living proof is what you're really saying is you're going to embody what you believe in and it seems as though the techniques you use are designed for that how do people get ahold of you and how will they get a copy of the book now that they're ready to be better condensers so well you can read a copy read a sample of the book if you go to our website which is living proof advocacy living proof advocacy dot com and you can read a sample of the book there it's available in our usual online big book retailers tim and i as independent authors and publishers are are really urging people to support their local booksellers so if you go to our website you can see locally where the book is being sold by independents but also there's a link to india and we can see what other independent booksellers around the country are showing or selling it online or in their stores as well and how do you know how many copies you've sold so far is that a loaded question is it going a way you want it to it's going it's going very well we're going to do a second printing by the end of last year we were and this is self a place that hasn't started and of course self publishing has changed dramatically and it's it's what more and more people are doing so the fact that you were also recognized for what you're doing is great we as we've been saying to everyone when we got the news of the kircus reviews that we were on the best of two thousand and twelve list as we did not see that coming that was it was a wonderful way to end it will help your promote it and get it i would think i'll give you an excuse for another round of local reads absolutely and yeah i really wish that more people would use it because i think they're some way we're about to enter that season of all the breakfasts for all the nonprofits so right they could use your guide to shape the testimonials that will be presented at those breakfasts one thing we have been very excited about is that it's been big picked up by a number of college and university courses really as an auxiliary text so really yeah and what do you to academic programs that are focusing on this very thing social justice programs where they're looking for advocacy tools and how to help people who are going to going to be going out and making a difference in the world to give them some some resources we've been delighted so that's it that's quite a compliment i think to us so well we're delighted that you could join us today and tell us a little bit more about living proof that's all we have time for join us again next week on the st paul for