Monday Medium: Why You Need to Tell Your Story
By: Coach Chris
Tags: Podcasting, Storytelling, Podcast Tip, Podcast, Personal Brand

Now in today’s episode, I really wanted to explain and break down exactly how you need to tell your story. It’s a certain way you want to tell your story so that you separate yourself from your competition and you really connect with the people who matter within your market. You create a genuine connection with your audience.

I’ve done this before myself, and it’s always mind blowing. When I think back to it, I told the story on my show, The Greatness Unlimited Podcast, like literally two and a half years before this person had contacted me about it. It was crazy because I had changed the show name so much and I switched up the platform. I just did so much experimenting with my podcast that it was crazy that someone remembered a story I told. I was kind of confused like, how do you remember that? How do you know that? But they heard the story.

I told a story about me being homeless when I was in college and living in my car. Even down to writing my first book. When a girl messaged me about it on Twitter, I was like, wow, this is crazy. She said, “I’m glad you told the story cause my brother’s going through the same thing and I sent him your show.” That truly touched me.

But my real point here is when you tell your story, there’s somebody out there that’s going to connect with that. There’s somebody out there that’s listening, that’s watching and paying attention to you. They’re literally waiting to hear your story and how you got through that tough time, that trauma. How did you heal from that? So telling your story isn’t about you. It’s about helping other people.

I believe telling your story is a great way to express yourself, but it’s also a great way to connect with your audience. If you want to sell products or something like that, you can easily sell by manipulating people, and that’s what most people do. They sell by manipulating and all that stuff, and the NLP tactics. They do all the mindset tricks they can on you to get your money, but you can do, if you want to build an audience, build a brand, and have a longterm impact on people in a positive way, you have to present them with who you are at your core.

Now, what I will say, with this is it’s not something that happens overnight. Storytelling is not going to get you 10,000 followers in a month. Like it doesn’t work that way. But what I can guarantee you as you build more connections and earn more opportunities. Situations like building a connection with some one who literally went through the same thing as you! They truly know who you are. They know about your past.

And I’m not saying you have to be very, very personal, but you just have to be honest and truthful about who you are and where you are at this point in life. One of my favorite lies I hear right now is “I can help you make six figures” or “I’m going to help you launch a business and go from zero to six figures in three months.” I see that way too much for it to be true.

So again, to avoid that, you tell your story. If you have gone from zero to six figures in three months, that’s when you have to use that story and be truthful about it. But I mean, let’s be honest, how many people are really doing it for the thousands of people that can tell you they, they, you know, they can help you do that. How many people actually do that. It’s very rare, right?

So you want to tell your story, because again, it’s going to separate you from everybody else, number one. And number two, you’re going to build some genuine, valuable connections with your audience. That’s something that is really underrated because think about social media. The young internet is still very fresh to us as the human race. So we haven’t seen a longterm effects, even like 20 years, like Instagram is just now at the point where we say, okay, it’s probably going to be around for a long time, and Facebook and Twitter and all these LinkedIn, all these platforms, they’re still young.

So if you start off with building your personal brand now through telling your story and being honest about who you are or what you’re building, where you’re going, what your goals are, and you start now, just imagine where you’ll be in 20 years! You might have to switch platforms here and there, but imagine where your brand is going to be because now you’ve had people that have followed you from this point on to that next level.

You might not think some people will, but this is the thing, I have some people that have been following me since I had my very first podcast. You probably follow a few people on Twitter or Instagram or whatever that you’ve been friends with virtually for like 10 years. Virtual friendships happen all the time.

The only way you can have that genuine connections by telling your story, if you only focus on manipulating people to sell, yeah, you’re gonna make a little money here and there, but you won’t win longterm. It’s not going to happen that way.

So take the time to think: what’s part of my story that I want to tell? What do I want people to know about me? And I always tell my clients is good to start off with one of your most traumatic experiences. Be honest, be real about that first. Because you can talk about the worst one, then you start to see everything else isn’t as bad, and what’s going to happen is as soon as you put yourself out there in that way, somebody else is going to come to you and say, wow, I went through the same thing. Or they’ll quote your tweet on Twitter to say, wow, this happened to me last year or something. It happens every single time.

So just think about telling your story, and again, you want to do this on your podcast as much as you possibly can. I’m always telling stories and sharing experiences because. That’s how you build that connection. If you build a connection first, even if that person doesn’t buy it from you, they might know 10 other people that need the solutions you have. And then you have 10 new customers now. But if you only focus on manipulation and trying to “hustle”, then you just won’t win longterm. So this is why you need to tell your story more and just really create an amazing, amazing brand.