Karen Eber: Culture, & Storytelling Advisor, author of "The Perfect Story"

This week’s podcast features Karen Eber, a renowned expert in storytelling, leadership, and learning. 

Eber, known for her role as a Chief Learning Officer and head of culture in major corporations, discusses the pivotal role of storytelling in leadership and personal development. She discusses her career journey, sharing insights from her experience and her book "The Perfect Story."

She emphasizes storytelling as a powerful tool for leaders and coaches, highlighting its ability to connect, inspire, and effectively convey ideas. She combines scientific research with the art of narrative, illustrating how storytelling activates the brain and enhances communication skills. 

A key aspect of her approach is understanding the audience and crafting engaging narratives that resonate. The conversation also explores the use of storytelling in coaching, where it serves to strengthen client relationships and improve outcomes. 

Eber shares personal anecdotes, demonstrating the impact of storytelling in professional settings. She touches on various contexts where storytelling is vital, from corporate environments to personal interactions.

Throughout the podcast, Eber provides a comprehensive view of the intersection between storytelling, leadership, and coaching. Her insights reflect a blend of scientific understanding and practical experience, offering valuable lessons for anyone looking to improve their communication and leadership skills through the art of storytelling.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Karen Eber

(interview blurb)

Karen: There’s a seemingly simple story but there’s so much to unpack and this is why storytelling is so key in coaching because, as I’m telling the story, people are picturing their own awkward moment. It opens up this dialog and these questions and these moments to have coachable discussions and ask questions and prompts. It’s a way of inviting in because you are picturing your own experiences in that and it leads to so much more than just talking at someone or just asking a basic question.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a talented storyteller with over 20 years of experience working as Head of Culture, Chief Learning Officer, and Head of Leadership Development at companies such as General Electric and Deloitte. She’s also a published author with her book, The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire. Please welcome Karen Eber.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Karen. 

Karen: Hello. 

Alex: It’s great to have you.

Karen: I’m delighted to be here. This is going to be fun. 

Alex: It is going to be a lot of fun. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee and, as our listeners know, it’s not always coffee. Lately, it hasn’t been coffee, actually. What are we drinking today?

Karen: I am drinking a tangerine LaCroix. I’m going for a little bit of bubbly.

Alex: Okay, I know you wanted bubbly so I have Pellegrino with lemon. 

Karen: Nice. Nice. 

Alex: Yeah. It’s like the natural version of the LaCroix. 

Karen: Exactly. 

Alex: You’ve had a really cool, interesting career, and now you have a new book out that I know a lot of people are excited about that we’ll be talking all about your book, The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire. Please take me through the journey that you’ve been working for incredible companies and then being a consultant doing work with organizations, and, finally, coming up with writing this really great book that has amazing reviews and was released in October of 2023. 

Karen: I sat on both sides of the desk. That’s the way I like to describe it. I had a 20-year career working in corporate America for Fortune 500 companies as a Head of Culture and a Chief Learning Officer in a business in GE and Head of Leadership Development for part of Deloitte, and I’ve always worked in the space of helping build leaders, teams, and culture, helping different organizations that I was a part of figure out how to bring out the best of people and create these different places. And five years ago, I decided to get on the other side of the desk and open my own company, Eber Leadership Group, that is focused on building leaders, teams, and culture one story at a time. I did a talk on TED that ended up on Ted.com that had a million views really quickly, within a week, and that same week, literary agents came and knocked on my door and said, “We are interested in a book, are you interested in writing one?” and I said, “Well, funny enough, here’s an outline. Let’s go.” And so that led to The Perfect Story and how the book is now out in people’s hands, to show that no matter who you are, you can become a great storyteller once you recognize some of the science behind it. It helps you figure out how to play the art. So I have just always been in this space of how are we bringing out the best in people and what are the best ways to do it, just like so many of the listeners.

Alex: Well, I’m very excited to talk to you about your book because, well, thanks for sharing your story, of course, but the book is interesting because I don’t consider myself a great storyteller and I’m a coach and I’m an entrepreneur so perhaps even on the entrepreneurial side, I think it’s even more relevant because it’s really about how you tell the story of what you do in your company and the people you work with and the people you serve and it is an area that I’ve always thought maybe I’m a little too matter of fact sometimes and I don’t — there’s a story to be told that perhaps is more interesting and exciting than the way I initially conceived it so I’ve always been aware that working on my storytelling is probably something that would benefit me greatly. Some people I feel like consider themselves, “Oh, I’m a great storyteller,” or others don’t and it’s something that I’ve always been interested in. So, let’s delve like right into the book. So, you did the TED and you already had an outline. Was that outline very similar to what ended up being the book or did it change through the process of working with the publishers?

Karen: It is almost identical to what I started with. The only difference is I flipped the order on some of the chapters. What I was playing with is I feel like there didn’t need to be another storytelling book, there are so many out there, we didn’t need another one, and so if I was going to do something, I wanted it to be different. And while there’s a lot of books out there that prescribe specific models, you hear of the five stories you have to tell, I felt that wasn’t true to most people in life, like they would get backed into these specific stories and run out of them really quickly or they would struggle with the models that were really elaborate and maybe great if you’re writing fiction but for your average person trying to change the energy in a coaching conversation or help a client just gain a new perspective, they weren’t helpful. And so I knew I wanted to do something different and I wanted to really lean into science, and not in a lab coat and beaker way but in a really relatable way to help people recognize that this isn’t just a fun skill and an art, there is legitimate science as to what’s going to be happening in your brain when you communicate compellingly with the story. So I did a bunch of research and came up with what I call the Five Factory Settings of the Brain, like the way we show up, our brain is naturally going to react to certain things in the way we communicate or tell stories and being aware of them gives you these different levers and choices that you can make when you’re telling a story that’s going to impact how someone responds to it. And so that’s part of what’s different. It’s not enough to tell a story, the way you tell one makes a difference and I wanted people to understand the different considerations that go into that and then give them different ingredients for telling a story. 

Alex: How did you come up with this outline? What was it about your career that made you interested in this topic?

Karen: I have a master’s in instructional design and performance consulting and so I naturally think in these chunks of what do people need to know, where’s their capability and skill and how do we grow that or expand that, or what do people naturally get hard, and so I feel like one of my strengths is this ability to understand what is it people need and how do they need to receive it to be able to move forward. And so this very much came out of my strengths of when I think of storytelling, what do people need and how do you break that down in a way that makes it feel manageable but not overwhelming? And how do you lean into those things that feel really hard? So there’s a section on science but there’s a section on how do you get really clear on who your audience is? How do you come up with ideas for a story? How do you take any of those ideas and build a structure? How do you make sure you’re making your stories engaging? But then it gets into things like how do you tell a story with data? How do you avoid manipulating with your story? How do you use your body when you’re telling stories? Or how do you navigate the vulnerability? And so it just was very much like if I looked at this from an instructional standpoint, what’s going to set people up for success? And then I just saw the flow and then I put in this other thing because there’s a lot of stories in the book and there’s a lot of demonstrating what I’m saying but there’s also instruction and I wanted it to be a little lighter. So I interviewed people that tell stories in very different ways, like a former creative director at Pixar, an executive producer of The Moth, a co-founder of Sundance, a person that writes stories for video games. Each of these people are featured in a storytelling vignette at the end of the chapter. So you get this idea, you get the content, but then you also get to live in someone’s world for 500 words and get an idea of how they’re approaching storytelling to see there’s so many different ways you can do this. 

Alex: That’s awesome. Before we get into the science of storytelling that I find fascinating, I’m sure that one of the books that came up a lot for you is the hero’s journey. It seems like it’s such a powerful book. I read it years ago and I’ve really kind of been wanting to read it again. Was that when you were talking to people about storytelling, did Joseph Campbell and his book came up? 

Karen: It comes up all the time. I don’t love that model for the average person. However, rule number one is use whatever model helps you tell a story. The challenge with the hero’s journey is that, first, it’s pretty complicated. There’s many, many steps and there’s a guide on the side and you’re just trying to take your story about what happened and then who’s my guide and how do I fit it in? What step am I on? And now I can’t see how to do it. And so they abandon it. And then that’s not helpful because now you’re not telling a story.

Alex: Yeah, not everyone’s writing like Lord of the Rings or something like that. 

Karen: Yeah. And here’s the thing. You’re just trying to land an idea in a meeting. You’re not trying to write the next whatever movie —

Alex: Game of Thrones. 

Karen: Exactly. And it’s also a very specific type of story. So if you think of coaching, so many coaching moments come out of failure, mistakes, realization, reflection, not these moments where we were a hero and this monumental thing happened and so it forces this artificial type of story and makes you tell the same story over and over and over when, in reality, there’s just so many different stories that can be told. So I don’t love it because I feel like it’s actually confining and challenging. What I prefer is give people a basic structure that they can use to tell any type of story and then understand how to leverage different ingredients to make it be really compelling and interesting.

Alex: We’ll talk about structure, but let’s start with the science. How did you prepare for this book? How did you come up with the science behind the approach that you took for the book and the science of storytelling, really?

Karen: There’s two categories of science that I look at for storytelling. The first is what is featured in my TED Talk, which you often hear many storytellers talk about, which gets to what happens when you’re just saying words or presenting in a meeting to when you’re telling a story, which is the small walnut-sized part of your brain, Broca’s or Wernicke’s area, gets activated. And it’s truly language comprehension. Your brain hears or reads words. It says, “Yes, we know what this is,” or, “No, we don’t know what this is,” and it’s comprehension and that’s it. But if I start talking to you about walking down the beach and feeling the sand under my toes and how warm it is and hearing the waves crash on shore like a cymbal and almost tasting the salty air on my lips, well, now we’re starting to engage the senses and just use more real estate but also have you picture yourself there. So there’s this type of science and stuff that gets to some research of what happens in the listener’s brain,

Alex: You did take me to the beach right there, by the way.

Karen: I did.

Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Karen: You can smell the coconut oil and you were like, “Let’s go, this is nice.” But that’s what happens, right? There’s this part of it creates this artificial reality and that’s because of this term, neural coupling, which is where your brain is the listener or the audience is going to light up in the same patterns as the storyteller. So whether you’ve had an experience or not, you’re placing yourself there. This is why you’re watching a horror film and you feel very jumpy and you feel like something’s going to jump out at you. It’s because our brain puts us there. So there’s this type of science of storytelling that we hear frequently and I touched on in my talk and I even got into how that impacts decision making, which is really what happens when you’re telling a story. But what it doesn’t do is tell you what do you then do with it. So it’s nice to know that your brain is lighting up as though you’re in this story but what do you then actually do with that when you’re telling a story? And that’s where the second part came in, where it’s the five factory settings of the brain, where I take you through the different functionality and what to consider. And this came from years of research. There are a few neuroscientists that are well known in the field of really storytelling and trust, where all of this comes down to, and decision making. One is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett who is a professor out of Northeastern. Another is Dr. Paul Zak who is a professor at Claremont Graduate University. And they have done some of this research that is fairly recent, within the past 10 years, that helps us understand the brain better and how it can be so much more dynamic in the way we’re engaging it. So I immersed myself there and then thought how do I break this down in the way that someone that isn’t into science is going to consume it, understand it, and get excited by it, which is where the factory settings came in.

Alex: So tell me about this structure of telling a good story without becoming that hero’s journey.

Karen: You want to, again, write out four sentences. The first is write out a sentence for the context of the story. What’s the setting of it? Who’s involved? Why should the audience even care? Write out a sentence. You’re not writing the whole story, you’re not writing every character, but you’re getting a good introduction of what it’s about. Second is going to be what is the conflict? Conflict is the heart of a story. This is the fuel that when you run out of conflict, you run out of story. So this could be something that has to be resolved. It could be between two people. It could be to be between a person and their own values, which happens all the time in coaching. It could be between different companies, different obstacles, but there’s usually some tension that has to be resolved. Write out a sentence for that. So we’ve got context, conflict. Next is outcome. What happens as a result of the conflict? What’s done? What’s the impact of that? And fourth is takeaway, and this is the piece that people often forget to do but this is the what is it you want your audience coming away from the story with, and this is important because you want to be able to connect that back to what we said we wanted the audience to know, think, feel, or do, because if you map out that four-part story structure, context, conflict, outcome, takeaway, you can now connect it back to what you said you wanted for that audience. If you can’t connect it back, it’s not the right story or you have to play with it. So this gives you a more basic structure but also many more choices for all the things we can layer in to make it interesting and engaging. How we sequence it to capture maybe some more attention or the element of surprise. And so you’re now not forced into just a story about a hero, you have much more creativity in the type of story you can tell.

Alex: Really cool. So you have a lot of really cool stories in your book. What was the process of learning these stories, framing them for the book? Tell me a little bit more about it, because you have a lot of stories.

Karen: I do. I feel like if I’m going to break down for you how to tell stories, I need to give examples throughout. I used one story as an anchor throughout the book. There’s a story in the opening of my TED Talk about someone that drops a phone down an elevator shaft. I break that down in the book because I wanted to, as we go through each of the steps, show you what went into that and give you the option to see that story in writing but you can also go see the talk live and see the differences in a written versus a told story. But then in each section, each new piece has a different story and it’s exactly what I just walked through. As I went through each chapter, each portion of it, I would ask myself, what’s a story that I know, what’s an experience that I know that can help me build this idea? And most of them have come from my own experiences on either side of the desk. Occasionally, it’s a story that I’ve heard about another company that I thought, oh, this is such a great illustration. But it really was what story helps me build this idea and how do I use it and it really wasn’t a struggle. There were some that maybe took longer to find the right story but once I found them, it was really clear that they did the work. There was only one story that got swapped out because it didn’t quite work and that was the very, very end, in the epilogue, and the story that’s there now I think is much better.

Alex: Of the stories that you have in the book, which is the — is there one that people kind of keep telling you like, “Oh, that’s my favorite story”?

Karen: No. Each person connects with a different story, which is what is so fun about this, because everything’s going to be meaningful to different people. So I tell a story about a really awkward business center and how I learned you can use storytelling in that moment and just say the word, we can tell any of these. I tell a story about in the US, in New York, there is this statue called The Fearless Girl that was installed across the Wall Street Bull and how that was actually almost a cow. It was a colossal mistake in how she was never meant to be a girl to begin with and so that’s a fascinating story. I tell a story about blanking on the TED stage. I had an opportunity to do a talk at TED headquarters several years ago and, midway through, my mind just went blank and I talked about that. There’s endless examples of different things people have experienced in conversation throughout. But there’s not any one that I consistently hear, “Tell that story.” People connect to different ones.

Alex: Can you tell me the story of when you blanked at the TED headquarters? 

Karen: Yeah, sure. 

Alex: It sounds a little frightening. 

Karen:  It’s one of those stories, right? True coaching moment. The experience of it was not delightful and then you get on the other side and you realize what a gift it was. So I was working with TED. They were beta testing software to help companies teach people how to build an idea and I was this beta tester that for weeks was working in this app and giving feedback and they invited us to TED headquarters as a gift, a thank you to do a final debrief but then also thank us. And a week before, I got a phone call and said, “Would you like to give a talk on the TED stage?” and I was like, “Heck, yeah,” but I had one week and I’m practicing my talk everywhere, the library, the gym, in my car, I am doing everything I can to get ready for this talk. I am counting down the minutes when I’m at the TED headquarters, I go on stage, and I’m giving the talk and it’s going really well and I’m rounding the corner into the last quarter of the talk and, for some reason, my mind just wipes clean. I cannot think of anything. I don’t panic, and the thing about talks is that we see — like what you see as the audience is exactly what you see as the speaker, there’s no notes, there’s no hidden thing, a teleprompter or anything like that. So my mind goes blank and I remember what they tell you in improv to do when you blank. The first thing is look someone in the eye. My friend was in the second row, I looked her in the eye and nothing. And so I turn the other way and I looked a stranger in the eye and nothing. And, at this point, we’ve gone past like awkward pause into uncomfortable pause, we’re probably at enough seconds that you can tell that everybody’s starting to feel uncomfortable and I’m still not concerned but I then remember the second rule of improv when you go blank, which is fall on the floor. So now I’m looking at this red circle under my feet thinking like, “Do I need to fall on the floor? What am I gonna do?” And I am just trying to collect my thoughts when the audience starts applauding. And in my mind, I’m like, I’m getting pity applause when instead they were just trying to offer encouragement, and 30 seconds have gone by, this wasn’t an awkward two or three seconds, it’s enough time that they were trying to encourage me, and my brain snapped into gear and I finished, I get off the stage as quickly as I can because now I’m dying inside because this is not how I saw this going. I give keynotes and this was supposed to be this amazing moment and now I’m just mortified and I want to leave. And a TED employee comes up to me and she said, “I really liked your talk,” and I’m like, “Okay, thanks. I’m sure you have to say that,” and she said something that I didn’t register, she said, “You recovered really well, better than most people do,” and I’m like, “Okay, bye.” And I got away from her. And a week later, I am scrolling LinkedIn and I see this post from someone that had been at that day that I had not met. I left this feeling like a failure, feeling like I had not built this idea and how could this have gone so wrong, and as I’m scrolling LinkedIn, I see a quote from my talk. I hadn’t met this person but here he was a week later remembering something I said and putting it as a quote on LinkedIn, which was amazing. And that just kind of struck me. A few months later, I’m back at TED headquarters for another workshop. They’re giving us a tour and as they get to a certain part of the office, they say, “This is where we edit our talks,” and I’m like, “Excuse me, what?” He said, “Yeah, people make mistakes. They cough, they forget where they are, they have to go off stage.” 

Alex: They freeze. 

Karen: They freeze, yeah, and I’m like, I had no idea. I just thought, like most people, the views are just perfected talks and I hit messed up royally. I didn’t realize that what happened to me was so incredibly common, we just don’t know because they’re edited. And that’s when I realized what that employee said to me, “You recovered much better,” like this happens all the time and the gift in this whole experience was I thought I had failed because I hadn’t built this idea when, in reality, people had been coming up to me for a couple weeks after, sharing things from the talk that they wanted. Blanking didn’t make me a failure, it made me more relatable and it was something that showed me, first of all, we’re human. Who cares? No one is upset because you blanked. They’re only upset if you quit and run off the stage and don’t try to continue. And Blanking gave me such a gift because this was before I actually got the talk that is now on Ted.com. It makes me approach all of these things differently. I’m no longer afraid of those things. I recognize that it’s these moments that make you relatable and have people trust you. 

Alex: That’s an amazing story and I can see why you refer to it as a coaching moment. There’s so much to unpack from a seemingly simple story. I love the frame around how we all think these TED Talks are just perfectly delivered every time and I think it’s part of why we elevate TED speakers, right? Because like, wow, you delivered this pitch perfect session.

Karen: But there is something you just said that I think is so important in coaching, where you said there’s a seemingly simple story but there’s so much to unpack and this is why storytelling is so key in coaching because, as I’m telling the story, people are picturing their own awkward moment where maybe they forgot something or had a presentation that didn’t go the way they wanted and it opens up this dialog and these questions in these moments to have coachable discussions and ask questions and prompts. It’s a way of inviting in because you are picturing your own experiences in that and it leads to so much more than just talking at someone or just asking a basic question.

Alex: And connection too, like I connected with you because the way you described the length of the pause made me really feel like I was in the audience and it’s like, okay, it’s been five seconds —

Karen: Dying for me. You were like, here’s your pity applause.

Alex: Yes. And then that story is perfect because it takes me through the things that I’m thinking and how you were thinking so it puts me in the audience’s shoes but it also puts me in your shoes. And it’s interesting, five seconds go by, well, she’s intending to do a pause. How powerful. Ten seconds, okay, is she intending to do a pause? Fifteen seconds, this is getting awkward. Thirty seconds, oh my God, get me out of here, I feel bad for her.

Karen: Totally.

Alex: You took me through that.

Karen: Totally. But I want to also unpack something else because I’ve had people say, “Oh my gosh, it’s so brave of you to tell that story.” It is not at all. So here’s the thing. Storytelling is personal. Even if you’re telling someone else’s story, storytelling is always personal because it is you telling it. It’s why you are the one bringing your perspective to it. However, it isn’t private. Each person decides what is private and isn’t to be shared. So, for me, I don’t really tell stories about my family but I will happily tell you stories about mistakes that I’ve made and things like that because that’s not private, but maybe something about my family is, and for someone else, they’d be very comfortable sharing a story about their family and maybe not something else. It’s not brave. It’s, to me, in service of a coaching conversation or an idea I’m trying to maybe help people broaden their perspective into. So, sometimes, there’s hesitancy, it’s like, “Oh, but I don’t wanna share, that’s personal.” Storytelling is always personal. It should be personal. It is your perspective and you’re the one doing it. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to reveal private details.

Karen: Absolutely. Just to round out my experience from that story, so interesting how we have these expectations and when they don’t match reality, sometimes we, and this is something I see in coaching a lot, sometimes we erode all the value that we’re bringing because one of our expectations didn’t match the way we perceived how we showed up or how a situation unfolded. And you impacted so many people that day and most of them were probably not thinking about that pause, they were just thinking about the impact that your story had on them. But for you, it was all about that path. So I think when you think about all the things that we work through in coaching and situations that people at work go through, and I think ascribing value or focusing on our weaknesses or sometimes focusing too much on our strengths and not looking at some of the other areas that we need to pay attention to, it is such a common human thing and storytelling really provides an incredible way to learn and think through some of the things, add more color to a story that perhaps is harder to absorb. Perhaps what you learned that day when that happened was something that would be harder for you to tap into without having had that experience, and then come up with the packaging of how you want to tell that story to other people.

Karen: Yeah. It took a while to learn how to tell that story, like so many stories, especially ones that feel emotional, because this was pretty emotional for me in that moment. You need a little bit of distance to be able to reflect on it and be able to tell it, but you were very right about expectations because I came away thinking I failed, this is terrible, and the day that I went back to headquarters, I stepped off the elevator and someone pointed at me and said a quote from my talk, also another person, and I said, “You’re just being kind because I blanked,” and she’s like she didn’t remember me blanking. I still don’t understand how she didn’t remember me blanking because everybody knew I blanked. But you’re right, I was focused on something that other people weren’t and that’s so often the shift that we need to make.

Alex: You know, I am very tempted to ask you to tell me one more story because that was super fun. So The Fearless Girl story sounds very interesting.

Karen: Yeah. So, in New York City, there is this Fearless Girl statue. She’s about four feet tall. She’s got a ponytail, her hand’s on her hips, and she’s standing defiantly. But she actually started as something completely different. So State Street Global Advisors was going to launch a mutual fund, I believe in 2017 for International Women’s Day. Mutual funds are not the most sexy thing to market so they thought we are going to do some type of art installation to bring attention to women on Wall Street, to promote more women being on Wall Street, in the work and in leadership. And they brought together artists and marketing teams and they are working really hard on it. They file a permit and they are like, “We know exactly what this is gonna be,” The Wall Street Cow. Their thought for what would celebrate women and be an amazing art installation on International Women’s Day and promote women and leadership was to install a huge bronze cow opposite the Wall Street Bull. And this went on for months. This wasn’t like a five-minute mistake, this was like there was a permit that said Wall Street Cow. You can only imagine the discomfort in the room when somehow they thought like maybe a cow is not going to be the best symbol for women, like maybe we should rethink this. They were about to start casting the statue. They had to stop and they had to reframe and, ultimately, come up with this new design that led to the wall street girl, and what’s funny is this girl had a one-week permit to be installed opposite the bull and that week became a month, which became a year and now she is actually installed permanently across from the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York and replicas have been placed in so many other places. This thing that has, I think at last call, several 100 million impressions on social media was almost this huge mistake because we sometimes get caught up in our ideas and get caught up in our excitement but miss what is really most important for the audience. So I use this as an example of how storytelling can go so dramatically wrong when you center on the wrong thing. But also, it didn’t matter what her story was because now she holds the story of every person that stands beside her and takes a photo. She means something different to everyone now and that’s some of storytelling too, like you can share a story but, ultimately, people then have their experience of it and that’s what lives on.

Alex: I love that story. Thank you, Karen, for indulging me with two of your stories. For more, myself and the audience, I think we’re going to have to go and buy the book. I love the cover, it reminds me of one of my, I don’t know if I would call it my favorite book, but a book that I appreciate, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Karen: Yes, yes, yes. There’s actually a story behind it. If it’s okay, can I tell a third story?

Alex: I mean, please. Indulge me.

Karen: So the cover of the book is — it’s got a green crayon on it, very similar to Daniel Kahneman’s book with the pencil on an angle. I have two different colored eyes. I have a brown eye and a green eye, and when I was a child, and still today, it’s my most favorite thing about myself. I feel like so many people have something about themselves that’s unique that they treasure and, for me, it’s this, but when I was a child, I started to recognize that people didn’t know what to make of it, like you could almost tell the exact moment when someone would notice in conversation because their eyes would start going back and forth, almost like their brain was trying to decide, “Do we look at the brown one or the green one? The brown one or the green one?” And I would brace myself because they would almost always say, “Did you know you have two different colored eyes?” As if I didn’t know.

Alex: “No, I didn’t.”

Karen: That’s what I would say, I would go, “No,” and then it would be, “I know a dog, I know a dog that has that.” Like thank you? I don’t know what to say to that. And then it would be, “David Bowie. David Bowie has two different color eyes,” to which he doesn’t, he had an accident and his pupil was dilated. Then the questions would start. “What color eyes did your parents have?” “Do you see the same colors out of each eye?” “Do your eyes give you special powers?” And this thing that was something I treasured now is this burden because, now, I’m no longer a human, I’m just this weirdo that everyone is calling all their friends over, “Look over here, look over here,” and nobody even really cared what I said, they just were constantly asking these questions that I wanted to be like, “Do you see different colors out of your eyes? Why are you asking this?” I decided one day to do something different, so when I got the how did this happen, I started describing how when I was a baby, I was born with brown eyes and was in my room about the age of four coloring one night, I was getting hungry, dinner wasn’t going to be for a few more hours, and you know that box that we all had that we threw our crayons into, like you had the broken ones and the peeled ones and the perfect ones? For me, I had a cigar box and I reached into the box and I pulled out a green crayon and it didn’t really smell like anything but it had an interesting texture and I ate it and I liked it, so I ate another green crayon in the box and another and another until all the green crayons in the box were gone, and I woke up the next day and my left eye was green. So I would say this and then they would be quiet and people would look at me and they would be like, “Is she for real? Logic tells me there’s no way her eye changed colors because she ate a crayon but she said it so convincingly, like maybe, I don’t know,” but what happened was the shift in energy, because I would admit, of course, I didn’t eat crayons and that’s now why my eyes are different colors, but I was now a human, I was a person, I was relatable, and we would laugh but also we would have a different connection that I don’t think we would have had if I hadn’t told the story. They would usually recognize that they asked questions, like do your eyes give you special powers, and it just changed the energy, and I recognized that, yes, we tell stories in presentations and meetings and, yes, we tell it with friends, but they also can create connection and they can create the shift in energy that can change a dynamic and change an interaction for the positive.

Alex: That’s amazing. Thank you for providing the background story on your book cover that reminded me of Daniel Kahneman’s. So it’s very different underpinning of why the cover — I don’t know what the story behind Daniel Kahneman’s book — 

Karen: Much more scientific and proper.

Alex: Yours is a lot more fun, I am certain of that. Also, Daniel Kahneman is accused of not being super fun because of some of the conclusions of his book but we’ll leave that to another day.

Karen: Yes, I’ve heard it’s been updated, yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of goodness in that.

Alex: He had to make it maybe a little bit more positive?

Karen: Yeah.

Alex: Yeah. I think what it says about humanity, like for us, when you read just straight through, it’s maybe a little dry but there’s the antidote to that book too which is Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition so they’re kind of frenemies and it’s a very interesting thing, but a story for another day. 

Karen: Another day, yes.

Alex: So as we close out our episode today, you’ve worked in organizations for so long, you’ve seen the impact of coaching, you do coaching yourself, what would you say is the value of becoming more aware of storytelling and its impact for coaches as they work with clients?

Karen: As I think about how the work force is changing, individualization is front and center, we’re not — when I started working, people were hired into roles not necessarily because of abilities but because roles were there so it was all about creating the same thing over and over, and as the dot-com era grew and we are where we are today, it’s all about the unique skills and abilities that each person has. It’s the differences and how you bring that out quickly and how you connect with it and so coaching is so key in helping people figure out who they are and what’s important to them, what their values are, and figuring out where you’re at your best and how do we amplify that, how do we create runway for you, how do we help you be the best leader that you can be, how do we help you move through the things that you’re stuck in. Unfortunately, to be able to do anything at scale, it’s having to look at the individual and that’s where coaching is so important because it’s not about generic, it’s about helping tone in on what’s going to be best for each person and that’s all coaching and the fastest way to help with some of that is stories that are going to help you connect with your clients, that are going to help introduce different thinking, that are going to shift energy, like it’s not the only tool in your toolbox by any means but it’s a tool that has many different uses that can help someone be unstuck or gain resilience or recognition or familiarity. It’s just endless uses and one that you should definitely hone.

Alex: Absolutely. I think next time I’m doing coaching, I will think about maybe asking a client, “Let’s go back to that meeting and tell me a story of how that unfolded.”

Karen: Even like, “Make me feel like I’m there next to you in the meeting. What did that feel like?” Yeah, have them tell it that way, like you were there with them, because then you’re going to start to hear those emotions or the doubts or all of those things, yeah.

Alex: Or go back to that meeting that you thought went so bad and tell me a story of that meeting going really well. I mean, there’s so many things that you can do with this. It’s almost like a superpower. Thank you so much, Karen, for joining me today and telling me all about your new book. Good luck with all of the things you have to do when you’re launching a book, including coming to many podcasts. I know it’s your third podcast today out of four so thank you for joining me.

Karen: Thank you for having me. Such a fun discussion.