Charting Entrepreneurial Success Through the Art of Storytelling

Embark on a voyage where the winds of change are stories waiting to be hoisted into full sail. As your captain, I navigate the narrative seas alongside Dave Bricker, a sailor turned sage in the craft of storytelling. Our journey reminisces the mysteries of Stiltsville's floating village and charts the course from open waters to the open hearts of your audience. It's not simply about the roles we assume but the tales we tell that define our path. We reveal how the hero's journey is more than just a marketing tool; it's a beacon that can guide your home business to shore.

Stories aren't just for the storybooks; they're etched in the very fabric of our lives, sometimes taking the helm when we least expect it. This episode sails through the importance of seizing the zephyrs of chance that life offers, transforming the fear of missing out into a treasure chest of experiences. Listeners, join our crew as we express our gratitude to the home business community, and remember: your success isn't a distant land, it's a narrative you craft with every choice you make. Tune in and anchor your entrepreneurial spirit with wisdom as timeless as the tides.

Website: https://storysailing.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/davidbricker
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davebricker
Blog: https://storysailing.com/storysailing-blog

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Oxygen America

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Welcome to the Home Business Success Show. Join us as we speak to home business entrepreneurs for tips, tricks, do's and even don'ts for running a successful home business. Welcome everyone. I'm Hank Eater, also known as Hank the PR Guy, host of the Home Business Success Show, and you are listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. We'll meet our guest right after my two cents marketing minute.

Speaker 1: 1:12

When you give presentations, do you tell compelling stories? Time to up your game? Stories can mean the difference between your audience yawning or gripping their seats. Stories have always been a part of our culture, going all the way back to ancient Greek dramas and even beyond. The most compelling story is the hero's journey. Google that, learn what it is and how you can use it in your marketing.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Our guest today, dave Bricker, is a true storyteller. As a young man, dave was inspired by the remarkable people he met in Miami's secret floating village. I just want to say quickly I come from there and I know what you're talking about. We used to call it Stiltsville. The sailboat anchorage, a quarter mile offshore from Miami City Hall, attracted world travelers, squatters and dreamers. All had remarkable stories to tell.

Speaker 1: 2:12

By his senior year in college, dave was living aboard his own tiny sailboat. Soon after graduation, he set sail for the Bahamas with a locker full of food and dreams and $40 in his pocket. His voyages took him up and down the Bahamas, up the east coast of the US to Chesapeake Bay and across the Atlantic to Gibraltar. He ran aground, dealt with mechanical breakdowns, got seasick more than once, slept in the volcano, survived powerful storms and returned to the land of clocks and calendars with what he had gone in search of Stories of his own. Today, as a speaker, trainer and coach, dave Bricker helps remarkable people tell remarkable stories through writing, speaking, graphics, design, video technology and music. If you want to see it, visit wwwdavebrickercom. Share it or sell it. Bring Dave your story, he'll help you tell it. Welcome to the show, dave.

Speaker 2: 3:16

Hey, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here today.

Speaker 1: 3:19

You're welcome, hey, and all of your adventures. Did you ever run into the mythical sirens that sang and tried to draw you to the shoals?

Speaker 2: 3:29

Oh, that happened to me on shore a time or two, but never during my sailing.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Oh, there you go. That's, that's the upside of being a sailor is running into the sirens. There you go.

Speaker 2: 3:40

And of course now I live in the city, so there are plenty of literal sirens making noise all the time.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Right, but those don't draw you in, those usually push you away.

Speaker 2: 3:49

Hopefully not.

Speaker 1: 3:51

So if you would please tell our audience what it is that you do, Wow, how much time you got.

Speaker 2: 3:56

What do I do? Basically, what I find I work with mostly with companies, with groups, but with with really smart people. And smart people very often share a certain curse, which is that they have these brilliant ideas swirling around in their heads and they are completely confident that they know how to break this down in a way that nobody does or explain it in a way that nobody does. But when you actually ask them to do it, it starts to ramble and go here and go there. It's like, well, before I tell you this, I've got to tell you that and you've got to understand this before you can. And the next thing you know, it's just a mess. So I help those people turn their mess into a message.

Speaker 1: 4:39

That's very good, turning their mess into a message. It reminds me just about an hour or so ago, you and I were both in an event called Mini Shark Tank and one of the speakers, after he gave his pitch, was asked by the two hosts. One of the two hosts I think it was Jim asked him please explain what it is. You do. You know? Break it down for those of us who really don't know, because I still don't really know what you do. So I think that that's where. That's where you're going with this. You know, get them to be able to make it relatable, tell stories.

Speaker 2: 5:11

And I certainly didn't understand what that gentleman was talking about. I had no clue what he did, and I think he did a lot of things that were blended together. But the question itself is kind of a dangerous one. One is what do you do? Ok, that's your function. What do you offer? What results do you produce? That's really what people are buying, and yet so many of us are focused on what do we write on our shingle? I'm a doctor, I'm a dentist, I'm a plumber, I'm a this, I'm a that you and a million other people. What is it that you offer? And how is it that you do it differently than anybody else? Now you've got no competition and people are shopping for you because you are offering value rather than function. A, b and C.

Speaker 1: 5:57

Right. People don't want features, they want results, they want transformation. Well, you talk about you speaking. You're right about storytelling. What's that all about? Why should leaders care about storytelling?

Speaker 2: 6:13

It's interesting. We said we'd write into this one, which is this idea that people tend to talk about prices, processes, ingredients and data and that will hold our interest only so long. And it will only hold our interest if we know what's in it for us, if we know there's some outcome involved. So when we tell stories, the golden rule of storytelling is that stories are always about people. If you're not talking about people, you're not telling stories. If you're not telling stories, you're not connecting. And if you're not connecting, you're not selling. And that does not necessarily mean whether people are paying you money. People need to buy your credibility, People need to buy your ideas and we're all selling all the time. Anyone who's asked a child to go to bed, or ask someone on a date or asked for a raise or a job we're all selling all the time. So let's get the stigma of selling off the table. But stories are important because they really contain the roots of human connection and until you've made that connection, you don't really care about somebody's facts and data.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Right, and I'm correct in my belief that when you do tell a story, the audience needs to be able to see themselves in the place of the person about whom you're telling the story. Otherwise they have no vested interest in it. Sometimes that's the difference between a really good movie and a very mediocre movie the characters you know. If you could feel yourself in the place of that character, they've won you over.

Speaker 2: 7:53

And it's interesting. I mean this is. This is why memoir writing is the extreme sport, for authors too, because if you're going to write about yourself for three or four hundred pages, you have to make your story a metaphor for your reader's story. They need to get something out of it. And I'm reminded of a time I was watching a speaker talk about his ascent to the top of Mount Everest and my colleague next to me tapped me on the shoulder, said Dave, this guy climbed Everest. Why is this speech so boring? And I said because it's all about him. But we and it's he's so close to it because we all have mountains to climb, we all have challenges. We have our own little Everest to face, and he's talking about him and his bravery and his journey and his struggles, but he's not making it about us, which is why, if you look around you, people are checking their email on your cell phones Instead of listening to this person talk about their remarkable journey to the top of Mount Everest.

Speaker 1: 8:52

Right and maybe how it relates to our lives.

Speaker 2: 8:56

Yeah, we, and storytelling is great. Make your story a metaphor for your listener's story your journey and then they will listen. You have to get rid of your eye infection that's capital I infection and stop talking about yourself and start talking about your listeners, and once people realize you're talking about them, they pay attention.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Very cool. Well, you sailed thousands of solo miles and crossed the Atlantic in a wooden boat. What inspired you to do that?

Speaker 2: 9:32

Now I get to talk about myself, right.

Speaker 1: 9:34

That's okay. I'm sure you'll make it a metaphor somehow.

Speaker 2: 9:37

Right, exactly. Well, look, I was, I was just. The nutshell version is I was in my early twenties when I was actually 18 when I discovered sailing and realized that you could have adventures without going to a movie theater or reading a book. You could have real adventures in life. I was a private prep school kid. I didn't know that was an option. I thought you studied hard and went to college and got a law degree or whatever it was. You know, my mother was a lawyer and my father was a doctor and I was a disappointment, but I was happy with that.

Speaker 2: 10:11

But but I guess at some point I'd been sailing my little boat in the Bahamas, having my adventures, writing ticket pictures, meeting amazing people, seeing beautiful things and just digging into life. And at some point in that journey a friend sailed up in his beautiful hand-built wooden boat and asked if I would sail across the Atlantic with him. And I thought look, I'm 25 years old, I'm single, I'm unemployed and I can be broke in the middle of the ocean as easily as I can be broke Bahamas. What's the difference? It's not like I'm pursuing some big opportunity. And so I thought about it for about a quarter of a second and said yes, and that was that.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Because what I was really afraid of is getting old one day and looking back and thinking about Wow, dave, you really should have taken advantage of that opportunity. Why did you wimp out on that? I would have hated myself for the rest of my life. People ask me why I went. You know, how could you be so brave? Of course I was afraid, but I was really more afraid of what I would think of myself if I didn't take that opportunity when it landed in front of me. So off we went.

Speaker 1: 11:30

That's, that's good reason to go talk about missing an opportunity when I was like 16. My friend and I he was like a year and a half older than me we met these two beautiful women that were older than us but they had a. They had like a 36 foot sailboat and they wanted us to sail to Bimini with them. And you know, I was 16. I described it to my parents and my mother said well, yeah, you know, if your friend goes, yeah, you can go, but you know I'm going to do it alone. I said that to my friend and he had this I guess he had this really disproportionate fear of sharks and his answer was no, I'm not sailing to Bimini on a sailboat because I'm going to have my stomach eaten out by sharks. I wanted to kick them because I knew at 16 that if we went on a trip like that with these two beautiful older women, it's going to be an adventure of a lifetime.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Yeah, the fear of cougars would be more appropriate.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Yeah, fear of cougars. It's funny. Now I've reached the age where cougars are like young women. So yeah, that being said, what if somebody doesn't have a big, amazing story? Does someone need to risk their lives or survive cancer in order to have an amazing story, something worth sharing?

Speaker 2: 12:52

No, and it makes me sad when I meet people who say, look, nothing's ever happened to me, I don't have any kind of story. But anyone who's been in a relationship, anyone who's loved and lost or been on a really horrible camping trip or been on the date from hell or had the boss, or I mean, take four people working in adjacent cubicles If you could record the stuff that goes over those walls you could write a novel. Anyone who's had a pet I mean we have story generators in our lives and then turn on your story radar. Look around, there's stuff happening, people are interacting. Look at even some of the people who rant and rave about politics or whatever their topic is. Jump on YouTube and look at people telling their stories that they get so passionate about.

Speaker 2: 13:53

I just find I'm mining stories from everywhere because right now I live a pretty conventional terrestrial life. I go sailing on the weekends when I can, when the weather's good, but I mean I'm not off crossing the ocean these days. But my life is full of wonderful people and wonderful stories. It's just the way I live it. I think anybody can do that.

Speaker 1: 14:18

Well, it's like authors who keep an author's notebook and if they're out and about and they see something particularly interesting, they don't know if maybe they'll use that someday in a short story or even in a novel, but they write it down so that it jogs their memory to go back to it.

Speaker 2: 14:33

So yeah, or ask anybody if they've ever had a remarkable coincidence in their life. Everybody's had at least one, at least one. You're not going to believe what happened. I was walking down the street and all of a sudden, fill in the blank, the people, the people you met at just the right time, the people you just missed, who might have been life changers for you.

Speaker 2: 15:03

I remember when I before I was very, very young and there was I went to Everglades National Park and I went sailing there with a friend of mine who ran the schooner and there was this absolutely beautiful park ranger there who she said hey, I'm going canoeing in the Everglades next weekend. Would you like to come? Now, I mean, great, that she was beautiful, that makes the top 40 rock story but really interesting, a fascinating person. And I thought, well, I don't have. I mean, I'd be afraid to just take off in a canoe by myself in the Everglades for a weekend. That's not my familiar turf. And here's this woman who is comfortable doing that, ready to do it alone. I'm going to avail myself of that.

Speaker 2: 15:55

And I thought, well, this is going to be a great date. I don't care if anything romantic happens or not, it's gonna be an adventure and we had a date and she called me a week later and said I've been transferred, I'm going to a different national park somewhere else in the country. I never saw her again, but I always remember that story. Look, I met my wife, I'm happily married, all is good. But it's more than just like okay, the boy meets girl story. It's like, wow, what an amazing adventure there was on my plate that got jerked away and there's always a little hole there that that story could have been. I've got that empty spot.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Right, I'll say this as quickly as I can. One time I found myself right in the right place at the right time, almost accidentally, to run into a woman who, almost 50 years earlier, was a substitute teacher when I was in the second grade and paddled the crap out of me for something that I had done. And then she spent the next 50 years feeling so much guilt that she just wished she would run into me one day to ask for forgiveness. And this was amazing, that we were put together for that to happen. And I told her, ma'am, if this makes you feel any better, number one I don't really remember the paddling you gave me. Number two, if you called my home, my mother gave me a lot worse, so probably that's why I don't remember what you had done.

Speaker 2: 17:25

And number three sorry to make you feel bad, but I'm over it.

Speaker 1: 17:28

There you go. But I told her I forgive you, I forgive you and I gave her a hug and that was like the closure of a lifetime for her. That was amazing and that's quite a story. Which brings me that one's totally true. But it brings me to my next question. When you tell a story, like on the stage at a talk, does it have to be 100% true and if not, how do you draw the line?

Speaker 2: 17:53

Well, what's the old saying? Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. I'll tell you where you draw the line. If you're just making stuff up, well, or you're just embellishing or leaving things out, how does it serve the audience If you're speaking or running a training program or trying to motivate somebody? There's a difference between, I guess, memoir and autobiography. Right, if you're an autobiographer, you wanna capture every fact and every little thing that happened on a certain day, whether or not it's interesting because you're adding something to the historical record.

Speaker 2: 18:29

But as a storyteller, my job is to deliver transformation, not just information, and I want to write the story or tailor the story in such a way that it does that most effectively, offers the most benefit to the audience. For example, I tell a story about crossing the Gulf Stream on a storm in my keynote address and if someone were to ask me afterward was that true? It's like, yeah, it was a true story, it all happened, but I did have a lady friend with me on the boat. She was afraid to, but she was a part of my story at the time. But I don't need her to be a character in that story to make my point. I'm starting to burden it with.

Speaker 2: 19:17

There's a part in my sailing memoir where I take the reader on a trip through the Northern Bahamas and we hop from island to island to island. What the reality. I did that on four or five different trips. Why would I make my reader do all of that anchoring and sailing back and forth? My goal is to give them a tour of the islands, so it's that kind of thing. I don't think a story needs to be true. It needs to be purposeful and authentic.

Speaker 1: 19:45

Right, yeah, so if it stems from your consciousness and something that you've worked out in your consciousness, that would be helpful to your audience. I guess at that level that story is true.

Speaker 2: 19:56

Yeah, and the other side. That's interesting is I remember when I wrote the memoir, which was some time ago, I looked up people. I hadn't spoken to some of them for almost 20 years. They remembered things I didn't remember, but they also remembered things differently. And I would talk about a story. I was like no, dave, that was you who said that. It's like no, I didn't say that, ray, you said that that came, but we remembered things differently. So what is truth? You start pulling stuff out of memory. That pot's got a lot of holes in it.

Speaker 1: 20:29

Yes, it does.

Speaker 2: 20:30

And quite a few worms.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Especially mine, right, but that being said, you know it's amazing how quickly we run out of time. So, basically, In a nutshell, you will work with people whose business their lives and their businesses would be improved by becoming better storytellers and being able to incorporate stories into their presentations. If those folks want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that?

Speaker 2: 21:01

Well, my website is storiesailingcom, or you can use gavelbrickercom, my name. It goes to the exact same website, to make that easy for people. And then, yeah, I work. I offer workshops on what to say, how to say it and why they'll buy it, because I see those three components as working together to make an effective story.

Speaker 1: 21:24

I think those are three very good components. Anyway, thanks for being here with us today and to our listeners, tune in every Wednesday at 11 am for the Home Business Success Show here on bizradious. Before I go, I want to tell you that there are some great resources available to home business owners. You are not alone in the wilderness in your home business. The home business success community has your back. We're an online membership support community of like-minded home business entrepreneurs. Contact me to find out more. Just go to bizradious, scroll down to shows, find my picture and all of the contact information will be right at your fingertips. Remember you can achieve success, freedom and independence in your own home business. I've done it, dave has done it and you can too. I'll see you again next week. This is Hank Eater, wishing all of you a fabulous day of home business success.