Welcome to upSkill Talks brought to you by McGraw Hill. I'm your host, Michel Shah lead UpSkiller at UpSkill Community. UpSkill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact lead themselves and others. In every episode, through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenge.

And opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies for you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin. 

Transcribing...  

You know, companies love to put a list of values on their website. We value integrity, we value innovation, ,  integrity,  innovation customer centric, , we value our people,  

I can take that whole list off General Motors website and transplanted onto McDonald's website. It would still make sense, and I think that's a problem. What you have that will truly illustrate your values are the stories of when you seize the treasure, what is treasure for you.

These are your value stories. These are the stories of, yeah, we were trying to do something and we tried something, but hey, it went really well and here's the outcome that we got. That's our treasure. Because if you treasure what I treasure, we're probably going to do business together. Probably gonna hang out together.

And I'll be, I'll know what you treasure just by virtue of your stories, by what you consider to be treasure. 

And the last story,  everybody needs a journey story. And I love this story because this is a story that answers the question, why are you here?

How did you get here? Why is your business here? And this story starts in the past with where you were, what challenge you faced, how you overcame it, and the outcome of that story. The ending of that story is where are you right now and what is the elixir that you share with your world? That is the real ending of a journey story.

It's like, what am I giving back? What am I sharing with my world that it just feeds my sense of purpose? It gets me out of bed in the morning. It makes me  wanna like, I can't wait to get to work.

So for each of these stories, 

we can Use this compass, we can say, okay, where is my listener? Or where is my audience?

What story might they need to hear right now? And this will just help you be a little more intentional in your storytelling at work.

Sandra, you're asking how long typically, should each phase take? It will vary, like setting, challenge, solution, outcome. If you really need to convince or persuade your audience that a challenge exists, then you're probably gonna spend a little bit more time there just to really paint the picture and illustrate it and describe that conflict.

How do we know what setting we are in, so, and then just to apply fry tags, pyramid to just that phase. Yeah. So if you're telling a vision story, you use this little structure to start the story in the here and now and end it in the future. Talk about the challenge and the solution in there.

If you're telling a knowledge story, start your story with what you were trying to do, what challenge you faced, what you might do differently next time, and what lesson can everybody take out of. If you're telling a value story, what were we trying to do? What challenge did we face? What did we do to solve it?

And what was that fantastic outcome we got? What treasure did we seize and a journey story starts in the past? What challenge did we face? How do we solve it? And where are we now? And what elixir do we get to share with the world? So we can use each of those. 

 And I'm sorry, I don't know the first name. Yes. My apologies.  So question to you was,  I find myself,  trying to communicate things that, you know, the answer.

Maybe I'm, I'm trying to explain some kind of like scientific document and the answer is really, it depends, or the answer is, it is we don't quite know what we know a little bit more than we knew yesterday  it goes back to the comfort that you're talking about.

It's like if the answer is they'll, you have to accept that the tension is there and you have to live with that tension like, Sometimes those are valid endings to stories too. Yeah. How do you communicate those to people?  In a real way,  I think that,  this is a really, really solid model, but,  sometimes I find myself  in a situation where people are asking me, okay, so what's the answer?

And I'm like, well, to tell you the truth,  the Alexa that you want doesn't exist like it. The truth of the answer is you need to be. Open to living with these two things. Accepting both of them at the same time and trying to weigh them when you wanna make a decision because that's, that's the correct thing for you to be doing as a decision maker.

How do you go about that? I think, I think that's totally fascinating and that is such a great ending to a story story. I think that's, I think that's wonderful. You still, you can still structure it this way where you kind of set them up believing that the conflict is going to be solved. But the surprise is we don't wanna solve this conflict.

The solution is to learn to live with it. Yeah. To, and to figure out which, you know, which sides of the rope are we pulling at different times, , in that, in that tug of war that we're feeling. I think that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. It still fits. Okay. that's the way that, I see the world sometimes and, , yeah, I think that it, it does fit the mold.

I just wanted to know your opinion on it. Yeah, I think it's a completely fascinating story, and with those, you know, we're not being really concrete with one specific example, but I think if you can still rely on that structure to save that element of surprise for them, you know, where you do kind of set them up to think, oh yeah, okay, there's gonna be a solution.

And then the surprises that the solution is to learn how to live with this pension. A good example of this for me was like scientific journalism. Like, especially during covid and stuff like that, when people were like, where, where is the vaccine? How long is it gonna take? What, what is the solution to this problem?

It's like, well, the end of the day, we don't know yet. The answer is we don't know. And we're figuring out. And as we figure it out, we have to communicate that certain things are uncertain, certain things are, yeah. Not entirely decided on yet. And then people need to be comfortable understanding that things are going to be uncomfortable while we figure it out.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. No, it's a great question Russell. Thank you for asking it. And it was a good example.

, it kind of led me to another thought too.  Practicing this skill of telling stories also will develop another skill  and that's listening for stories and being able to be an intentional listener. You know, if you're trying to understand somebody else's perspective, maybe you have a good sense of the setting and you heard the solution and the outcome.

But you haven't really understood the challenge yet. You can draw that out of the person you're talking to, so you have a really good picture of what it is they're trying to communicate. And by the way, it can transform the way somebody sees their own world. 

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So they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to UpSkillCommunity.com to review show notes and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michel Shah. And again, thank you for joining me on this episode of UpSkill Talks.