Share the Scars, Not The Open Wounds

Alright, so last week I spoke at Raise Fest, which was my friend Hunter Thompson’s big event, and over a thousand people in the audience. And I was speaking on the power of storytelling for growing our business, specifically growing as a capital raiser. And it was all about how to tell our stories in a way that makes our audience care about what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. And if you can make your audience care, they deeply connect and resonate with you, then it’s very easy be to convert those people into paying customers. Very, very simple. But the problem that we have often is, one, we don’t know how to tell stories. Number two, we don’t know which stories to tell. And number three, we don’t know how to deliver those stories in our own unique way, our own unique voice.

And one of the recurring things that kept coming up in conversations after my speech, a lot of great people came up and had talked with me about what they got out of it and what they’re struggling with. One of the things that kept coming up over and over and over is this deep desire people have to tell their story, but this fear that it’s not going to be received in the right way, that it’ll be perceived as maybe being attention seeking or sympathy seeking. These things in our life that we want to share the dark parts of us, the things that we’ve overcome, because that’s what people resonate with, that’s what they connect with, not with what we’ve achieved, but with what we’ve overcome. And so we realize, okay, I have these things, these struggles, these things that I’ve overcome in my life. I would like to share that with you. But one of the things holding people back is two things. One is, how do I know that I should share this story? It’s like pretty emotional. How do I share this in a way that doesn’t come off as attention seeking or wanting sympathy? That was one that kept coming up.

People are really afraid of how their story would be perceived as being self seeking. And the important thing to remember is that your story, the reason you tell it, is not about you. You tell your story so that it can serve as the vehicle for your audience to see themselves in it. And they can connect and resonate, and they can say, I understand that, I’ve been there, I’ve experienced something similar. And it’s in that that they connect. But the point of telling the story is not to put yourself on a pedestal, to show yourself in a certain light. And I think when you come at the act of telling your stories to your audience with that lens, saying, I’m not telling this so that you think I’m great and I’m amazing and that you’d learn more about me. It’s actually so that you have a hook point that you can connect with me, that we can see, we can resonate together.
And when you do it from that lens, you are telling your stories as a vehicle, to serve as a vehicle for connection. And I think when you do that in the correct way, you will not come across as self serving. You will not come across as seeking sympathy. Right now, if you do come across as those things, it’s usually because your audience perceives the reason you’re telling the story is for the wrong reasons. You’re telling it not for the audience’s sake, but for your sake. And that leads to what I really want to share with you guys today, which is that the stories that will have the biggest impact on the audience are the stories where you are at your deepest, darkest moments and you’re overcoming some really horrible things and the struggle that you had there, those are the stories that have the most power, but they also have the most emotion behind them. And you need to be very, very careful that when you share your stories, you share scars, but you don’t share the open wounds. So if you’re in a place where you have a story that has not healed yet and you can’t tell it without getting emotional, then that’s not a story that you should be telling yet.
You’re not quite ready to tell that story. Because our goal, again, in telling our stories is to build a bridge of connection with our audience, not to put the weight of our emotional baggage on them. And when we share our open wounds, we are asking them to carry the emotional weight of this thing that we have not ourselves yet processed fully. So we share the scars, we don’t share the open wounds. That doesn’t mean we don’t share emotional stories. You might get emotional when you tell certain stories, but there’s a different type of emotion when you feel it in your heart and you say, oh, man, I think about all the things that have overcome, and I feel the power of this versus the emotion is just welling up in you, uncontrolled, and you can’t direct it, and it’s running rampant in you. That is the story that you avoid telling. And that’s not to say that you don’t tell your friends and family, and you talk to therapists, and you work through this in your own private setting, so you can get to the point where someday you share that story publicly, but not yet.
Not until that wound is healed, until it’s scarred over. And then once you have the scars, then you share those. Because the goal of telling your stories is so that other people can get your lessons without your scars. And you can say, look, I got this scar. Learning this thing, you don’t need to get this scar. Just take the thing and run with it. I’ve already paid the tuition at school of hard knocks on my own dime. I’ve already got the scar.
You don’t need that. You can just have the lesson. It’s free, right? That’s why we share those stories. So I wanted to share that with you because I think storytelling is the most powerful vehicle for connecting with other humans, with exchanging and transmitting meaningful ideas that have the ability to go and transform the world. And I want that for you more than anything else. And it’s going to make such a big difference if you can get to the place in your life where you can effectively communicate your stories in a way that captivates and engages and that makes an impact. And I want that more than anything for you. So if you’re interested in learning more about how to do that, how to tell stories that make a difference, that make an impact, that is going to be a core part of the beyond the apex community, which is all about helping entrepreneurs maximize their return on life.

Part of that will be storytelling and communication skills. If you want to learn more about that, shoot me an email, shoot me a DM, shoot me a comment, and I will make sure that you are notified as soon as beyond the apex goes live. We are going to cap that community the initial first year of it. So it is not going to be an unlimited offering. We are going to keep it small and cap the number of people who can enroll. So if you are interested in it, you are going to want to jump at that opportunity the moment it goes live. And so, like I said, shoot me an email, shoot me a DM, leave a comment, and I’ll make sure that you get on the list so you get notified and you have an opportunity to get in before the doors close. So that’s going to do it for me.

Ladies and gents, I appreciate the heck out of each and every single one of you. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.