ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

Magnetic Storytelling - How to Move People with your Words

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 2 • Episode 38

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In this engaging conversation, Dr. Danny Brassell shares his journey from teaching in South Central LA to becoming a renowned storyteller and speaker. He emphasizes the power of storytelling in connecting with audiences, the importance of authenticity, and the techniques for crafting magnetic presentations. Dr. Brassell discusses common pitfalls in public speaking, the role of reading in enhancing communication skills, and how to overcome language barriers. He also provides practical advice for aspiring speakers, highlighting the significance of practice and intentional storytelling.

Takeaways

  • Storytelling has always played a role in my life.
  • The purpose of a presentation is to connect with an audience.
  • Authenticity is what's most important in storytelling.
  • Stop sharing your successes; start sharing your failures.
  • The best speakers always inspire and uplift their audience.
  • People think in pictures, not words; use visuals effectively.
  • Your audience wants you to succeed; they are rooting for you.
  • Speaking is a skill that can be trained and improved with practice.
  • Intentional storytelling is key to effective communication.
  • You can create a well-crafted story that resonates with your audience.

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Have questions or suggestions? Email us at info@santiagotacoronte.com

Danny Brazell, welcome to Productivity. Thanks so much for having me, Santi. More importantly, thanks for spreading some joy in the world. We need a lot more of you, my friend. Thanks so much. Danny, you've gone from teaching in South Central LA to sharing stories around the world. What is the moment where you realized that storytelling was so powerful? Well, I've always been a storyteller. If I was going to write an autobiography, it would probably be called Pivot Santi because I feel like I've already lived nine lives. 30 years ago, I was a journalist covering President Bush Senior in the 1992 presidential election and I got to meet every editor of every major daily and one editor offered me a job working for the City Beat for $16,500 a year. Meanwhile, a friend told me they were hiring teachers in South Central Los Angeles for$25,000 a year. So Santi, I became a teacher for the noblest of reasons, for the high pay, and I fell in love with teaching. I've taught all age levels from preschoolers all the way up to rocket scientists. I can make that claim because I used to teach English as a second language to engineering students at the University of Southern California. And in 2005, my wife and I attended a real estate seminar, which turned out to be a scam, and we lost everything. And I could give you the woe is me story, but I'm a positive storyteller and I learned a lot of important lessons. First of all, I learned that my wife is my soulmate. I put her through the wringer and she stood right by me. She's an incredible human being. Secondly, I learned that you can lose money in a second, so don't put everything on the money. uh Third, I try not to judge people anymore, because if I was somebody who looked at what I had done, I would have said, you deserve that. But now I realize if you don't know everything about a person, you really don't know anything about a person. Fourth, I became Christian, which I'm always embarrassed to admit, but the more I read the Bible, I'm not the first screw up to find Jesus. And fifth, I didn't want to uh declare bankruptcy and my accountant said, well, you have to make this much more money this year then. So I started speaking as a side hustle and I hit that number right on the number. Well, the next year, Santi, he gave me a much higher number and I hit that number right on the number. So in year three, I thought, well, maybe I should set a higher number. And basically during one of the worst economic downturns in world history. was able to build up a highly lucrative speaking business which has taken me all around the world and it attracted the attention of some famous people and companies who started asking me to coach them on how to create their own presentations. And I resisted Santee because you need to know this about me. I have a very high standard for my students. I will not let you fail. I will actually hold you accountable and be on your back until you succeed. Well, now that I work with entrepreneurs and business owners and executives, I find that they're highly motivated. They do the work and I find my work as a coach now the most gratifying thing I've ever done. So that's a very long answer to your short question, but storytelling has always played a role in my life. I've read a description of you, a depiction of you as the Jim Carrey with a PhD. How much of your public speaking is performing and how much is philosophy? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know about that. I think oh my performances are basically who I am. I have a rule, Santi. I take my job seriously, but I don't take myself seriously because I ain't all that and neither are you. And if you think you're all that, teach kindergarten for a week because those little ones will set you straight. I remember one day one of my little girls raised her hand. said, uh Latasha, question. She's like, uh Mr. Purcell, when are you going to trim your nose hair? I'm like, this afternoon. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I ain't all that. So I like to infuse humor into everything. I feel like I'm a pretty open book, though. I'm pretty authentic. So I think my performance and my philosophy are pretty much tied together. Danny, what turns words into a memory that stays with the audience, the people? What makes a story magnetic? Yeah, so that's a great question Zanti. Of all people, was Joseph Stalin who said that a million people dead is the statistic. One person dead is a tragedy. Translation, facts tell but stories sell. Facts inform but stories transform. And so ah I'm working with a gentleman right now from Saudi Arabia who's incredible. He's uh climbed to the top of the highest peak on all seven continents. did the Iditarod to the North Pole. He swam with sharks in Madagascar. And I look at him, I'm like, nobody can relate to you. Nobody in your audience has climbed Mount Everest. And so this is a big misconception. A lot of people think they have to be extraordinary to be effective, but the opposite is true. It's the ordinary stories that connect because not everybody's climbed Mount Everest, but everybody peed their pants when they were six years old. Everybody felt uncomfortable at a dance when they were a teenager. And so when you can connect with audiences with stories like that, this is the whole purpose. A lot of people miss this on a presentation. think what you were talking about, they think the purpose of a presentation is to perform. And it's not. The purpose of a presentation is to connect with an audience and get them to want to take the next step with you. Now that next step, it can be an unpaid next step, like subscribe to my podcast or uh book a free phone call with me. It can be a paid offer like buy my product or invest in my coaching program. But when I'm working with people, I run a company called the Wellcrafted Story Workshop with my co-founders, Coach Jimmy Hayes Nelson and Dave Ward. I call us the professor, the performer and the producer because my background is in academia. Coach Jimmy was a Broadway actor and then Dave uh used to be an attorney who's an AI specialist, worked with a lot of Silicon Valley firms.. so I think authenticity is what's most important in storytelling. And we always emphasize to people that it's the ordinary that stands out. The purpose of your presentation is to connect with your audience. And if people come up to you and tell you you've got a standing ovation, we'll say, that's great. And if people come up to you and say, people are telling me I'm a great speaker, we'll say, that's great. But the only way we measure your effectiveness is how many people in your audience decide to take that next step with you. We want you to move hearts, but we also want you to move the needle because after all, you are a business. In your experience, why do so many professionals struggle with telling stories? Even if they have probably a lot to tell. Well, first of all, they don't tell intentional stories. They just tell random stories that don't have any point. I think the biggest mistake most people make is they brag. And I'm a big fan of Brene Brown. She talks about vulnerability and I couldn't agree with her more. I always say to clients, stop sharing your successes. Start sharing your failures. Because not everybody in your audience has succeeded, but they've all failed. And the more you share your own failures, the more your audience is gonna see themselves in you. And this is what we're trying to get them to do, is to see themselves in you so that they're attracted enough to you to want to continue to work with you long after your speech. I mean, you can help people a little bit during your presentation, but you can help them a lot with your product or your coaching program or whatever. The other biggest mistake I see most people make is they give multiple calls to action. And so I'm a former teacher, have to bear with me. All of my sayings either rhyme or they're alliterative. I always say this, choices confuse and cause you to lose. You have to have one clear call to action. I'll give you an example, Santi. I was on a podcast yesterday and the hostess said, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Make sure you like, subscribe and give a five star review. And after we got off the air, I looked at her and I said, you just told your audience to do three things. They're not gonna do any of them. You need to give them one clear thing to do. So if you can start uh crafting what we call a well-crafted story, which is very intentional, then you'll have much more effectiveness as a speaker. I want to stop one second there because as a corporate worker, I obviously see and work in lot of presentations, PowerPoints. And I do think that messaging and crafting the message and the right call to action is important. Would you say that It's important to have one message per slide, one single message per slide or one single message per entire presentation. How do you go about this? Well PowerPoint is very interesting. A lot of people, they rely too heavily on PowerPoint. I can tell you, Santi, I've never had a person come up to me six months after a presentation and say, oh, you know what I love the most about your talk, Danny, was that one PowerPoint slide that had 18 bullet points that you couldn't read because the font was so small. I've never had anybody say that. If you are gonna use a PowerPoint, and I work with people that like to use PowerPoints, but... I'm a big believer in PowerPoint is a visual. So if you watch the news, pay attention the next time because the news anchor is giving a story and in the upper uh right-hand corner, you see a picture. So if they're talking about a war, you'll see an explosion because the reason they're doing that is Walt Disney said people think in pictures and he's absolutely right. So if you really want your PowerPoint to be much more effective, get rid of all the text. I mean, it's all right to have a little bit of text, but to your point, maybe one point per slide, but have a picture and that picture should actually guide you on where your presentation's going. I see way too many. I like to give the example of, I'm Christian and in the Bible, I always laugh because Jesus is always frustrated with his apostles. He's like, all right, you're not getting this point. So let me tell you a story about the prodigal son. Oh, let me tell you a story about the Good Samaritan. I bet you, you don't even have to be Christian and you'd be familiar with those stories. But I also bet you nine out of 10 Christians could not name the 10 commandments. And the reason is they aren't presented as a story. They're presented as a list. People don't remember that. People remember stories. This is the power of storytelling. So if you are, and I work with lots of firms where they're using PowerPoints all the time. Again, I really want you to focus on getting your point across through stories and pictures. I'll give you an example. We can do this right now, Santi. I want you to think of an apple. Take a moment, think of an apple. describe, what did you just think of, Santi? I thought about William Tell ah throwing the arrow and hitting the apple course you're from Switzerland so William Tell Overture was written on Lake Lucerne so of course you're thinking of the apple. I've had people they describe they describe a green apple or they saw a red Macintosh apple or a Fuji apple. Some people say I thought of an apple computer or I thought of an apple iPhone but I have I've done this with tens of thousands of people Santi I've never once had a person in an audience say I thought of a PPL E they don't think of the word. We don't think in words, we think in pictures. And so when you're a story, when you're creating a presentation that's effective, you have to create pictures in people's heads. Paul Harvey style storytelling. What is it and how does it change the way people listen and learn from you? So when I was a middle school teacher, I was the only teacher in my school that none of my students were ever tardy because I always started off by reading aloud to them a Paul Harvey story. When I was growing up as a kid, there was a guy on the radio named Paul Harvey who every day would come on at 12, 15 and say, I'm Paul Harvey with the rest of the story. And for five minutes, he'd tell you a story about a person or a company and you're trying to guess who's he talking about. And my students, always loved trying to figure out who he was talking about. But the problem with Paul Harvey was a lot of his stories were about like Fred Astaire and Sears Roebuck. And kids today don't even know what those things are. And so I wrote this book, Leadership Begins with Motivation, as an homage to Paul Harvey uh with more updated stories about people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. But it was interesting, Santi, after I wrote the book, I read it and completely unintentionally I realized a lot of my examples are of white male Americans. And so the last book I wrote is called Misfits and Crackpots. And the stories in this book are primarily of women, minorities and international people, because there's all kinds of great stories from all around the world that people have to be exposed to. And so when I'm putting together presentations, I'm usually... working with clients on their personal stories. But every now and then I work with a difficult person says, I have no personal stories. Nothing's ever happened to me, which is completely a lie, but I'll accept it. ah And I always point out to them, if you look at one of the most popular personal development books of all time, it's Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, in which he shares no personal stories. What he did is he interviewed millionaires and shares their stories. So ah that's the strength of Paul Harvey is, Well, maybe I don't have a story that's happened to me, but I can tell you a story. And I like to find stories that people don't know about. I hear a lot of stories that are regurgitated all the time. uh I actually used to belong to this secret speaker society. And our inside joke is, have you told the starfish story? Because I hear that story all the time where the kid's putting starfish back into the ocean and the person says, There's thousands of starfish. You're not doing any good. And he says, well, it makes a difference for this starfish. I've heard that story a million times. I'm sick of hearing that story. I like stories that are unique, that people have never heard. So, that's, that's the impact of the Paul Harvey stories. Uh, he, I was just reading a, Paul Harvey story to a, a school in New York city and a lot of people don't know New York city was called New Amsterdam. ah because the Dutch settled there first. Well, back in 1664, the British were trying to take over the entire eastern seaboard, and so they invaded New Amsterdam, and the Dutch surrendered without firing a shot. And so the British started making fun of the Dutch, and pretty soon everything negative in society in America became Dutch. And some of those expressions have lasted over 350 years. So for example, when you say you're going Dutch on a date, it means you're both paying. I'll be a Dutch man's uncle is not a nice thing to say to a person. A Dutch wife meant she was a prostitute. Dutch courage meant you were drunk. But there's one thing the British used to say to the Dutch which infuriated them. You know how every ethnic group has a type of food we like to associate with that ethnic group? Well, the Dutch really like cheese. And so the British started going around calling the Dutch John Cheese. And this infuriated the Dutch so much they started calling the British John Cheese. in Dutch, Yonkies, you know, Yankees. And that is the rest of the story. The kids were like, great. ah I'll give you one. Can I give you one from my leadership book? Here, I'll give you, this is an updated one. This is how I get kids excited about reading. So, on the morning of January 17th, 1977, Gary Gilmore in a plain t-shirt strapped into a chair with a bag over his head, awaited a firing squad of five law enforcement officers to execute him. the state prison in Draper, Utah. Convicted of murdering a gas station employee and motel manager in Utah the year before, Gilmore would be the first person in the United States to be executed in nearly a decade. Shortly before his execution, prison officials asked Gilmore if he had any last words. Neither he nor anyone else that day would know the impact of those words. Over 10 years later in 1988, Dan Wyden, An advertising executive who co-founded the Wyden and Kennedy Agency in Portland, Oregon, made something of a morbid pitch to a struggling fashion company. He recalled the inmates' final words and used a slight variation for his pitch, and seemingly everyone hated his idea for the company's new slogan. Trust me on this one, Wyden implored the company's co-founder, and the co-founder, his company, and the public. had not looked back since. The co-founder's name was Phil Knight. The struggling brand he co-founded was a shoe company called Nike. And advertising executive Dan Wyden slightly altered Death Row inmate Gary Gilmore's final words, let's do it, into the phrase, just do it. So that's how I get kids excited about reading. This is how you use stories to compel people. uh But again, you have to be very intentional about the stories you're telling. They have to... lead to your call of action. What is the biggest myth about being a great speaker? The greatest myth about being a great speaker is that you have to be a great speaker. Some of my favorite speakers, uh Lou Holtz was a football coach. He has a lisp and he speaks with a pronounced lisp. I'm working with a woman right now. She suffered a stroke and she speaks very slowly and she was very self-conscious about presenting to audiences. She probably is one of the most powerful speakers uh you'll see out there. People always connect with her. They think she's so brave. uh You know, I was uh speaking to a school in India in 2018 and after I pumped up all the kids and kids are coming up to me afterwards, they're all excited. And then I look at one little boy and he has tears in his eyes. He's about six years old and I notice he's missing his left arm and he looks up at me and he says, how can I succeed? And so I crouched down, I get to his eye level, I say, you know, when I was your age, I went to 18 different schools before I was 12. Everybody called me. stupid because I stuttered. And eventually I went to a school where a teacher worked one-on-one with me and she would sing things to me and I found I could sing without my stutter, kind of like the movie, The King's Speech. And eventually I lost my stutter and I became a swan. But I looked into that boy's eyes and I'm like, isn't it interesting that the little boy that everybody used to make fun of and call stupid because he couldn't speak right now gets paid a lot of money to travel the world to do what? And he gets the biggest grin on his face. He's like, speak. I'm like, don't let anybody ever tell you what you cannot do. So I think to answer your question directly, Santi, the biggest myth out there about speaking is that you have to be a polished speaker. You have to uh make sure that you're speaking in complete sentences. That's complete rubbish. You have to connect with audiences and the way you connect is by being who you are. That's what I love about your podcast. Santi, you're an enthusiastic, positive person. You are bringing your best self every single day. and uh people need authenticity in the world now, now more than ever. Danny, you have worked with thousands of speakers. m What do the best of them have in common? Regardless their style, what is the trait that makes speakers good speakers? Well, the speakers, I'm a little bit different than a lot of coaches out there. Coach Jimmy and I, when we started working together, we worked with probably the biggest company in the world to train executives. And this company would get us 50 executives in a room. Each executive would pay $25,000 to be with us for two days so we could create their presentation for them. And Jimmy and I thought there was three major problems with that. First of all, these executives came from very diverse backgrounds. Some were with pharmaceutical companies, some financial services, uh some with real estate. They were very diverse fields, so we couldn't give them the individualized attention that they needed. Secondly, I don't think you master anything in two days. And these people, put together their presentations, but then they'd contact us three months later and say they're not converting. And so Jimmy and I would say, well, send us video. And it was very evident to us immediately. We're like, well, you didn't put this here. You need to put it here. And this story works better here. And you completely forgot about this. And just making a couple of tweaks, Coach Jimmy calls himself a story chiropractor. It's exactly right. We're just making a few tweaks. Those few tweaks can... greatly impact your conversion rate. But the biggest thing for me, Santi, is I see a lot of people coaching people. If you really want to connect with audiences, you have to talk about the most traumatizing moment of your life. And there's three reasons why I refuse to do that. First of all, the world just survived the global pandemic. Everybody's had a lot of bad things happen to them. I don't think we need more sad stories. I think we need more stories that lift people up. Secondly, What Coach Jimmy and I are teaching you to do is to create your well-crafted story. Politicians would call this a stump speech. Superhero movies, they call it your origin story. You can call it peanut butter and jelly. It doesn't matter what you call it. This is a presentation that you're going to deliver again and again to introduce yourself to new audiences, whether it's one to many, one to fewer, or even one to one, that people are going to become intrigued with you and want to figure out how they could work further with you. Do you really want to talk about the worst moment of your life again and again? I mean, I have a friend, his daughter was killed in a school shooting. He's told that story over a thousand times. You have to be a lot stronger than me to talk about the worst day of your life and relive it again and again. I could never do that. And third, and this is where people get angry with me, I have one objective when I'm on stage. I want people to leave feeling better when they came in. I want them smiling, laughing, happy. I think there's something admirable about that as a goal. I believe that people that tell the same sad story again and again, by the 20th time they're telling it, now those are crocodile tears and now they're being manipulative. And I'm not saying it's not an effective sales strategy, it's actually a very effective sales strategy. But I personally don't want to have to take a shower after I get off stage because I just manipulated my audience. There are ethical ways to get people to want to do business with you. And so my personal belief to address your question directly is the best speakers always inspire. They always make you leave feeling like, wow, I can do this. I can do anything. To me, that's what an effective speech should do is, I mean, this goes to my background as a teacher though. I used to always tell my students that every day. I'd say, you know, sometimes you need somebody else to believe in you before you believe in yourself. I believe in all of you that would give me the best and the brightest. So let's go out and make this world a better place. Cause to me, uh a good presentation should make the world a better place. Danny, what do you tell to people that tells you, well, Danny, that's great when you're in a conference or a motivational gig ah and you go and tell stories, but um that doesn't work on business settings when it's high stakes and you need to take decisions. Yeah, that's not accurate at all, Stante at all. mean, work with, Jimmy and I were just working with a firm in Silicon Valley last week where they were perfecting a pitch to get venture capitalists. uh We worked with a gentleman who couldn't raise any funding and what we did with his presentation, so he was trying to get funding for, so just so you know, I never discuss the names of the people or the companies I work with. Coach Jimmy on the other hand, loves to tell everybody who I believe a little bit of discretion, but we were working with uh a gentleman a few years, about 18 months ago, where he was trying to get venture capital for his technology firm. It's a fantastic firm and his presentation was wonderful, but he was over teaching. He insisted on teaching the 12 things about his technology that were going to be changing the world. It just overwhelmed people. and he was talking in very technical terms. And so what we did to his presentation was we changed it from his technical jargon to just storytelling. uh within three months, he went from not getting a dime to he had raised over uh $12 million in venture capital. And that's great. But the comment that people kept on telling him that he insisted on telling Jimmy and me, said, what you guys taught me worked because people are saying, I've never heard a technical presentation explained in a way that I understood. And that's what we're trying to do is how do you get people to understand what your vision is and want to be part of that vision. And so the format that we're teaching people, this can work in front of a ballroom, can work in front of a boardroom, it can work in front of courtrooms, classrooms, heck one of our, One of our clients, used it in a restroom. did a 30 second pitch at the urinal. Hopefully he washed his hands afterwards. uh But you need to get the reps in. I always tell people there's two ways you get better at speaking because most of the people we work with, are terrified of speaking or they don't want to speak at all. But we believe that speaking is the fastest way to grow your business. And the two ways you get better at speaking are, first of all, you got to watch lots of speakers. I mean, I watch 10 speakers a day. I watch politicians. I watch comedians. I watch televangelists. I watch them. in front of big groups, in front of small groups, in front of men, in front of women. I'll give your audience a ninja strategy. I watch a lot of televised award shows because when the person wins the Academy Award, they only have 45 seconds to connect with their audience. I want to see how they use their time. Now, most people waste their time. They get up there, like, I want to thank God. I want to thank the Academy. It's stupid. Nobody's paying attention. But every now and then, a person does an excellent job. So a few years ago, There was a gentleman by the name of Joe Walker who won the Academy Award for best film editing. Now, this is the Academy Awards. The important people of Hollywood are in the front of the room, the actors. And you can tell the actors, none of them are paying attention. This is film editing. And Joe Walker gets on stage and he's British. He speaks very slowly and distinctly. He says, a lot of people don't know this, but when phrased properly, the term Academy Award nominee can be used as an insult. Well, now the camera's scanning the audience. You see everybody kind of leaning in like, what's he talking about? He says, for example, yesterday I got in an argument with my 17-year-old daughter and she said, well, Academy Award nominee, Jared Walker. All of a sudden you see everybody laughing hysterically. Denzel, he gets off stage, Denzel Washington wants to meet him, Sondra Bullock wants to meet him, Brad Pitt wants to meet him. Time Magazine said it was one of the highlights of the Academy Awards. That's the power of connecting in 45 seconds. So the first way you get better at speaking is by watching lots of speakers. The second way, I've been blessed to have lots of wonderful coaches and mentors throughout my life and one of them was a gentleman by the name of Jim Rohn. And Jim used to say, you can't pay other people to do your pushups. Translation, you gotta do the work. We need to get you so comfortable presenting that it's, it's second nature. So you need to start speaking to service clubs like Lions Clubs, Optimist Clubs, uh Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club. Speak to schools, speak to churches, synagogues, temples, speak to chambers of commerce. I had a client three years ago, Jason, 22 years old. He was a negative Nelly. I don't know anybody. I can't get on stages. Wee, wee, wee. I can't stand people like that. I said, okay, Jason, do you have a Facebook account? He's like, yeah. I'm like, all right. We're going on Facebook Live right now. He's like, what? We're going on Facebook Live. We just put together your talk. Let's try it out. So he does his 45 minute presentation on Facebook Live. One woman from Ontario, Canada, accidentally watched him. And guess what, Santi? He sucked. And I said, do it again next day. I didn't watch him the next day, but he said three people watched him. And I'm sure he sucked, but he didn't suck as bad as he did the first day. Well, here's the reason I share this story. Jason has gone on Facebook Live every single day for the last three years, including Christmas. He now has 6,000 people in his Facebook community. Last year, he sold them almost a million dollars worth of products. And he's all excited about that, which is fine and good. But the reason I use him as an example is I'm so proud of him. He did the work. He's done it consistently. And he's gone from somebody who was terrified of speaking, who didn't think he was a good speaker, to now... He can recite it like the Lord's Prayer, his presentation. It's second nature to him. And this is the way you beat stage fright. I mean, the way we work with lots of people with stage fright and the way you get over it is you practice. You practice, you practice. I mean, when I was in college, I once had to take a final exam and as I walked into the class, I looked at the professor, I said, I hadn't studied. I said, I sure hope I do all right. And he looked at me and he said, Danny, the time to place your bet is before the wheel is spinning. He's absolutely right. I should have prepared. That's why I was nervous. People are nervous because they're not prepared. Another little strategy for people is just find the one smiling person in the audience and speak to that person. And this is why I actually love it when people are giving presentations to boardrooms because, you know, typically, you know, there's no more than a dozen people in a boardroom or maybe it's even one on one. One thing your audience can do is watch Shark Tank, the TV show Shark Tank. That's a great way. to learn how to practice pitches is all these people are presenting their ideas to five billionaires and uh just watch what are the billionaires, what's resonating with the billionaires, what was it that got them to smile. Here's another ninja strategy for your audience. When you do speak, stop filming yourself, just film your audience. The audience is gonna tell you all the information you need. If you see them leaning in, you're connecting. If they're on their phones, you're not connecting. We have to change something. So again, that's a very long answer to your short questions. You often talk about the link between reading and communication. How does reading shape the way we speak? Well, I think that reading, you know, the reason I read is I collect stories. Some people collect trading cards, some people collect stamps, I collect stories. And I'll read an entire book in the entire book consent, but if there's one story that's meaningful to me, it was worth the read. uh I think these are treasures because I'm always looking for stories. I just was reading a marketing book and the entire book was really boring. except for one story where he was traveling the world looking for the next great marketing idea and he was in Chile. He's watching these fishermen fish and he notices that they're catching a fish and they're putting it in one bucket but there's this other type of fish they're putting in another bucket and they're eating that fish. And he says, are you eating that fish because you're getting paid to catch the other fish? And they say, well, yeah, but also this fish that we're not getting paid for actually tastes better than the other fish. He says, well, may I try it? And they say, sure. So he tries it. He's like, my gosh, this is like the best fish I've ever tasted. What's it called? And they said, bonefish. He's like, bonefish? That's the worst name I've ever heard in my life. And he thinks about it and he introduces it to the United States and it's now the number one selling fish at fancy restaurants throughout the United States. He renamed the bonefish, the Chilean sea bass. It just showed me, I thought that was a great story. Here, I'll give you your audience, uh here's a good, this is the first thing I usually do with clients, is I want you later on, get a pen and paper, sit in a comfortable chair, libation of choice beside you, and for an hour I just want you to write down every story that's ever happened to you. And I don't mean the entire story, I just mean triggers, like the time I locked myself out of the car in front of the grocery store. The time dad spilled mustard on his tie at that fancy restaurant. You'll find in an hour, you can come up with literally hundreds of stories like this. So that's the very first part of the exercise. The second part of the exercise is then I want you to think about, well, what's this story really about? this is a story about never giving up. this is a story of building and maintaining trust. this is a story of being accountable. If you go onto my computer, have hundreds of files with thousands, if not tens of thousands of stories like this. So when I'm putting together a presentation for a specific audience, I have different stories that I can use to tackle the emotions that I want my audience to have. I'm very intentional when I craft presentations. This is the mistake a lot of people make. They just, they over teach or they tell stories that are funny, but they aren't relevant to what they're trying to. ask the audience to do. You have to be very intentional. It's a formula. mean, I don't know how to cook very well, but I mean, I'm sure if you gave me a recipe on how to make chocolate chip cookies and I followed the recipe, I am sure that I could bake a decent batch of chocolate chip cookies. And the second time I make them, they'd be even better. The third, they'd be even better. It's the same thing with speaking. Coach Jimmy and I, again, former teacher, we take people through our five Cs process. So the five Cs are, Before you write any of your speech, first of all, you have to have clarity. You have to ask yourself two questions. Who is my audience? And what is the problem that I solve? And once you can answer both of those questions succinctly, then we can get into your presentation, which is to connect with your audience, teach meaningful content that serves your audience, have one clear call to action, and finally end with an emotional close that gets people running to work with Danny, let's give some advice to people that need to speak in a language that they were not born with. Many of us, including myself, I'm not a native English speaker, and we suffer from a sort of imposter syndrome, nervousness, what if I don't say the right words? What is your advice? uh for people that is speaking in a foreign language to them. I love that question, Santi. That is a great question. I commend you on that question. And so this is why I watch lots of speakers. And so the strategy I would share with your audience is watch comedians. Comedians are brilliant at this. What they do is they take a perceived weakness and they turn it into their strength. So for example, Kevin Hart is a short black guy. And so what does he do? He makes a lot of jokes about being a short black guy. Jim Gaffigan is a big fat white guy. So what does he do? He makes a lot of jokes about being a big fat white guy ah We were working with some engineers uh recently and uh one of the engineers he's he's uh Up for promotion and he's trying to connect with his bosses. And so he he he said done it. He's from India He's like Danny, please please Please make me funny, make me interesting to these people. And so we put together his presentation. so he has a very difficult name to pronounce. And I'm not gonna tell you his real name. And so this is what I did to change his presentation to his promotion committee. So now he starts off, he says, hello, my name is Shubhanakar Majahadeen. Gee, I sure hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. And what it did, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It got all of the people on the board just laughing and saying, oh, this is a good guy that I wanna work with. So the teaching point for your audience, and I commend anybody that's trying to present in another language. When I was in India, I was supposed to just be touring schools, and the very first school I went to, a principal opens up a door, there's 5,000 kids in an auditorium. There's 20 newspapers, five TV stations, and the principal introduces me, he's like, and now for the next hour, Dr. Broussel is going to teach you the three secrets to reading better. Santi, nobody's told me I'm speaking, and I have no such speech, but I got 5,000 kids, I got media there, I got 60 minutes, so I look at the kids, and fortunately, English is their second language, so I got to speak slower. So I looked at the kids, I'm like, Today, I am going to teach you the three secrets to reading better. Who wants to learn the three secrets to reading better? And the kids are going wild. And in my head, I'm thinking, what the heck are the three secrets to reading better? And using the exact same 5C structure that I train clients on using. I put together a speech in 30 seconds, which was broadcast to 1.5 billion people that evening. And now I have a company based on that speech. I slowed it down. I didn't take myself seriously. We had a lot of fun. ah Anytime I made a mistake, this is something a lot of people don't realize. When you make a mistake, most of the time you're the only person that knows you made the mistake. So don't acknowledge the mistake. Your audience probably didn't even pick up on it. I actually once gave a presentation and I forgot to include an entire 10 minute segment in the presentation and they acted like no big deal. They didn't even know that I had gone over it. I had completely skipped over it. And so the other thing, this is to encourage your audience on this, audiences are a lot cooler than you would think, Santi. They actually want you to succeed. because there's nothing more uncomfortable than watching a speaker bomb. And they always appreciate it. To me, the greatest compliment you can ever show anybody is to try and speak their language. I mean, it annoys me that foreign leaders come to the United States and always speak English. And yet I've yet to see an American president go abroad and try and speak another language. I think it's a, of course you're make some mistakes and people are gonna snicker. But there's no greater sign of respect than to try and communicate in another person's language. We'll snicker at accents and things like that, but no, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Santi, you speak better than half the people born in the United States. I mean, your English is superior. And again, it's this imposter syndrome. A lot of people, don't give themselves the credit and you have to give yourself grace. mean, I used to teach English as a second language to engineering students at the University of Southern California. And one of my jobs was to to interview every single student to see what their degree of English proficiency was. And so I'd get some engineer from like India, I'd be like, well, what's your major? He's like, I have come here to study rocket science because I'm going to become a rocket, a nuclear engineer. know, their English is fine. I mean, often they were self-conscious of their accent. And I always pointed out to them, like, well, the former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had a pretty thick accent. and he did pretty well for himself. I think accents add flavor to a language. And then I'd get people, I'd get an engineering student from Taiwan, I'm like, what's your major? Yes? Great, what kind of car do you drive? Yes, okay, we're gonna put you in English to get some support. First, we need a little bit more support, but most people, again, I'm going on here, but I would really love to encourage any of those people that feel self-conscious, including yourself, Your audience is actually supporting you. They want to root for you. And the easiest way I know to connect with that audience is to point it out. Like when I'm working with a person with a lot of stage fright, I say, well, let's point it out at the beginning of your speech. I'm nervous as can be, as I can be to be up here. I don't get speeches. What you're gonna see is there's always gonna be some, hey, you can do it. You can do it. People are encouraging. They're not as big a jerks as you think. Danny, we have this section in the podcast called rapid fire questions, where we do five questions in 30 seconds or less. But I want to change it a little bit. I want to challenge you. It's going to be five questions where you need to answer with a story in one minute or less. Are you game? I'm ready. Let's go with the first one. The most important skill for a new speaker. The most important skill for a new speaker. um So when I was a first grade teacher, the silliest thing that I ever told a group of kids, said, write about your lives. And they looked at me like I was from outer space. They're like, we're six, nothing's ever happened. I said, no, man, things happen to you all the time. mean, when I was six years old in first grade, I had a teacher, she called me stupid and smacked me on the hand in front of the class, got me to cry. And the next day I was walking to school, I had an apple and I peed on the apple and I gave her the apple and she ate the apple and said it was the best apple she had ever had. My first grader was like, that is awesome. This is also the reason I've never accepted food from a child. But the point is, I knew that if I wanted my students to give me stories, I had to give them stories. And so oh for the new speakers out there, you need to develop a whole portfolio of stories to tell. Number two, what's one word that ruins a presentation? that drains a presentation. rings, rings, and destroys our presentation. that destroyed, uh so this isn't political, whenever I give politicians as examples, it's just to show the speaking style. But this summer at the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton, I thought, had a funny line. He said, I think Donald Trump thinks he's an opera singer. He's always me, me, me, me, me, me. And so the word that drains most speakers is they're talking about them. You know, the only place where I should come before you is in the alphabet. You should always put your audience's needs before your own ego. Number three, virtual talks or live audiences. Which challenges you more? Obviously it's going to be virtual because virtual I don't get to see some people don't have their cameras on and and I don't get to really have that live interaction. mean actors would say the same thing why they enjoy performing uh plays on Broadway as opposed to movies is they don't have that live reaction. I use a lot of jokes and so it's very important for me to see well what what jokes are landing with people and I can't do that as well with virtual as I can. with live audiences. The benefit though of virtual is just like you and I are doing today is you're in Switzerland, I'm in the United States, that's beautiful. The world just got a whole lot smaller and virtual is very powerful because of Number four, one thing every speaker should stop doing immediately. One thing every speaker should stop doing is pacing like they're waiting for their wife to give birth. Aimless pacing drives me nuts on stages. You should use your stage intentionally and you'll start to know, I'm gonna give you a ninja strategy right now, is the best presentations, they start off, the person speaks over here about the pain that they had and then they go over here and they talk about, then, I went on Santi's podcast and got all kinds of tips and now I'm speaking faster over here and because of Santi, I have the confidence to be a better speaker and I'm really enjoying everything. And the best speakers, when they give their offer, which side of the audience, which side of the stage are they gonna give their offer from? They're gonna give it over here because subliminally the mind has already associated, positive things happen on this side of the stage. So stop pacing and have very intentional movement on stage. You hit me with this one, Denny. I do this all the time. I think I work more on a public speaking gig than in a golf game, to be fair with you. Number five, the best sentence to start a story or a presentation. Once upon a time, it's worked for a long time. oh worst? The worst? Let me tell you a story. Just tell the dang story. I call it the lethal weapon because if you ever watch the lethal weapon movies, uh all of a sudden you're all of sudden in a car chase and immediately you're wondering what's going on. And that's what a good story should be doing is you want people leaning in like what's going on. Whereas if you just say, um I'm going to tell you the story of my life. Yeah. want to hear that. Just get us into the room. Get us into the moment that you're trying to put us in. Denny, let's wrap this up and let's give some sound advice for our listeners and particularly those that are saying, I'm not a speaker, I cannot do it, I cannot speak in public. What's the mindset shift can help them at least start or continue the journey? Yeah, I've worked with some very famous speakers and actors and politicians, but most of the people that Jimmy and I work with are people like you and me. They're just entrepreneurs. A lot of them don't want to speak or they're terrified of speaking. And the first thing I say is speaking is a skill. It's something that can be trained and it's just practice. mean, my youngest daughter right now, she's learning how to drive. And when I get in the car with her, she's so cute because she adjusts all of her mirrors and she puts her hands on the steering wheel at 10 o'clock and two o'clock position. I guarantee you, Santi, a year from now, she'll be driving with one hand, fixing the radio, eating a Big Mac, putting on her makeup, because it'll be something that is automatic to her because she's practiced it again and again. The same is true with speaking. Danny, can people or listeners access your, you have something called the free storytelling blueprint. Yes, yes. wanted as a thank you to you, Santi and your audience for having to bear with me with my stories. I wanted to show you how to create your own well-crafted story. So if you go to freestoryguide.com, guide like a tour guide, freestoryguide.com, I'll give you your own well-crafted story blueprint. What this is, is the actual process that Coach Jimmy and I take our clients through to create your well-crafted story. What this does for you is it takes the guesswork out of... Where do I put this story and why do I put it here? And what this means for you is you now have a system that's gonna get you endless clients and endless referrals. You can get that at freestoryguide.com. And I just wanna thank you, Santi, for having me today. You're just wonderful and I really appreciate you, my friend. Thank you so much, Denny. I also want to thank you for uh this conversation packed with very interesting stories. And I'm taking a couple of things away. The first one is that practice makes perfect. And exactly as I learned how to code, I can learn how to tell stories too. So, Denny, wanna thank you so much again for being with us today and we're looking forward to continue listening to your stories, reading your books and learning from you. Thank you. Thank you, Santi. God bless.