Episode# 030: The Power of Story to Transform Your Business with Kindra Hall

Get ready, because in this episode we have a special guest on the show that is literally going to change the way you do business AND how you do YOU.

Do you ever feel like you don’t have a compelling story? Or that you don’t know how to craft it in a way that delivers? We have THE expert on how to capture attention, close sales, increase influence through the art of strategic storytelling

Kindra Hall is President and Chief Storytelling Officer at Steller Collective, a consulting firm focused on the strategic application of storytelling.

She’s one of the most sought after keynote speakers trusted by global brands to deliver presentations and training that inspire teams and individuals to better communicate the value of their company, their products, and their individuality through strategic storytelling. In other words, she teaches the big kahunas how to use their story to sell!

She’s also a mom, wife, and wildly funny speaker that I personally adore and have already learned so much from!

Kindra, can you talk to us about how the spark for storytelling started for you?

The first stop where I told my first story was it was an assignment for fifth grade. We choose a children's book and then go read it to a third-grade classroom. So, I chose the book, The Giant’s Big Toe, an American classic. I remember walking into the third-grade classroom and the girl before me who read her book, who's in my class, she read the book, Love You Forever.

She sat there and read that whole long sing song book to these third graders. And they were just going out of their minds. They're bouncing off the walls and it's my turn. Then of course, it's right before the buses come and I decided just to put my book down and just tell the story. It had to have been within the first two or three sentences. All the kids were silent. They were hanging on every word. I could feel it. I had a lot of power in that moment and I really liked it. It was awesome.

The rest of that fifth-grade year (it was at the end of the year, so there wasn't a whole lot of time) I went to every other classroom in the school and told the story of The Giant’s Big Toe. So that's really when it started. My mom saw me tell the story because I practiced it with her. And she knew too that maybe there was something, she's like, I've just never seen anything quite like that. You know, when you watch your kids do something and you're like, wait a minute, is that, is that special?

It was definitely something my mother wanted to encourage and I really appreciate that because I know as a mother and I'm sure it only gets more difficult as my kids get older to walk that fine line between encouraging something and like shoving it down their throat. And my mom did a really good job of that. And so what she did, it was that summer, we went to the library and we checked out all of these cassette tapes of books on tape. This is before podcasts or anything, where it was recordings from storytellers. So there was Storytelling Live at the national storytelling festival, which is this big festival that happens in Tennessee every year. And that's the one that I remember like my brother was in the backseat of the minivan.

My sister and my brother were in the back. My sister always fell asleep on car rides. I would always read. My mom was trying to read, but my dad was listening to the Minnesota twins play baseball and it was either the Twins or the Vikings and my mom would be complaining because the radio was too loud. And then all of a sudden from the back seat, I just hear my brother and my younger brother laughing out loud, all of a sudden, like busting out and he was listening to one of these cassette tapes of these storytellers and we hadn't heard it yet.

And so finally, I was kind of annoyed with him because I was always kind of annoyed with my younger siblings. But we took the tape out of his Walkman and put it in the van so we could all listen to it.

And you know, everyone in the family has different agendas. Right? And we turned on that cassette tape and all of us, my sister woke up and my dad turned off the twins and we were all laughing and thinking and experiencing the story together. And that was just another one of those moments where I thought, WOW, even though we're so different, we're all really enjoying this experience. That's really when there was a series of other events that over time, I'm like the storytelling, you just keep feeling the power and getting the sense that maybe you're the one to share that power with the world.

Is the gift of storytelling something people are born with? Is it something people have or don’t? OR Is it a learned skill?

I think it's probably a little bit of both. When you see me on stage, I've been doing this for decades now, right? This is what I do and I've put in the time. I've put in the rep, I've put in the 10,000 hours, so it can look that way. So let's just put that out there. Set that to the side though. And I really do think that, there is also a science to a story.

Part of the reason that you are so captivated (that anybody is so captivated) is because of the components that you can include in the story. This is something I discuss in the book.

There's four major components to include in a story.

ONE

One is to have identifiable characters. In that story that I just told you right there about the cassette tape, you could sense a dad, right? A father. And now the thing is he probably maybe looks like a father figure in your life and then you could sense the mom up in the front seat- you could picture the story because I told you about the people in the story, which makes the story more real. And then of course I said it in a very specific moment, a place and a time and even building out the details on that Astro star minivan.

TWO

It needs to happen in a specific moment.

THREE

There needs to be authentic emotion. I wouldn't say that this story is entirely emotional, but the emotion that I'm sure you could sense was a annoyance. Right? It isn't like the emotion of extreme sadness or elation or tragedy. It's just being annoyed with your siblings, which is a real something that people can connect to.

FOUR

And then the last one of course is, specific details. The color of the Astro star minivan or even the part about, I'll Love You for Always.

How kindra got started as a story teller

There’s a graphic that shows a point A and point B and the caption says ‘what we think success looks like’ and it's a straight line. And then it says ‘what success actually looks like’ and it's looped around and up and down and all jagged.

Somebody once asked me about my book. They asked- how do you know if a book is going to make money? And I'm like, you don't until it starts making money. So that's one of the things that you have to take those risks and you have to go for it.

I worked in sales and marketing through the recession (which was awesome), but even still when people were connecting to the product, when they were connecting to the values we were trying to communicate, when, when it was working was when I continuously pulled our messaging back to stories.

But I went in and told my boss that I was leaving and then I found out like a week later that I was pregnant. So I didn't know as I just kind of like left a job to become a stay at home mom because I didn’t really know what my business would be. But I kept trying different things and so I would use stories for, to help a local nonprofits. I was using stories to help a few business owners hone their message and differentiate themselves. And these are just friends of mine. I wrote stories for people's weddings, for their wedding vows. And I would interview the bride separately and I would interview the groom separately and then we would write their whole story and we'd take me days upon days upon days and I charged $100. I was just trying to figure it out.

I had this thing that I knew I was good at, but I just didn't know. I didn't know exactly. So I just kind of kept trying things. It was hard because when I decided to, I decided to leave that job I was cutting our family's income in half. And so my husband and I really did, we sat down and we went through every single family finance. We sold my car, we went through weeks unsubscribed from Netflix, which at the time was still a service that just delivered DVDs. I still didn't really know what it was, but I kept trying things. And then the paths started to become clear. And I think that's a really important thing as you're thinking about this and you feel like this is the right direction.

Keep following that feeling and then keep an eye out for affirmations and confirmations of which direction you should go. So I was actually doing some work for a thought leader and helping him with his stories and honing his stories. And he said to me, if you can teach people how to do what you just taught me, there's something there. And it was kind of a passing comments, it wasn't like, I am now going to give you the greatest career advise of your entire life. He was just like, gosh, you should figure out how to teach this. But that's, that's really where it started.

My first thought was- I should develop an online training program about how to tell your story. And I did. And I spent so much time like in between naps, right? Because I was still a stay at home mom, so I put the kids to bed and I would let go and I would write. And then we brought in, we got a camera to videotape it and we turned the nursery into film studio.