This week on my Amazon Flash Briefing & Blog, I am sharing ways Your Story Builds Community.

I talk a lot about how your story can help you create community in general — but what does that really mean? How does it really work?

Yesterday, we talked about how important it is to humanize your brand, so others can get a sense of the heartbeat behind your business. 

Today, I want to talk about how using your story can help bridge the gap between you the expert, and your audience.

When you share your story effectively, it allows others to see themselves in you; know they are not alone.

So how do you do this? Start by looking for commonalities and life lessons that nearly all of us face, and then ask yourself how can you share a story from this perspective and connect it back to your business.

Here’s an example for you — and one that most anyone can use.

I was listening to The Moth Podcast yesterday, and someone one shared their story by sharing an...

I’m starting a series this week on this Flash Briefing (and blog!) all around the theme of how Your Story Builds Community. I talk a lot about how your story can help you create community in general — but what does that really mean? How does it really work?

Every day this week, We will dive a little deeper into this.

No matter if you are a business with a tangible product, or a service-based personal brand, it’s important you find ways to share your story with your audience for this reason — it shows you are human. So often, marketing your business can feel sterile and cold, and your potential clients can be turned off by this.

You must find ways to share the heartbeat of your business and brand by showing the humans behind the machine.

In my own business, I use my social media channels to take my audience behind the curtain and show off different aspects of my life — I often will take the time to share bits of my story illustrate the passion for...

I want you to imagine a Mountain-- picture in your head the landscape of this mountain, and imagine what it might look like if you were looking at this mountain from afar. You’d see the base, the peak, and the other side.

The mountain is an image I use in all of my storytelling classes to help people understand their own story, and how to craft their message in a powerful way.

This applies to all great storytelling — for businesses, for people, for analysis of politics — everything.

Here’s how this mountain relates to storytelling.

What makes up a great story is the element of transformation. When people tell stories without this ingredient, the stories fall flat and are very boring. Think of a movie script — can you imagine watching a movie without experiencing the buildup to the climax? It would be a disaster.

For my illustration today, I’m going to use a business as an example — because I think too many businesses overlook the...

The first step of storytelling is knowing your Audience.

Knowing who you are talking to will help inform you on the type of story you share, and the details you need to include.

So many people ask me, “How do I know what’s relevant— which parts of my story should I share?” — and the answer is tied up in “who are you talking to?” — What parts of your story would your audience be interested in? What is relevant to them?

Too many people share their story and quickly get off on a tangent of details that, honestly, nobody really needs to know!  Going off the rails like this makes your story all about you. Remember, your story — and the whole reason you are sharing it — is to make it about your audience.

Knowing who you are talking to will inform you on the types of details you need to share. Asking yourself this simple question: “Does my audience need to know this; Is it relevant to them?"— will help you...

For most of my career, I’ve worked in the world of Visual Storytelling — as a video producer, writer, and creative director. I love using video to supplement the story and help tell it through moving, visual images.

There are all kinds of ways to incorporate Visual storytelling, including art, photos, sketches/illustrations, music, abstract collages, just to name a few. For some people, Journaling is hard — writing their words down on paper is not something that comes easily. I hear often from clients who struggle with the journal prompts I give — so an alternative is to seek a more visual route to tell your stories. So if you are in this same camp — I encourage you to seek visual options expressing your story. Often times, the words come much faster once the visual is in place.

EXERCISE: CREATE A VISUAL STORY

This time of year — the beginning of a New Year — seems to be a popular time to make Vision Boards — and these are a fantastic...

There’s a fun little viral challenge making its way through social media at the moment called the 10 year challenge — where you post your profile picture from 10 years ago and compare it to the one of today. All over the internet, people are posting side by side pictures — some in which there are noticeably drastic changes in appearance, while others look relatively the same. Some people are asking the prolific question, “How well did you age?” This is a golden opportunity to sprinkle some storytelling to your audience by taking it a step further — and instead of focusing on how well you aged, focus on how much your story has changed. This is actually an exercise and story prompt I give a lot of my storytelling students — to look back 10 years ago and write about what their life looked like then, versus what your life likes like now. We often don’t even realize — or give ourselves credit for how much we’ve been able to do...

I want to ask you a question. When was the last time you dreamed big? I mean really big??

We are at the beginning of a brand new year so I imagine many of you have spent some time recently imagining and planning out your year — maybe you’ve set some big goals to accomplish this year, maybe you’ve even created a Vision board to help you bring those dreams to life. What I’m talking about today is BiGGER than what you can imagine for just this year.

I think it’s really important to push our imagination to the farthest limits it will go and really visualize the biggest dreams we can think.

Here is a journal exercise I want to give you today: Write down the biggest version of your dream you can imagine. If money, time, logistics, and knowledge were not a factor — how BIG would you like to dream? What would your life and business look like?

I want to encourage you to go crazy here. Write down the most ludicrous version you can dream up. I did this...

There's a storytelling technique I use often and I'm sharing it today on my Amazon Flash Briefing, What's Your Story.

This is really helpful when you feel uninspired, have writers block, or just simply have no idea what to say on your social media channels.

There’s a Christian study practice called Lectio Divina — and this storytelling technique is borrowed from it. Now don’t worry — this has nothing to do with religion — we are just taking a cue from the Lectio Divina principles and applying them to storytelling.

You start by taking a PHOTO and letting it spark a story lurking within you. Similar to Lectio Divinia — you do this in 4 parts.

The first is to simple Observe — study the photo and allow thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, creative sparks come to you.

The second is to Ask — what does is this picture saying to you? What stories are you hearing in your head?

The third step is to Think — how does is this really relevant?...

Alexa Flash Briefing: Lessons gleaned from my interview with Nyota Gordon, author of "The Unraveling of Captain Gordon"