What is Next for Your 2020 Storytelling Strategy?

Your 2020 storytelling strategy offers three choices.

Either you choose to:

• Play it safe. Tell a complacent, risk-free story. And continue to provide products and services which have sold in the past, using your original skill sets and tool kits, doing things exactly the way you originally learned to do them: Yesterday; or
• Make a trendy shift. And tell stories which shift as your strategy shifts. Abandoning whatever last year’s short-term strategy and goals were. And, applying your original skillset and tool kits to the latest, flavor of the month trends that may shapeshift. Trying to appeal to fluctuating markets and clients who are not solidly invested in the value you (or anyone else) bring to their trending tables; or
• Become Continuously Uncomfortable. Boldly telling stories which become your clients’ True North in a Sea of Change. Because Today’s and Tomorrow’s Internet of Things business environments generate stories about Change. What differentiates you from everyone else is your comfort, clarity and confidence as you continuously explore uncharted waters: adapting, adopting and applying new ideas, strategies, processes, technologies and designs. Keeping up with, if not always moving three iterations ahead of, continuous IoT change. And, attracting clients co-invested in collaborating with you, to get to where everyone needs to go: Together.

What’s Next for Your 2020 Storytelling Strategy? What is the True North you, yourself, seek?

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg created the storyline for Star Wars® Episodes 4 – 6 in concert with Joseph Campbell, the distinguished American professor of comparative religion, mythology and human experience. Campbell’s chronicle of the Hero’s Journey is best described in his signature quote, which Yoda® tells Luke Skywalker in Episode 6, The Return of the Jedi®.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

What is the unalterable True North of your purpose-driven, professional differentiation? Your core skill sets, values, beliefs, outcomes, experience and stories which you, and only you, can deliver?

The 2020 Storytelling Strategy you seek has always been hard-wired into your professional DNA.

Except you overlook and dismiss your story, because you take it for granted. Or, worse yet, you bury your story because it is associated with workplace toxicity and professional embarrassment.

Take another look at your story, and your storytelling strategy. Where? In that cave you fear to enter, because it indeed does hold the treasure you seek.

When you uncover and embrace the stories only you can tell, those stories are never comfortable and risk free: for you or for others. No matter how many times you tell your story. Regardless of how many times people hear your story. The story is always told the same way.

In this New Year and New Decade, will your stories shapeshift one more time? Or will you, once again, become a comfortable professional couch potato, wearing-washing-rinsing-repeating Yesterday’s same-old stories?

You have heard that voice, sitting on your shoulder, whispering in your ear that it is time to tell your story. The story only you can tell. The story your co-workers, colleagues, stakeholders, partners and clients seek.

Will this be the year you finally enter that cave you fear? And tell the story which is yours, and yours alone, to tell? To catalyze your professional development and employee and client success and retention? I certain hope so.

Let’s storytell. Together.

My One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling programs translate across communication disconnects between people and professional disciplines in today’s challenging Internet of Things workforce environments. Working with you, I create purpose-driven strategic business and human capital value by leveraging storytelling. Let’s catalyze employee and client success and retention. Together.

Find out more about my professional story and speaker profile here. I am a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. My playbook of communication tools and methods, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact me right here here.

Image source: Getty Images