What Storytellers Must Do With The Blocks

You may be the world’s greatest communicator. But you won’t always be understood. You might be a superb wordsmith, and yet unable to convince everyone all the time. Lyrical wordplay might be your jam, and still, you will meet a quizzical look from time to time.

As a speaker, part of my job is influence and persuasion. Admittedly, I’ve had moments where I thought I’d failed because I didn’t persuade every person in the room. My batting average was less than perfect.

Perfection is responsible for more people quitting than anything else. Many people stop performing because they feel like failures the first time they fail. Sometimes, it isn’t a huge failure. It may simply be the inability to convince one person out of ten. Yet, we focus on the 1.

Why do we do this?

I remember offering a workshop and collecting the evaluations afterward. More than 90% of the evaluations said, “This was so amazing. I needed this.”

But, I remember feeling a little sting when I came across one that read, “The instructor was cool but I didn’t really learn anything new.”

WOW! I wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get a great score from this ONE person. The positive reviews made me smile but I paid ATTENTION to the one perceived negative. Isn’t it funny how that works? I’d received…