Mark Sanborn
Best-selling author of The Fred Factor
What’s the story?
- How to be the one?
- Speakers are using stories
- If you understand someone’s personal story you can better understand their professional success or lack there of.
- What is your story? Drama, thriller, etc
How does working for you affect your team member’s story?
- Are they a better person because of their relationship with you?
- People are tired of hype, it is not enough to tell a good story, there has to be substance behind the hype.
Leaders don’t tell a better story, they make a story better!
- We want leaders who help us make our stories better.
- Do we treat people as if they are a WIP or WAC.
- WAC=Work Already Complete.
- WIP=Work in Progress.
- Need to recognize the potential of people, don’t act if they can’t grow and improve. You are there to help improve their story.
- It is always a challenge not to become cynic.
- How can we be story shapers?
Story permeates every aspect of leadership
Level#1 Stuck
- They may need a nudge.
- This comes in form of hope.
- They have resigned themselves to think that they can’t progress beyond where they are.
Remedies:
A) Resell them on themselves, on their own value.
B) Re-Narrate their story.
C) Re-Energize them, get them started again, reinvigorate them.
- Hope=having something new for them to try and also for them to be willing to try it.
Level#2 Struggle
- Got to get people to struggle.
- Heroism is not possible without a struggle.
Provide encouragement
A) Nobody is exempt from struggle.
B) Refocus from present struggles to future hopes.
C) Redefine failure.
- Failure is something that happens to you, not something that defines who you are.
- With no resistance no hope of success.
Level#3 Shaped
You must learn or languish, no matter how bad the circumstances.
- Look for lesson.
- Look for destination.
- Look at the affect your story has on others, it always impacts others, it always intersects with others.
Be shapers of stories
- Positively shape the stories of others.
- Catch the other person’s story.
- It takes slowing down so you can catch other people’s stories.
- When you hear the story you must respond to it.
- It takes unconditional acceptance of their story.
- When we reject a person’s story we reject them.
Ask Questions:
1) What is your greatest hope?
2) What is your greatest fear?
3) What would you most like to learn?
- Feel—listen with your heart.
I believe a cynic is a passionate person who does not want to risk being hurt or disappointed again.
- Tell your story.
- Here is where you find the connectivity, focus on how their story can be better as a result of hearing your story, how can you add value to them.
- Need to be a fellow conqueror together with them.
- Need to connect how your stories can blend together to make their story better.
- Tony Dungy stated earlier, ” that my story is about the many people who have poured themselves into my life”.
- Whose life are you investing in?
- Who are you pouring yourself into?
- It is people, ideas and experiences that shape our lives.
- People are primary.
- People are where our ideas and experiences come from.
- Might that our stories might be generous stories.
- Be a generous story, a giver.
- Be ye openers of doors.
Be shapers of other people’s stories.
Be the one who makes the stories of others even better.