Ally Fallon 04:50
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me first of all. And I love that you just followed your intuition and paired Marcella and I together because I genuinely, Marcella, I want to just express my gratitude. While you were talking, I was like, how on earth am I going to present after this? Because I’m just in tears and needed to hear that this morning. I’m in the midst of quitting a few things in my life and have felt like as I’m making these choices, am I going to regret this later? I’m feeling crazy. It doesn’t seem like the logical thing to do, but I’m just really feeling pulled to let go of these things. And so this came at the literal perfect time, and I feel like it really opened my heart to share from a very vulnerable space what I want to share today. And also, you know, when I heard from both Brian and Bill that you were going to be presenting Marcella, both of them were like, you need to be there to hear her present before you present. And I had a vision in my head of what a copywriter presenting about copywriting would be like. And what you did just literally blew me out of the water. I had no clue that that was coming.
Brian Kurtz 05:51
You know, when I say that this is a marketing and copywriters group, it’s like, man, we do stuff on, you know, imposter syndrome. We do stuff on, you know, values. And it’s all marketing. It’s all part of marketing, right?
Ally Fallon 06:05
And you did something to me that’s so much past what our traditional idea of marketing is, because you just literally shared your story, which is what I’m going to talk about today. Pulled me in to the point where I could not turn away, moved me emotionally to recommit really to a decision that I had already made. And because of that emotional engagement, that change, the transformation that I just had in the last 30 minutes while you were talking is permanent. Like it’s different than you saying, giving me advice or giving me a three step process or whatever this is, this transformation that just happened for me is permanent. It’s, you know, I just changed in the last 30 minutes. So what I want to talk about today is writing your story. And originally when Brian and I talked, I had said, you know, oh, you’re meeting with this group of business leaders, we should talk about writing a book, because every single business leader, in my opinion, should write a book. And I have a presentation that I do that walks you through taking a baby book idea and kind of cultivating it and growing it into a book idea. Well, two days ago I just was feeling really, following my intuition was feeling really pulled to pivot and talk about something a little bit different today. And now that I just heard Marcella talk, I’m glad that I made that decision, and I’m glad I trusted my instinct on that, because, you know, it’s true that every business leader should consider writing a book. There are a thousand reasons why writing a book could be beneficial to you. And I have a recorded talk that I will give you. I’ll give you a link to this at the end of our time together. So if you do have a book idea and you want to go spend some time cultivating that book idea, that’s a recorded talk that I’ve done before. And I just thought, you know what? I’ll give that to them too, so that you can also go do that. But what I really wanted to talk about today is the importance of sharing our stories. And what Marcella just did is such a brilliant demonstration of why it’s so important for us to share our stories. For some people, sharing your story will look like writing a book. For some people, it will look like a TED talk. For some people, it will look like sharing your story over coffee with a friend. For some people, it will look like, you know, pulling together a group of business leaders and entrepreneurs like Brian has done. For everybody it will look different and yet the sharing of stories is an essential human need. It is something that we need to both to be the sharer of the story and also the receiver of the story, because the sharing of stories is how we learn and how we change. This has been true since before the written word was even a thing. And so, you know, I wrote a book called Write Your Story and that’s what I want to talk about today. And I always tell people when I’m talking about Write Your Story, if you read the book, Write Your Story, and you never physically write your story, but you apply the elements that I talk about, you’re still going to experience the benefits of the framework. This doesn’t mean that you have to go write your memoir or publish your memoir or whatever. What I’m trying to encourage you to do is to recognize I have a story. There’s a story that’s being written in my life, that’s being told through me as a vessel of this story, and that story is inspiring. That story is life changing for both me and for other people who hear it. That story is the window to all of the meaning and purpose that I’m looking for in my life. And when I can look at my own story and think about it through a lens of storytelling, the themes and the practices of storytelling that have existed for, you know, for generations, then I’m going to unfold a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in my life that wasn’t there before. So that’s what I want to talk about today. My book is called Write Your Story: A Simple Framework to Understand Yourself, Your Story, and Your Purpose in the World. And I’ve been, you know, sitting here with you all for the last hour and a half and really just kind of tuning in to the type of people that are here to the energy of the group. And one thing that I can tell about this group is that you are all people who really want to serve not just your clients and your customers, but you want to serve the world. You want to serve your communities. You want to be a contribution. And I’m of the belief that the greatest way to be a contribution, and Marcella just lived this in real time, the greatest way to be a contribution is to share your story. First, I’d love to share how I came to this work. I have been working in publishing for 15 years or so. I had the dream to write a book from the time I was very young. My first career was in teaching, and I taught in the public school system in Portland, Oregon for three years. And the whole time that I was teaching, really the reason that I became a teacher, which is a terrible reason to do anything, let alone become a teacher, was because I was like, oh, I’ll get three months off every year. And I can, you know, focus on writing my book. And that proved to be a really illogical plan because, you know, teachers don’t get three months off every year. It’s like maybe six weeks. And those six weeks are spent planning and prepping for the next year and also recovering from, like, the intensity of what it is to be a teacher. And so I realized really quickly, like, I’m in the wrong place. And I always had this dream to write a book. The story kept nagging at me. To be honest, I didn’t even know what the story was that I wanted to tell. I just knew that I had a story that needed to be told for my sake. Not necessarily that it was going to serve the world, but like, I just had this story that just was nagging at me and wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew nothing about publishing. I knew no one in the publishing industry. I had no plan to write a book. I was 26 years old and very naive, and I quit my job and decided that I was going to spend the next six months writing the manuscript. Well, I spent the next six months doing a lot of sitting at my computer screen, staring at a blinking cursor, trying to write the manuscript. I had about six months of reserves in the bank. And when my six months was up, I was a little bit like, oh shit, I’ve got to figure out a different plan. And so I started doing a lot of like copywriting and other things on the side. I finally published that book three years after I started writing it, which actually, in the grand scheme of things, is a short timeline, I learned later. But, you know, was what, six times the amount of time that I thought it would take to get the thing finished and published. And that was a wild ride in itself. I could do a whole talk on everything that I experienced, from sitting down to write the book to publishing it. But one of the things that I learned is that it’s incredibly healing to write your own story. Whether or not that book ever got published, whether or not anybody ever read it, whether or not I ever got any feedback on it. It’s an incredibly healing experience to write your own story. While the experience of writing and publishing that book also opened a door for me to begin my work in publishing because I realized also as I published the book, this was another way that I was quite naive. The book did very well in the marketplace. That book has sold I mean, to date, I want to say like 30,000 copies, which most books don’t sell over a thousand copies. So the book has done well, better than the publisher expected it to do. And yet, shock of all shocks, the book was not paying my bills. You know, I was getting royalty checks for like a few hundred dollars, I think every month or something like that. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles in publishing.
Brian Kurtz 13:25
Those are big royalty checks, by the way.
Ally Fallon 13:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 300 bucks or something like that. I’m like, I’m going to need to figure out a different plan. So I started working with other people who said that they wanted to write books because I said, I’ve got this background in teaching, so I know how to put together a curriculum. And I’ve had this three year crazy roller coaster experience of trying to write a book and pay my bills while I did it. So I thought, I’ll just pull together groups of authors and aspiring authors and help them outline their books. So I have spent most of my career doing that, helping people finish their manuscripts, helping them edit their manuscripts, helping them connect with agents, get published, et cetera, et cetera. And yet I started to notice this theme that while I was working with people on writing a book, they were having this very transformative experience that I was like, am I imagining this or is this really something, you know, this theme, this pattern keeps coming up that someone’s writing a book about business and they’re having, like, these massive transformations in their business. They’re making more money. They’re having these epiphanies. They’re having new ideas. Someone’s writing a book about marriage, and their marriage is becoming stronger. They’re writing a book about relationships, and their relationships are getting better. And so I was like, just noticing that this was a pattern and kind of questioning myself about it. Like, maybe I’m just imagining things, or maybe I just, you know, want something to be here that isn’t really here. And while I was having that experience, I went through a major left turn in my personal life. At the time, I was working very closely, I was running a business with my husband at the time, and uncovered a whole thread of information, realizing he was living this other life that I didn’t know about. I filed for divorce. It was a very contentious divorce. It was wild. Like the things that I went through. I was like, I’m living in a terrifying movie. And I did the only thing that I knew how to do to survive the trauma that I was in, which was to start writing about what I was going through. And at the time, you know, for professional development, I was taking all these courses, learning about storytelling and how stories work and how stories are put together and what every story needs to have, and learning all of the elements of storytelling. And I started to apply some of those elements to what I was writing, because a lot of what I was writing was just kind of like verbal vomit on the page. This is what I’m going through. This is what happened today, this is what he did, this is what he said, this is what the attorneys are saying, et cetera, et cetera. Just to kind of see it on the page for myself. And so a lot of that was really messy and nothing I ever would have shared. But I was like, I just want to try and experiment and start to apply some of these storytelling techniques to this very chaotic and messy story. And what unfolded and unlocked for me was so profound that I still to this day, I mean, I’ve written this book called Write Your Story in an attempt to explain what happened for me during that time. And yet I feel in some ways, like words don’t really do it justice. My life took a turn for the better. I changed so dramatically and so completely that my life today is unrecognizable from my life back then. And in some ways, when I look back on it now and think like it really could have gone the other way, it’s not just like, you know, it’s not just like a 50-50 chance or something. Like it really could have gone the other way. I could have chosen to, I can see this path very clearly, I could have chosen to be very bitter about what happened to me. I could have chosen to play the victim. I could have chosen to stay angry. I could have chosen to close my heart. All these things. And I didn’t choose those things. And it’s my belief that I didn’t choose those things because I was witnessing what was happening in my life through the lens of storytelling. And that’s really where this work was born. This, this work that I call Write Your Story. And it isn’t necessarily book writing, although many of the clients that I work with still do turn their stories into to memoirs or other types of books, but it’s what I wanted to talk about on the call today, because I think it’s something that literally any person, whether you want to write a book or not, can apply to their life immediately. And even if you don’t ever write a single word, you will begin to see changes in your life, positive changes. You’ll begin to see yourself in a different way. You’ll begin to feel more engaged and in touch with your life. You begin to see your life with more meaning and purpose. And you know, the biggest thing for me is you take back your agency because you start to see yourself as the hero, the protagonist in an unfolding story that’s happening in front of you. And hey, guess what? The story, the plot, doesn’t move forward until the protagonist starts to take some action. And so rather than seeing yourself as the victim in the story, you start to see yourself as the hero. And that’s really has been a profound shift for me and for a lot of the clients who I’ve worked with. So what I want to do in our time today is go through the eight different parts of the framework, and I’ll just give you a quick overview of what I teach in the book. And if you want to know more about what I’m teaching, the book is called Write Your Story. I also have a podcast called Write Your Story with Ally Fallon that is available wherever you listen to podcasts. So that’s another place where you can kind of go deeper with the framework. And then on Instagram, I share a lot about this work that I’m doing also on Instagram. So number one is controlling idea, two is the hook, three is the hero, four is the one big problem, five is guide, six is struggle and relief, seven is the transformation, and eight is the moral. Okay, so the first element of every story is what I call a controlling idea. A lot of times in publishing this will be called the one golden thread of the story, but this is the thread that holds the story together. This is like the one repeating theme. This is the thing that the story is really about. So in publishing, when you publish a book, a publisher always wants to know what’s the one golden thread of this book? What’s the one takeaway that the reader is going to walk away with? You know, Marcella said the words like the one big idea of a TED talk. So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the controlling idea. Now, as it relates to your life story that’s unfolding, the reason that this is important is we can start to look at patterns and repeating ideas that show up for us in our life story over and over again, and we can start to get a sense of that one golden thread that holds our life story together. Now, I talk a lot. I recorded a whole podcast episode on the cost of clarity because clarity is incredibly helpful. It’s obviously clarifying. We love the idea of clarity, but like Marcella mentioned in her talk, the cost of clarity is all the other options. And as human beings, we tend to want to cling and hang on to those options. And so it can be difficult to say, well, my story, my life story, or the story I’m living through right now in my life is about this one thing. You know, my story is about quitting right now. This is the story that I’m living in right now. It’s about letting go of what’s not working, letting go of what’s not serving me, letting go of what has atrophied, what is dead in my life. And that’s literally the life story that I’m living through right now, like in the three months chunk of time leading up to this call. So I would ask you the question, what’s the one golden thread of your story? And in order to really define the one golden thread of your story, you have to think about, well, what’s the story that I’m telling? And for most of us, there’s a story that’s kind of pressing right now. That story for you might be an old story. It might be like, well, the story that I really want to tell or the story that’s kind of nagging at me is a story of losing a loved one that maybe happened 10 or 20 years ago, but you’ve never really processed it. And so that’s a story you’d really love to tell or to process or to unpack. Or maybe there’s a story that’s taking place for you right now that you’re in the middle of. A lot of times when people come to me to write memoirs, when I sit down with them to help them map out a memoir, I realize they’re 80% of the way through the story. They’re literally living in what I call the all is lost moment of their story. And there’s something about seeing the story through the lens of storytelling that helps them to create the resolution, co-create the resolution. So that controlling idea is about defining, well, what is this story really about? What’s the story that you’re living through in your life right now, really, about what’s the story that you need to tell from your past? The more specific you can get about what story you want to tell, the easier it will be to write your controlling idea. But the controlling idea really answers the question: what is this story about? And your story can’t be about ten things. It has to be about one thing. And that’s very difficult to get that clear. Okay. So once you have the controlling idea of your story, which is about defining, okay, what’s the story I’m telling? What’s the story about? That’s the controlling idea. And once you have the controlling idea of your story down, the second part of the framework is the hook. The hook of the story is the question that your story is asking. That must be answered. I’m going to use an example from Marcella’s presentation that she just did, because her hook was absolutely brilliantly executed and so beautiful. But the hook of her story, the first thing she talks about at the very beginning is going away to this retreat because of what’s going on with her son. And it’s such a beautiful hook. Notice she doesn’t answer the question for us until the end of the talk. I spend the whole question going, where is he now? What’s going on now? Is he okay? You know, and wanting to know the answer, needing to know the answer to that question. Like my brain will not rest until I know what is the update with her son. So brilliantly, like a good writer does, she saves the answer to that question for the very end of the talk, because she knows that’s part of how your brain is staying engaged with this content. Now, the hook of your life story, or the story that you’re writing right now will be similar. Your brain will stay engaged with this question until the question is answered. So, you know, Marcella asked us questions in her presentation. What would happen if you just quit? So let’s just say that’s the question that your brain is asking right now. Your brain is not going to rest until you get that question answered. She asked, what do you need to quit? Your brain is not going to rest until you get that question answered. Whatever question your story is asking, your brain will not rest until you get that question answered. One of the reasons why it’s so important to understand this is because a lot of times we have open stories in our lives that we haven’t answered the questions. The story asked us a question, we haven’t fully answered it. And I think of this like an open tab on your computer. It’s unconsciously taking up energy and taking up space in your brain, and it isn’t until you close the loop on that story that you can really let go of that season, that part of your life, and move on and create something new. So what the act of storytelling does is it forces us to make conscious what was unconscious. To consciously ask the question that was already being asked unconsciously. And I would ask you to just consider, like, what are the questions that are keeping you up at night? What are the questions that wake you up at two in the morning or three in the morning? What are the questions that get you out of bed in the morning? What question are you trying to answer? Or what question is trying to be answered in your life right now? Maybe you don’t even feel like it’s you, but you feel like a question keeps getting asked over and over and over again. Okay, so we have a controlling idea, which is the story you’re telling and what it’s about. We have the hook, which is the question that your story is asking. We have the hero to the story, which is the person in the story who moves the plot of the story forward. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about as it relates to storytelling, because I think a lot of times with our personal stories, we really don’t like to believe that we’re the hero of the story. Part of this is just semantics, you know? Like, we hear the word hero and we think like, oh, God, like I don’t qualify as a hero of a story. I’ve never done anything heroic in my life. But what I want to point out is that as it relates to storytelling and in a literary sense, the hero of the story doesn’t necessarily have to be heroic. In fact, the hero of a story usually is not heroic until the last couple seconds of the story. The last few sentences of the story is when the hero becomes heroic. For most of the story, think about every movie you’ve ever watched, every TV show you’ve ever watched. You’re watching the hero through the story, screaming at the screen, going like, no, don’t walk down there, you idiot. That’s where the bad guy is, you know? The hero is notoriously flawed, struggling, tripping over themselves. Can’t get it right. Can’t seem to change. Can’t make the right decisions. Can’t figure it out on their own. And so an incredibly flawed character in the story. And yet the hero is the only one who can close the loop on the story. There’s no other character in the story who can close the loop. The arc of the story is built around the hero who changes. And it isn’t until the hero transforms that the story is over. So notice how Marcella’s story, her story ended when she changed. And her son didn’t change until she changed. The story is built around that transformation of the main character. So it begs the question, how would I have to change in order for this story to change? Because many of us, myself included, are getting outcomes in our life that we wish we weren’t getting. And maybe, you know, this would be true for me right now. 85% of my life is going great. And I love, you know, my kids, my marriage, my family life, my home life going great. There’s 20% or 15% of life that I’m not getting the outcomes that I would like to get. And in order to create a change, I have to be willing to change. I have to be willing to transform because who else is going to do it for me? How else is the story going to move forward? If I’m the main character, how can the story change if I don’t change? And so until I see myself as the main character of the story, I can’t move the plot forward. Until I see myself as the main character of the story, I haven’t even considered how I have to change in order to change the story. And so it’s so important that we put ourselves into the position of the hero of the story, even though a lot of people I talked to say it feels like an arrogant thing to do, to put themselves at the center of the story. But just know that what I’m asking you to do when you put yourself at the center of the story, is not to put yourself at the center of all human history, but just to put yourself at the center of your specific story. What’s unfolding in front of you, what’s happening on the movie screen of your life on a daily basis, and just know that that movie screen can’t change until you change it.
Outro 28:11
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.