Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we're talking about consulting advice and today, specifically, I wanted to talk about the advice that you sometimes get to tell more stories. You know, you should tell stories and telling stories is good for organizations. Well, I'm kind of skeptical about that because I am so scarred by terrible storytellers and I'm going to ask my guest today about that.

You can see I have a guest, her name is Karen Eber. She's my dear friend and also an international consultant, keynote and Ted speaker. Karen is the CEO and chief storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, a talent development boutique that helps companies reimagine how to transform their culture, build healthy leaders and teams and leverage storytelling. Karen works with Fortune 500 companies such as General Electric, ADP, Heinz Kraft, Kate Spade, Stuart Weitzman and guest lectures in universities like Emery and Purdue. Karen has 20 plus years of experience and has been ahead of culture and chief learning officer at General Electric and ahead of leadership development at Deloitte. Welcome, Karen, I'm super excited to talk to you today.

Same, same.

So I think what's really helpful, rather than just asking you what you do, is can you share a story of a transformation you got for a client that would illustrate what the kinds of work that you do for clients?

I am a CEO or have a CEO as a client, Jacob, where he was pretty new in his job, so you're coming into a company that's already established and he's particularly brought in to help them break into new markets, to take on risks, try different things and he's coming up on his first company wide meeting and he knows that he has to get their trust, but he also has to convince them to change what they're doing. And I've known Jacob for years, we've worked together in different capacities and he came to me to work on this big stakes presentation.

So we start mapping out what he wants and he comes with like a “thud” of a binder of 50 McKinsey slides that I know he's used before and I'm like, you're going to just make them louder for the people in the back? So I put them aside and I said, let's talk about what you need to happen and what you need to have happen in this presentation. And he talks about that, he wants the company to realize that even though they're doing really well in their sector, they have to break into new products, they've got to take on risk, be innovative, and they have to actually try things to break into some different industries in different sectors for survival.

So he said that I just don't know where to start, I don't know what to do and because Jacob and I have known each other for a while, we had started this conversation with him, tell me about his kids and some of the latest things they were doing. So I said, Jacob, just humor me for a minute, tell me again about your son and the surfing that he does, so he's describing his son, this gifted surfer, he's young, like 9 years old, but fearless in the water. Waves will be towering over him and he can just do whatever without any inhibition and he's really talented, same thing in the swimming pool, he's so good that he will like swim the lap of the pool, be up on the deck, walking away before the other kids in the water touch the wall. So he's talking to his son, he's telling me the story and he's talking to his son and I said, and that's why I don't try, I don't need to try I'm way better than everybody else who cares. And he said, but don't you think, Jacob, at some point you do need to try that they might catch up to you, that you might want to get better, you might want to try other things and he's telling the story and I'm smiling and he hasn't caught on yet for what I am about to do.

And then he happens to mention, oh, and by the way, Jacob has taken up skateboarding in the winter when he can't surf because skateboarding, he thought, would be really good cross training but he sucks. He can't stay up, he's terrified, he's afraid to take risks, he's afraid to try anything and so at this point, I just sit back and Jacob looks at me and he's like he's finally starting to see, oh ok, you're asking me this because there's a point about needing to take risk and not staying comfortable and everything you're doing and he says, ok, ok, how do I even do this?

So we stepped back and we said, let's make the story and he told the story at this company meeting about his son. He starts off with a picture of him surfing with the wave behind him, how he goes through, how he's so talented, but had to really learn to try to take on risk, to be willing to do different things and then talks about the skateboarding and how terrible he is and how humbling it's been for him and and what a difference that is what a contrast that is. So use that as the grounding we actually use two slides of McKinsey data and with that, he mapped out here's why, as a company, we need to change, here's why you need to take on risk. So what was 50 really boring and memorable slides went to this really entertaining story about his son and how they needed to make shifts. So that night, I get a text from Jacob that says they were at a dinner after celebrating and it says, you're not going to believe that, people came up to me and they started asking me about my son and they said, once a surfer, always a surfer, let's skate.

Oh my God. Played? Amazing.

I couldn't have written a more perfect story and so what I love about that story that's so common about so many of the companies and clients I work with is that people are actually afraid of storytelling even when they hear use it, they're afraid like, where am I going to find a story just like Jacob was or how am I going to take this and tell a story with it? And so what I love to do in helping leaders be more engaging and helping teams relate to each other and really helping culture be shaped is how people learn how you can use storytelling as a skill to do all those things and I'm with you, I'm against tell a story because there's a lot to it, but it can definitely be learned.

I think it's the kind of thing that looks easy when it's done well and when you try to do it, it doesn't always go as you expect. And that's part of why I wanted to talk to you about this but, you know, you've brought up exactly the questions I have, which is like how do you find the story? And oh my gosh, what if you get in front of people and your story is like, how do you make sure it's not, it just feels safer to do the 50 slides rather than taking a risk and telling a story that is, you know, he probably felt vulnerable telling a story of his son, I'm sure, among the reasons that worked, so how do we choose the story? How do we make sure the story is relevant to what we're talking about? All that?

Yeah, there are 50 slides, the reason why 50 slides feels more comfortable is because that's about you, what a story or any presentation should you should be about your audience, what is it that you want them to do? What is it you want them to think or know or feel after? Because you start there and then it's going to give you an idea for a story. I always get people saying, like, do I tell a story about myself or do I get an idea? There's endless ideas but let's start first with what are you trying to achieve? Because a story is really about trying to take people and have them be changed, like a great story neurologically is going to leave you changed and so you want to be intentional about what is it you're trying to do? So that's the first thing you want to do. From there, you have to make the choice of do you want to use a story about your professional experiences or personal experiences, about something you've observed in the workplace? Or do you want to use a story about something in the world that you know any of the above are fine when they are needing the idea? So I will take a lot of random things and compare them on to bring a point in storytelling, you know, taking to things that don't seem like they're related and pulling out the conjoining points are an easy way to do it but I think where a lot of people go wrong is they don't think of the audience and then they tell a story for story sake and it's not making any points because they haven't stopped to think about their audience.

That has definitely been the case, I feel like I've seen people tell stories and then I've been like that just like it was like 5 minutes we'll never get back and it didn't really lead into anything and all of that and I'm not ever sure if anyone told them about that or if they just had an idea of like, hey, open with the story, kind of like open with a joke and it just didn't go well. When we doing this for ourselves, I mean, do you besides hiring you literally like how do you suggest we kind of test this before we get into our big audience?

Yeah, it's true, it is definitely a skill. And I will tell you, just before you and I were doing this, I was working on my newsletter and I was trying to use a story and it just wasn't working, I couldn't recognize where it's coming together and where it is and so now I'm on to the next one. So some of the common mistakes people make is that they don't give themselves enough time to think about the story or even their presentation everybody loves to move slides around and then think about what am I going to say after two hours of perfecting sides and really to do any type of communicating well, you need to leave yourself time because a story isn't going to hatch perfectly every time you need to have time to think about it and test it.

I love to use the rule, make everything earn its place, which came from the movie La La Land, where the the director, Damien Chazelle, took every musical number out of the movie and he only put them back in if he felt that it advance the story in some way and anything that didn't was gone and so to do those things, you need to leave yourself time up, what is my idea? What is my story? Has everything earned its place here? And how do I make sure this is going to have meaning?

So first thing is leave yourself time. Second thing is make sure you are connecting to your audience and what you want to do, because a story has an intent, it takes people on a journey and the third thing is, you're going to have to play, you're going to have to test your story with different people and a story in writing is different than a story verbally but you want to try that out to see, is it understandable? Is it making sense? Is it resonating? And when you do that, the first few times you're going to realize your own style for storytelling, you're going to realize the pattern you have and it's going to get easier. Like anything, first few times are going to be slower and then it gets easier and you can do it much faster.

Well, so I hear one of the things that you're saying that I have said many times to clients and colleagues who are doing presentations or speeches and things like that, which is from my old actor days, which is like, hey rehearse like, don't be afraid to kind of get in there you don't do this last minute thing where you're, as you're saying, starting slides at the last minute. If you have time to rehearse, then you can try these things out and you know, practice them in front of whether it's an audience or a mirror or a you know a zoom or whatever it is but in practicing, you really get to see how things land and I feel like, you know, the most basic mistake people make is that they just don't do it, I don't know that they don't know that they should do it but I feel like people don't do it for whatever reason and it's a great self sabotage technique to ensure you're not maybe not going to have the best presentation you can have, so I love the idea of trying it out and saying it.

You have literally, I mean maybe my top five TED talk of all time on storytelling and as I've told you, what I loved about it wasn't that I geeked out on the information in it, although I did but your performance is like so you know, so often you're saying like, here's a genius, but they can't really deliver their material all that well but the material is fascinating and in your case, like, here's a genius about storytelling who is delivering this, like she's so engaging, how many times did you rehearse that TED talk?

Over 50, but there's a balance, right? Because I do believe you have to practice, you do need to see how people resonate, but when you're telling a story, it still has to be organic, a lot of my business is keynote speaking and there's this chemistry, this emotion that happens in a room that can't be replicated and you have to be in the moment and so something like a TED talk is scripted and rehearsed and I knew I was going to push the elevator button in it and I knew different movements, but I needed it to feel real and the day. But that's where the practicing comes into place, because there's these two things, when you practice, you have to make sure that your story resonates, you also have to realize there's two parts to a story, there's the story you tell and there's the story that the listener experiences, because I have my intent and I have my communication but you as the listener, your brain is going to fill in gaps in what I say, and it's going to think about your own experiences and impose your own meaning. So when a whole audience full of people are going to come away with their own personal imprint, and so that's where the practicing comes in to see like, what are those other versions of the story that people are experiencing and does that change how I tell it?

That's amazing, so you took in that feedback and incorporated into your talk.

Yes, yes, definitely in the talk there's a different story also that has happened. I was in Spain doing a workshop about navigating change with a company that is going through massive change ad I was trying to give them this metaphor that employees are like scrambled when you're going through change, overwhelmed and I told them, picture a plate of spaghetti, very tangled mess and noodles, you can't make sense of them, you can't organize them, if you try to get one noodle, you get 12 and they slap you in the chin while you're trying to eat it and like, this is what your employees brain feels like. So your job as a manager, as a leader isn't to come in and make spaghetti your job is to come in and make waffles because what's a waffle like perfectly lined up squares and you can pay attention to one square and put as much in it as you want, but you can ignore the others until you're ready and if you're coming in each day and making waffles and helping your employees focus on this one thing at a time, it's going to be easier.

So I tested that story in Spain and I literally got, I went and I like open up Google and I brought up pictures like maybe the translation is right and I still got these looks and I thought ok, story didn't work that way and then for some reason a year later, I was back in Spain and something in that moment said tell this story so I told the story again, which we share in a moment and they sat back and they said, that's really good, you should tell that waffles and spaghetti's story more and so I'm sure that it took me time to figure out how to tell it. The best ending on that one in the end of the workshop, I did have someone stand up and say this Italian man stood up and say, as much as this pains me, even I will make waffles and not spaghetti which I love it when a story writes itself.

So I am always practicing my stories to the chagrin of my family and my husband who are getting tested on, you know, I'm a genius in my own mind and so I may think something is amazing until I tested on someone and then they say, but I will say my process has changed because I've done this so much. If I get to the point where I feel like I should run this by someone, then I put it away because I know it's not working and I don't have that question. I know it's working and that each person can get to.

Awesome, you can feel it within yourself that this is like on point. Awesome, would you share like, what are your, like you don't do storytelling for a living and yet you kind of do. What services do you offer as a consultant? Yeah, I focus on helping companies transform their culture because culture is the umbrella for how we're working, for how you're developing your leaders, for how you're creating healthy teams and and how you're shaping all of that with storytelling. So I do work at the organization and company level of how do we define a culture strategy and transform our culture to what is going to help us deliver our business strategy, which I've got a seven step model, multiyear process, I take companies through within that, I have year long leadership development experiences and even tactical things like storytelling workshops and I do a lot of team facilitation where we come together and work through building a trusting team. So storytelling is kind of the how, the thing that cuts across all of them and there's definitely a big piece of what I do, but I'm ultimately trying to create great workplaces.

And how does storytelling and how do stories work to achieve that? Well, I'm on a mission to save the world from one boring meeting at a time and unfortunately, because PowerPoint slides are comfortable, everybody comes in thinking every person's going to hang on my every word and let me just drone on and what storytelling does is it helps you be thoughtful of who am I as a leader and how am I showing up? And stories are demonstrating what are we reinforcing and encouraging in this culture? What do we discourage? In fact, Stanford has done research that telling stories, telling stories about heroes, rituals you put in place all of these things are reinforcing your culture and so one of the questions I will ask companies when we're doing culture transformation is how do your friends and family describe the culture here? And without fail, everybody is like, oh, because that is the story of your culture and that is a piece of it. So storytelling is embedded and woven throughout because it's a way that brings meaning to the culture and helps people understand what their culture really looks like.

And what about when people feel like we don't have time for storytelling, we need to x, you know what I mean? We just want to do the data or we just need to, you know, give the bullet point version. What's your the most persuasive thing that you can say to them?

This happens a lot, I work with a lot of facts, science based minds, how is your engineers, your auditors who tell me that date, we decide their data, we don't decide through stories, so you're wrong neurologically. we actually do decide through our emotions and stories and I touched on this a little bit in the TED talk, but the things we think we're deciding through and data we're not and we think a story has to be this production in this lengthy thing and it doesn't, it can be 10 seconds, it could be a metaphor, it could be an example. So the way I get through, the way that I get people to embrace this is I make them tell a story until someone does it and they see the response, it's hard to convince them through different things. Although I have been getting amazing mail from around the world that the TED talk has done a pretty good job of convincing people on that.

I think it's super persuasive, we'll totally put the link in the show notes because everyone has to see like my top five. I'm telling you, it's like you and Brene and the lady who does space archeology and Dr. Daniel and I'm hard pressed to figure out the fifth one right now but you are so totally in that group with them and I have put in a second talking there. But I mean, just if I were your friend, which I am but you know what I mean, I would be like, oh my God, you and Brene Brown are like. That's why Brene’s talks are so compelling, because she is a storytelling researcher right? So she is talking about all the research, but she's telling stories most often about herself and most often about realizations of mistakes that she's made. So she's being vulnerable, you identify with her even if you didn't do what her husband Steve did or you are going to experience and that's what draws us to her and that's what makes storytelling so relatable.

And how can you so I just think of myself back at corporate and yes, it was a long time ago but I know other people are in those kinds of dangerous corporate environments I just didn't want to tell stories like I was like vulnerability was completely off the table and I just feel like I wouldn't have brought anything personal in so what do you do in those environments that it's just like high danger?

You can tell stories that are not yours. So a great example, I was working with a chief H.R. officer where they were looking at talent analytics, trying to do future work stuff and they wanted to make predictions about who to hire, who to put in roles and so I said, can I tell you what the Navy SEALs do? Do you know what the ratio of success is for the Navy SEALs? And she said that back at me and I said 2 in 10, make it through their training. And you know what? They can actually predict failure, so you can go to their base in Coronado and they talk about all of this and cool part of leadership development is I get to study all this stuff so they can actually predict failure in a candidate because of physical stature or acumen or mental toughness, like thinking, they're generally things that they're like, no, I'm sure they even make it a game each class but what they cannot do is they cannot predict success because they don't know when an individual is going to put together to get to an outcome, they don't know what grit someone's going to tap into. And so I was trying to get this HR leader and organization to realize, like, you're walking in tricky waters here, like you want to say, here's the exact things that need to happen, but we don't know, so I use that story because I'm a curious person, I read I listen to podcasts and stuff and had that nugget and it completely changed the conversation and it is you know told shorter usually, but about 15/22 second story. So it doesn't have to be this, let me start with a story today, which, by the way, never say never, you just sneak it in, I talk a lot about sneaking the vegetables, right? If you have children, you often hear parents sneaking vegetables into things so the same thing with story, the same thing with culture, you just do it, you don't just call attention to it and say, give me an “s”, give me a “t” you just do it and those are the things that people come out of meetings and remember, until I think every person has the opportunity to take things they see in the world and use that to ask a question or to interject ideas.

I mean, I so completely agree with you, like when I talk about my favorite books and especially non-fiction books, they're the ones usually by people who write for The New Yorker because they are almost always story based. And so if I look at books that I've read, like a bad, poorly written business book is just so preachy, it's just like, here's a point, here's a point, here's a thesis, here's a this and there's no like I need to like examples or something like give me something to hang onto.

Years ago I downloaded this freebie that was like 50 pieces of something for I can't remember what the occasion was, but it was like a bunch of advice and the only things that stood out to me was there was a cartoon by Hugh, he's the cartoonist that a lot of people will recognize his cartoons and a story and it ended up by being by Chip and Dan Heath. This is how I discovered them and it was about this boy who came into the classroom and how he was kind of washing out of school and the teacher did one single thing to engage him, which is that when he walked in the room, she said, Hey, Johnny and then thereafter it kind of like picked him up and he turned into a less of a washing out student and, you know, that was led to getting him more on the right path.

I still remember that to this day. I'm sure that was good advice from, I don't know, maybe some other famous business people in there but none of it stayed with me those few things stayed with me and what really stayed with me was whenever I write something, I'm always trying to make sure it's got a story in there so that people can, you know, I just call it something to hang on to because otherwise our brain is going like, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then it's like as soon as you say Navy SEALs, I'm like, I'm all ears or you know, Jason and his or Jacob and his surfing son, I'm like, oh, I'm interested in them and as you pointed out, I think you say this in your TED talk like the amount of details that will retain about that story, because it's been a little movie in our minds are so many where as the data points are going to be,how many data points will people remember 30 minutes after the meeting?

None. I mean, the thing about storytelling is this idea of neural coupling where is the listener? Your brain is lighting up as though you are actually the person in the story. So we've all experienced this when we're watching a movie in action movie and we're sitting calmly in the seat, but our heart is racing or we watch the notebook for the millionth time and we learn that Noah wrote how he every day and she never got that letters, oh my God right?.

So the stories are chemically changing us, which is why when you don't use storytelling, you're actually wasting brain potential and no one is deciding through the statistics or through the math. But to use your teacher example, if you taught that to teachers, then a teacher is going to be more likely to go and engage someone right away instead of if you said, well, there's a 37.2% chance and that's not how it works. And this is where I started to have some of my greatest success with storytelling, when I worked at General Electric, I was head of culture for 90,000 employees in one 150 countries. And the only way that you're going to build a leadership culture is to make each and every person stop and think, what does this mean for me and what do I want to do about it? And I'm not able to replicate myself 90,000 ways, nor do people want me sitting on a zoom. So I started using storytelling because when you read a story, you think like what would I do in that situation and what does that mean to me? So when you encounter it, you're more likely to respond and not react and that's the magic in all of this, of you are just kind of shrinking your brain into learning and retaining things that would never come from a classroom or a book or facts or figures.

Yeah, I feel convinced, I want people to hear about where to go and learn more about you before I do. I'm going to say the piece of advice that I give everyone and I repeat this just because someone is doing it poorly, don't let that stop you from doing something well. So I think that really studying and practicing this honestly, I think you know we've talked about video as a 21st century superpower. I really feel like especially over the past year, we've all had to get so good at what this is, which is just zoom and video and I really feel like storytelling is going to be that thing, that's going to give leaders the edge as we go forward. So if someone wanted to get better at storytelling with your help, where can they go to find more about that?

Yeah, so I try to model storytelling in everything I do, so on my website, which is my name, kareneber.com. I've got a brain food section that has a blog that are all of these story based pieces on leadership, on storytelling, on culture, that role model how you use story to teach and impart different thinking. I also do the same thing on YouTube and I have these two to 2 to 5 minutes videos that are on these different topics that are leveraging stories to just help you think differently and open up conversation.

Awesome, ok we'll put that information that show notes so that people can go see more of you in your videos and gosh, please do yourselves a favor and do not delay and go watch a current TED talk, which has over a million and how many views at this point? It’s like 1.3 or 5, I think, I don't know it's crazy.

It's amazing and you've touched so many lives with that talk, so I appreciate on behalf of everyone who saw it, I thank you for that and thank you for telling those stories and for showing up for us that way and especially I'm super appreciative that you came on today to talk to us about the power of storytelling.

Well, thank you for having me, it's always fun to be on a podcast you listen to. Great, super and with that, Karen and I are wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.