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You have started to collect and organize personal stories through your Story Matrix, let’s take one of those stories and place it in a template to nail out all of the important details!
The purpose of this tool is to equip you with a template to understand and then tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons.
Determine the situation in which you plan to tell your story (i.e. an interview, a team meeting, a customer call.) For this example, think of it like an interview for a prospective college you want to attend.
Then define the purpose of your story and the business arc (i.e. to share relevant experience, create momentum for an idea, and build trust.) For example, if you’re interviewing to get into Medical School, what would the medical department professor want to hear during your college interview? What about you as a person might help them decide if you are a good student to go to their university?
From there, identify the 5 C’s of your story: Character, Context, Conflict, Climax, Closure
Using the defined elements of your story, write the full narrative of the story, as you would tell it today. Label your 5 C’s as you write them out. This serves as “capture” and you will be able to remember the story one month from today.
CHARACTER: Back in 1998, Sara Blakely was getting ready to go to a party, and she had selected a pair of cream-colored pants. And she wanted to wear a pair of her panythose underneath her pants to get the slimming effect that the hose would give her. But she also wanted bare feet for her look. So what did she do? She simply cut the feet off of the pantyhose, and a billion dollar idea was born.
CONTEXT: And I mean billion. In 2012, Blakely was named the world’s youngest, self-made female billionaire by Forbes magazine. To this day, she still owns 100% of the company that’s made her famous. In the seven years that led up to her breakthrough idea, Sara Blakely had been selling fax machines. She didn’t even get any leads...she just had four zip codes that she could sell to, and her boss gave her a phone book as her only sales tool.
CONFLICT: As Blakely herself says; “I would wake up in the morning and drive around cold-calling from eight until five. Most doors were slammed in my face. I saw my business card ripped up at least once a week, and I even had a few police escorts out of buildings. It wasn’t long before I grew immune to the word ‘no’ and even found my situation amusing.” But if she thought that was a challenge early on, it was nothing like the challenge she faced with Spanx. See, most of the mills capable of making the product were in North Carolina. And who runs those mills? Men. Men who found it impossible to understand this simple, powerful idea. Men who failed to see her genius. She even tried to find a female patent lawyer in the state of Georgia... just one... and failed.