Your Bio – Your Story
If you’re in business, then you know that Your Bio or Your Story is one of the important brand stories you need to help you communicate core information to your potential clients: Who you are and What you do.
You personal story, or bio, is one of your important brand stories.
Dos and Don’ts of writing your Bio
Here are a few things you should be aware of when writing your personal story:
- Your Bio is NOT a summary of your CV. It is NOT a linear list (often in reverse chronological order) of your career, starting with your education.
- Your Bio is your personal story, so it follows the structure of a STORY (before – turning point – after). And like any good story, it should arouse curiosity & interest.
- Your Bio is a condensed version of your personal story. Depending on the platform, aim for between 50 and 150 words. Your Bio, like all your communication, benefits enormously from a ‘less is more’ approach.
One of the main features of your story is this. It should connect you on a personal level with potential clients, so drop the hype & hollow phrases. Write as you would talk to someone who’d like to get to know you, i.e. without needing to convince the other how ‘passionate’ and ‘committed’, and ‘awesome’ you are. To do that successfully you have to first own your story, then share it in a way that engages the reader on a personal level with you. And keep it simple – simple stories facilitate communication as I’ve pointed out many times.
What is the purpose of your Bio?
Contrary to popular tends, it’s NOT a text version of your favourite selfie.
It should create credibility in the reader/potential client who doesn’t know you that you are capable of doing the job you claim to do and that you are someone they can trust to do the job well.
To create that credibility your story should build confidence in the READER, not, as is often the case, demonstrate your confidence. It’s the reader who needs to find a reason to have confidence in you and subsequently wants to connect with you.
Want to test whether you Bio fulfils its purpose?
Have a read of your Bio, then ask yourself:
“If I didn’t know this person, would I consider hiring him/her?
And if reading your Bio doesn’t produce a definite YES, then maybe it’s time to get some professional help so that it does just that!
Why not get in touch and arrange a free session or email me directly.
Learn More
The Tyranny of Productivity
Like the annual business review, our New-Year-Resolution ritual belongs to a culture that celebrates the tyranny of productivity. Our obsession with goal-setting and to-do lists is a self-imposed method of monitoring our output and adjusting our productivity accordingly. We almost always adjust our productivity upwards.
Covid has Exposed the Mirage of the Promised Secure Future
Why do we willingly participate in an end-of-year ritual that gives us a false sense of control over our lives and our future? Is it because we have become so convinced that our worth in the workforce and our self-worth can be itemised, monetised and measured by living a ‘productive’ life?
If the crisis created by Covid has taught us anything it must surely be that the price of living a socially-approved productive and successful life is enormous. We have sacrificed our physical, emotional and spiritual well being for the promise of a secure future for ourselves and our children. In less than two years that promised future has turned out to be a mirage.
The Home Office has Given us Time to see how Empty our Full Lives actually were
As we finish our second year working from home we’ve learned that the home office is certainly not the perfect answer to the work-life-balance question. But we’re also discovering that is has potential to become close to that when both sides are willing to be open and flexible. Shattering the 9-to-5 daily routine has given us new options about how we want to live. It has also given us is more time to discover what our best options are.
Covid has also given us time to reflect on the lives we were so busy living we never had the ‘time’ to question whether this was the life we actually wanted to live. Covid put the brakes on our busyness. When we came to a standstill we could clearly see how empty our full lives actually were.
For all the misery and pain Covid created, it also gave us the down time we strove for with our to-do lists, but never achieved. We never earned that longed for down time because our to-do list was never empty. Reaching our goals demanded that we amplify more, optimise more, strategise more … We were so busy being busy, we didn’t have time to notice just how tyrannical our productivity goals actually were … until we were no longer so busy.
A New Year – Without the Tyranny of Productivity?
So how do we move forward into the New Year without falling victim to the updated version of the tyranny of productivity? Here’s one simple option. Instead of trying to manage our lives more efficiently, we can begin to create lives that give us joy, fill us with a sense of personal fulfilment, open up new creative possibilities, allow us to prioritise our well being, etc. And still find satisfaction, enjoyment and reward in our work.
Instead of goal-setting and to-do lists, we could take the advice of the great 20th century poet R. M. Rilke and savour the space in our lives that allow us to finally create the life that serves us best:
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been,
Learn More
Alternatives to the Sales Pitch
As we emerge into the ‘new’ normal, there is no better time to test ethical and effective alternatives to the sacred cow of conventional marketing. It’s time to find alternatives to the sales pitch and here are a few simple suggestions to get started.
What if we stopped doing the following:
- perfecting the sales pitch
- framing our offer in 7-digit outcomes
- emphasising the fear-of-missing-out argument
- boring everyone with our contrived rags-to-riches success story
It’s Time to Ditch the Sales Pitch
When interacting with potential clients here are some alternatives to the conventional sales pitch.
What if we:
- stopped talking so much and ditched the monologue-pitch altogether?
- slowed down, switched to a dialogue-mode and started having a real conversation?
- didn’t push our offer onto the potential client as the silver-bullet-solution and instead asked them questions to discover where they really need help and LISTENED to their response?
- communicated with them as if the sale was not our primary concern but building trust and giving value were?
It’s time to take an ethical, human approach to business
What if we decided to take an ethical, human approach to how we do business?
If you’re wondering about the viability of switching to an ethical approach, here’s something you should know as we slowly emerge into a post-pandemic world:
There is a growing mass of people looking for exactly that approach right now: viable and ethical alternatives to the sales pitch.
Are you ready to step up and provide it?
Learn More
“I can’t risk my public credibility”
It’s a challenge to get your communication ‘right’ – achieving that special blend of professional competency and personal connection. Yet, so many professionals and business owners have long ago sacrificed their humanness for the sake of public credibility.
The Great Divide
One of the main reasons is that the business world still considers ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ to be opposite ends of the spectrum. Despite many achievements in bringing the two ends closer together, many businesses still see such a merger as too risky.
And that’s exactly where Robert, a highly skilled engineer in his early 30s, was stuck when we started working together. Robert had managed to get funding for his start-up while still finishing his studies and had eventually launched a micro-business with a university colleague. However, even though they worked 24/7, they had serious issues attracting enough clients to survive.
Robert had spent his life gaining academic credentials and working in his specialist area. Only as a business owner did he hit the communication wall. He hadn’t yet realised that people do business first of all with people – who can also prove their expertise and professionalism. Robert believed that he could skip the first step – human connection – and focus solely on his professional credentials.
It wasn’t hard to identify Robert’s problem connecting with clients. He talked exclusively in scientific and business jargon. Even as he explained why he had contacted me, he could only talk about the problems of ‘leveraging’ and not having the ‘bandwidth’ yet.
Robert clung to the idea that professionalism and personal were polar opposites even when I mentioned how they could actually compliment and enhance each other, especially in the way we communicate. “I can’t risk my public credibility”, was his definitive response to my suggestion of replacing the jargon with a more personal style.
What’s behind the public credibility argument?
Once I began to scratch beneath his public credibility argument, another layer of Robert’s communication problem appeared. When I explained the importance of communicating person-to-person to build rapport and trust, Robert emphasised how much he “hated” the way so many businesses “rolled out intimate details of their personal lives as a cheap trick to get attention.” As a quiet, private person, he found such open sharing of personal details in public very intimidating and even embarrassing. He also explained how challenging he found engaging with the public at trade fairs and marketing events. All he really wanted, was “to do the work he was good at” and not have to be part of that “fake world of marketing and social media”.
Until now, Robert had ‘solved’ the problem of engaging with people at public events by distributing expensive brochures from behind his trade stand. He had actually hired me to ‘redo and improve’ the PR-material. His hope was that distributing ‘better’ PR-material would somehow solve all his marketing problems.
Better PR-Material is not the Solution
It was a challenge explaining to Robert that the solution was bigger than re-doing his marketing material.
I assured him there was a huge difference between having a personal conversation with someone and sharing irrelevant, personal details. Also, as a conscientious person, he didn’t have to engage in the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to marketing his business. He did, however, need to find a strategy that was aligned with his personality and worked for his business, too.
Jargon as a Mask
Using and overusing business jargon is often a mask to hide behind. Sometimes it’s to hide a lack of expertise and experience. Or, as this article claims, it’s a tool used to hide the “rise of meaningless work”. It’s also used in the workplace to exclude those who don’t speak it. And, as this article puts it, using jargon “is a form of control. If you can get people to talk like you, you can get them to think like you.”
In Robert’s case, he used it to protect his privacy and shield himself from the sleaze and over-sharing that dominate a lot of marketing styles. But as Robert slowly learned, there are alternative marketing strategies that are very effective.
One of them, as I’ve pointed out here, is to develop your own voice as a marketing tool that is aligned with your values, your personality and those you want to work with. To find out how to do that, check out my short self-study course on developing your voice.
Learn More
How to be heard in a noisy world?
Have you noticed how noisy it is ‘out there’ and how it’s getting noisier by the nano-second as more and more ‘hot’ tactics and glitz are rolled out? The increasing noise level raises the question ‘how can we be heard in a noisy world so that we can be found by the right audience?’
However, It’s not just that is getting more difficult to be heard in a noisy world. There’s also something else going on, as Sarah, one of my clients, pointed out recently.
“Why is everyone sounding more and more like copy-and-paste versions of everyone else,” she asked.
She’d just read a new post by a ‘respected’ coaching professional, who she said, “should know better”. (i.e. she’s been in business for some time!).
According to Sarah, she’s now talking about “deets” and “peeps” and her every post is now “a thinly disguised ‘pitch’ that I can see coming from the first sentence.” Then she summed up her frustration:
“I can’t feel the person writing these posts anymore with all the fancy words and tricks, so I’m not going to bother reading them!”
I’ve noticed the same trend, too, and find myself unsubscribing and un-following more and more to what I call ‘template junk’ content.
Why are we sacrificing our voice at the altar of algorithms?
Why are we sacrificing one of our greatest assets – our unique voice – to the algorithms?
What I mean with ‘voice’ is not just the ‘how’ of writing (style, language, etc.). It’s also about how you show up in your communication – having your own perspective, the topics you choose to write about, the way you interact with the reader, etc. Having a voice is about having a distinctive identity that others can see, feel, sense, identify and hear. It’s about showing up as YOU!
In a world that seems addicted to the automated ‘clicks & likes’ game, isn’t it important to stand back and just be yourself?
The pressure to conform
Being yourself, however, is not so easy in a world where the pressure to conform is enormous.
When clients ask me how to be heard in a noisy world, I encourage them to develop their voice. There is an immediate resistance to my advice and they generally give me a list of reasons on what is holding them back.
This list below includes the most common ones, but it’s certainly not comprehensive:
- No one would want to listen to them if they used their own voice. (If you haven’t tried, how can you know they won’t want to listen?)
- The voices that are seen and heard ‘out there’, i.e. the ones that have high numbers of views & likes, all sound similar. (Numbers don’t automatically convert into paying clients)
- They’re afraid that using their own voice would expose them in a public space, which makes them feel very vulnerable. (If you concentrate on connecting with your own audience, it greatly reduces the ‘dangers’ of being exposed)
- Using the same language as everyone else makes them feel like they belong to the group. And having a sense of belonging is important to them. (Exchanging your identity and individuality in order to fit in, is a very high price to pay)
The benefits of developing Your Voice
While the pressure to conform and fit in is huge, it also overshadows the benefits of developing your voice. And it does take courage to take that step.
Not only do you enjoy the freedom to discover your unique voice and express yourself in way that feels aligned with who you are and what you do, it makes it so much easier for those looking for you to find you. As I’ve already pointed out in relation to your story, your voice is also your USP.
Why is speaking in your own voice one of the best ways to position yourself to be easily found?
Because your voice acts like an antenna for those on your wavelength. They are the people already tuned into the service or product you provide and how it can help them.
Developing your voice also helps distinguish you from the crowd. It makes you ‘one of a kind’ for an audience that will spot you immediately.
Learn More
How to own your Story
When you own your story, you easily stand out in a noisy and crowded world by being your REAL self. The benefits are huge.
I was asked recently if and how my work had ever changed a client’s life. I have a few such stories, but this is the one I told.
Years ago, I was hired to help prepare a job-interview presentation (10 mins) for a leadership position in a semi-state company. Like 90% of the applicants, my client had extensive experience and relevant skills.
Your Story defines your USP
So, the personal aspect was key here. He needed to identify and clearly define his USP in relation to the job description. Owning your personal story is, as I’ve pointed out here, one of your brand stories and the more real it is, the more we need it now as we navigate our way in a post-pandemic world.
His personal story was ‘unconventional’ – left school and home at 17 and “bummed around” for 8 years, which included becoming an alcoholic (like his father), being homeless for a stretch, after three attempts finishing addiction therapy, completing a training-education programme with the help of one particular boss, who “gave me some slack, a lot of encouragement & kicked my ass when needed.”
It’s one thing to own your story and easily stand out. It’s another to get the value & relevance of that story across in a short presentation. Here’s what we did.
Your Story should build Audience Expectation
We decided to weave episodes of encounters between him & his boss into his presentation, incl. support, expectations & confrontations, etc., not revealing the identity of either party until the end (we’re building curiosity and tension here).
According to my client, the panel was clearly pulled into his story and anxiously waiting for the finale!
It wasn’t what they expected!
He was NOT the model boss. He was the difficult, sometimes disruptive and often challenging employee whose life had been turned around by a great leader!
A Story with an unexpected Outcome
Life, we know is NOT a Hollywood film. He didn’t get that job. He described afterwards the look of “horror” in some faces when he dropped the bomb at the end.
But that interview marked, he told me, a major turning point for him. He finally owned a hidden part of him that he’d kept well hidden in his career. It was the part that made him a REAL human.
And I helped him own that story!
That’s why I do what I do.
PS
He was offered a very suitable job three job interviews later. We kept tweaking his presentation for each interview and he kept me posted on the different reactions to his ‘plot twist.’ When he was offered the job an hour after the interview, he got the external confirmation for what he himself knew and believed: “They saw the value of my experience for the role they had to fill. And they got me as a person”.
Getting Your Tagline Right: Why it Matters
Getting your tagline right is one of the essential steps to connecting your business with the clients looking for what you do. That means when potential clients read it, they know they are in the right place and they are curious to find out more.
Here’s what I’ve learned about getting your tagline right from helping my clients. The advice itself it simple. However, implementing it is not always straightforward. So, to help you make the task easier, here’s my guideline to the essential Dos and Don’ts.
Your Tagline tells the reader, “This is for YOU!”
What exactly is your tagline?
Whether it’s on your website, your social media channels, or PR material, it’s the short message that tells the reader, “This is for You”! On your website it’s the banner beside your company name and logo. Getting the tagline right is all about getting these three elements synchronised to communicate the same message, to expand on and compliment each other and to create a clear, unified visual and written message about your business.
The essential Don’ts
A few warning shots on what to avoid when trying to get your tagline right
Let’s begin by removing those elements that muddle and confuse the reader.
- Drop the jargon and the buzzwords. We’ve heard these terms millions of times already and they numb our senses. Listen to how your potential clients describe what they want. That’s your best guide to knowing what will resonate with them when they read it.
- Don’t try to be clever or catchy. Instead of trying to impress, go for clear, simple words that make it easy for the audience to immediately understand the message.
- The shorter the better! A tagline should be between 3 and 7 words. (8 is not a crime!). Remember the wise words of Francois Fenelon: “The more you say, the less people remember.”
- Avoid vagueness. That means avoid a general slogan-type tagline, such as this one from a Health Coach: Enrich your life, health and well-being. (How do I know what this person offers: fitness classes, dietary advice, mindfulness courses, etc.?) Or this one from a graphic designer: Helping you run a successful business. (There are many skills needed to run a successful business, e.g. financial planning, marketing strategies to technical organisation, etc.)
The purpose of your tagline is to connect you with potential clients and start a conversation
The essential ingredients of your tagline
Your tagline is there to let the visitors know that they’re in the right place, i.e. you are the person or company that will help them get what they want. Like every message, its purpose is to connect you with potential clients and start a conversation.
To do that successfully your tagline has to answer the following questions the visitors are asking as they click and scroll. Remember, they want the answers immediately!
1. Who is this person/company?
2. What does this person/company do exactly?
3. Do they solve a problem that I have and/or provide an outcome that I want?
The name and logo (and in some cases the photo) should provide a basic answer to the first question.
Your tagline (together with complimentary images and headlines on your website) answers the other two, which also defines your ideal client.
How to get your tagline right
There are formulas that help you get started, that get you thinking about what exactly you do and for whom. They provide you with the raw material that you then tweak and edit to make it resonate with your potential clients and make it easy for them to feel it’s about them.
I use this simple formula to get the thinking juices flowing for my clients:
I help ______________ (define your ideal clients) who struggle with _________________ (state the problem you solve for them) get this outcome (describe the benefit of working with you).
Here are a few examples of simple, specific taglines, tweaked for the message and the audience, that skip the guessing games:
From a chiropractor’s website: Backpain relief for those who sit at work
It’s simple, clear and catches the attention of someone who needs this kind of therapy.
A dating site for women: Finding your soul-mate for divorced women over 50
A website designer: Websites that work! It’s short and it captures what everyone wants from their website – it does the job it’s designed to do.
This speaks to a specific kind of clients who can recognise themselves in the tagline instantly.
A final word on getting your tagline right
Like you business, your tagline is always evolving, so make sure to revise and update it as required.
Learn More
Stories create Common Ground
In a world becoming increasingly polarised between us vs them, right vs wrong, etc., we’ve lost sight of what connects us to each other. Our stories create the common ground that allow us to connect with each other.
It’s easy to have our attention diverted by the stories of division and difference peddled by various news platforms 24/7. These stories blind us to seeing what is so important and so very simple. We have far more in common with each other than divides us.
Where do we put our focus?
What can we do to make that change? We can shift our focus away from staring at how wide the divide is between us. Instead we can look for the stories that create the common ground ground we all share; the common ground that is right in front of our noses if we took the time to look.
While this might seem an impossible task right now as the fractures between us seem to grow wider and deeper every day. It’s actually not that difficult once we choose our starting point.
We can begin by focusing on the stories we tell, the stories we listen to, the stories we share and re-share, the stories we decide to own, ignore or discard. What are those stories about? Are they stories that celebrate our common humanity – the common ground we all share? Or, are they stories that pitch us against each other and highlight our differences and disagreements?
Stories are the common ground
The writer Kate Forsyth nails how stories can make or unmake us, can build bridges or widen the divide between us:
“Stories are the common ground that allow people to connect, despite all our defences and all our differences.”
What if we started to REALLY listen to the other’s stories and talk TO each other – the essence of real dialogue? We could discover a simple, obvious truth. We all nurture the same fundamental desires – for love, security, fulfilment, healthy + wellbeing, happiness, …
What if we first identified the common ground we share and then work on narrowing the gaps on how we want to reach our shared human desires. These are the experiences that make the stories we tell each other?
Story is not a stand-alone solution
Contrary to the hype, story is not a stand-alone solution for all communication problems in the business world. Story is part of an interdependent trio in which each part is reliant on the other to create a successful synergy.
The Three-legged Stool
To implement story as part of an interdependent trio, think of story as one leg of a three-legged stool. Story engages the heart and emotions. Our head or logic is the second leg of the stool. Our hands represent the practical application of combining head and heart. When the three legs are aligned, the stool is solid and stable. If one of the legs is weak or misaligned, the stool wobbles and is unstable.
The Two-legged Stool
Not very long ago, the business world relied on facts and stats to convince potential clients to buy. The reasoning being, people make decisions based on logic alone – if the factual information adds up, then the correct decision can be made. If we weren’t ‘ready’ to make a decision, then we just got more facts and data until we were.
However, neuroscience showed us that the decision-making process is not based on logic alone. Once we have sufficient information, it is our emotions, our gut feeling, or our intuition that play a pivotal role in making a decision. It would seem we humans are indeed three-legged stools and each leg contributes to a steady, stable stool.
One of the spin-offs of these science-based insights is re-discovering story as a powerful business tool. Not only did storytelling help translate facts and stats into easily digestible information, it humanised how we do business by creating human-based contexts in which to connect.
The Science of Storytelling
Whether through video, image and text, there is ample evidence of the neurological effects of storytelling on our brain. Telling or listening to a story stimulates a range of chemical responses and cortex activities which aid memory and support easy identification. This process is often referred to as Neural Story Net (NSN). It illustrates how the brain turns arbitrary information into a story that makes sense to the individual.
That’s why businesses raced to embrace storytelling because science proved that it does what no amount of facts can do. Storytelling inspires and motivates us to act, i.e. to change our behaviour. The popular catchphrase that quickly ruled showed us exactly the nature of ‘change’ the business world craved: “Story sells!”
Marketers queued up to show us how ‘compelling’ stories make our service or product ‘irresistible’. What exactly should we not resist? Our logic?
Does that mean we by-pass the head and go straight from the heart to the hands?
The Danger of Creating a Direct Link between Emotions and Behaviour
Science shows how story supports the way we process facts to make sense of the the myriad of information presented to us, via our neural story network. However, the business world also saw an opportunity to instrumentalise storytelling for pragmatic purposes.
It does this in two different and often intersecting ways.
- It’s an opportunity to short-circuit data, and create a direct line between our emotional response and our hands. Story now directly influences our behaviour by ignoring the facts. Suddenly we celebrate the heart as king. It provides us with a direct route to creating change, glorified in the new catchphrase: “Change your story, change the world.” Did anyone question either the nature of the planned change or the integrity of the story?
- It also saw the potential of implementing the Neural Story Net via its limitations to influence and misrepresent the facts. By prioritising the outcome, facts became malleable material to be shaped into ‘compelling’ stories to manipulate the audience. (The world of politics provides endless examples of how certain groups create ‘alternative’ facts to fit an ideological story and influence outcomes)
How to Avoid this Subtle and Dangerous Manipulation of Story
It’s easy to say that we should always interrogate the intention behind the story and double-check the facts. But the task of fact checking is becoming more difficult and less reliable in our changing social media landscape. The advancement of artificial neural network (a branch of AI) now has the capacity to craft stories according to algorithms.
We don’t know what the future holds. However, one step to retaining our autonomy as storytellers is to remember that story is part of an interdependent trio. We should choose the three-legged stool model, always questioning the integrity of our intentions and use whatever reliable means we have available to double check the facts.
Another is of course to engage in dialogue – as opposed to monologue. I’ve written about the benefits of dialogue as interactive communication here. While dialogue is not a cure-all solution for our communication problems, it does help us safeguard our autonomy and integrity.
Learn More
Simple Stories: Why they are so effective in business communication
Stories are key to effective business communication. They engage us emotionally, facilitate better understanding, create meaning and build personal, trustworthy connections. Simple stories amplify all these benefits.
Simplicity: A Navigation Tool in a Complex World
How do simple stories help us communicate more effectively in an increasingly complex and confusing world?
Simplicity is our best navigation tool for many reasons:
- On a practical level, ‘simple’ is user-friendly, i.e. it’s shorter; quicker; it’s easier to remember, understand, evaluate and use
- It’s the outcome of a process that distils complexity into its essentials – without stripping it of substance to create a simplistic, dumbed-down version
- It helps us easily recognise new ideas, systems, products, brands in an increasingly overwhelming and confusing marketplace
Simple Stories Simplify Communication
Simple stories are not just shorter stories. They clarify and refine complex ideas and data, making it easier for an audience to engage with what is being communicated and eventually act on it. The great physicist, Albert Einstein, gave us advice on how to do just that: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
We are complex human beings who live in an increasingly complex world, so our task is to make complexity simple, not simplistic! Simplistic is a when we dilute the substance of our message to the point that it can be consumed without reflection or question.
Editing, organising and sharpening our ideas are part of a skills-set we can develop and then improve with practice. The benefits of investing time and effort to learn these skills are huge. By making complex material ‘user-friendly’, i.e. simpler, you create immediate access to it, which in turn makes it more relatable, relevant and applicable.
That’s a huge part of my job. When clients present me with a 3/4-page document, I help them create a 2/3-sentence back-story, or a brand stories or a personal profile statement. The work is first of all finding the pattern in all the detail: it’s the pattern that connects it all together. Then creating the simple story to illustrate that pattern.
How to Tell Simple Stories
I. The Story Structure
The structure needs to be simple if you want your story to be simple. That’s easier said than done when most storytelling courses and workshops present beginners with needlessly complex diagrams and structures, while at the same time assuring us we’re all natural-born storytellers!
The story structure is the container for what happens: the details of who, what, when, why, how. The structure creates a pattern that helps us grasp and remember those details. The simplest structure and easiest one to use is created around a linear, temporal pattern:
Before – Turning Point – After
II. The Storytelling Structure
Once we have our story structure we then need a structure to tell that story. The same rule also applies here: the simpler the storytelling structure, the easier it is to communicate the story and the easier it is to receive it.
The most natural and effective structure to communicate information is the one we use every day – conversation, or dialogue. Dialogue is about reciprocal exchange, response and interaction, as opposed to the monologue, which is a one-way form of communication.
Another characteristic of telling simple stories is using simple language. That means getting rid of the jargon and the buzzwords because they act as a barrier to real connection. Replace them with personal, straightforward, simple language that supports and promotes human-to-human connection. Use the same language you would use in a conversation with a good friend.
The Benefits for Business of Making it Simple
How does keeping it simple actually translate into better outcomes for businesses?
The simplicity-index surveys show that simplicity pays. The top brands globally and nationally all share the common feature of offering their customers a simple experience that is communicated as simply as possible. Here’s how Ben Osborn from Siegel+Gale puts it:
“Our research shows us that 55% of consumers are willing to reward brands that make their lives simpler – and penalise those that do not. Simplicity is an important metric for the communications industry because empathy is the cornerstone of the contract between creators and consumers.”
If simplicity pays, how do we recognise it in how other brands communicate and then implement it in our own communication? Start by asking yourself this question:
Do I consciously choose to communicate in a way that is simple, honest, transparent and personal for my audience?
Isn’t it time to simplify?
Learn More