How to Attract and Convert More Clients through Story with Lisa Bloom

In this episode, Lisa Bloom shared the power of storytelling in communication, specifically how it can help in creating and launching a successful online training program. She emphasized the importance of authenticity in storytelling and how it can create a deeper connection and trust with the audience. She also mentioned how a lack of storytelling can make communication feel transactional or inauthentic.

Lisa also mentioned how a lack of storytelling can make communication feel transactional or inauthentic. She also shared her knowledge on how to use stories to articulate. What you do in a way that attracts clients. And how to get clear and confident about how your business helps other people. And to achieve what you’re really here to do in the world.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest today, her name is Lisa Bloom. She’s from story dash coach.com. We’re gonna get into the incredible power of story today, just to help you in your life. But also to help you and your courses to understand what you’re doing, how to communicate better. Welcome to the show, Lisa,

Lisa Bloom: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to get into it with you. I was on your website. And I noticed the first part about using story to succeed is to articulate what you do in a way that attracts your clients to get clear and confident about how your business helps other people. And then to achieve what you’re really here to do in the world. So those are all like, awesome. But just to frame it in. What is the story advantage? And you also have a book by that title that people should check out like what? What does that mean? Like when we really harness the story? What does that unlock?

Lisa Bloom: I think you know, the most powerful thing about story is its ability to connect you with others. And to build trust without even trying. So when you tell a story that’s compelling that the person listening feels, you know, they want to listen, they just want to they want to hear you get this engagement level that’s like no other. And people begin to identify with the story and therefore identify with you as the storyteller. That builds an incredible connection between you and the, you know, you and your audience. And, you know, they instinctively trust you because you’re telling a story that feels real. And of course, I have to have this caveat in place that this is not the story that tries to manipulate people to do the things you want them to do.

Right, this is the real story. It’s an authentic story of your experience, or a story that moves you. A story that you feel connected to, even if it’s not your own story, but it’s somebody else’s with permission that you’re telling that level of authenticity, you can’t fake it. And when it’s there, it builds this incredibly memorable experience for the listener. So we we come away from an experience like that.

We we really mull over the story, we think about it, we’re connected to we remember it. And maybe we don’t remember the details of the story, but we don’t remember how it made us feel. And so there’s something very deep happening. I’ve had situations where people have literally years later, come back to me and reminded me of a story that I told that I’ve even forgotten. I told her I’d forgotten I met the person but they had remembered the story.

Chris Badgett: For like a course creator or coach type person, what does it look like when we’re communicating without story? Like, what’s what’s missing? Or what is it? You know, what does that look like?

Lisa Bloom: Well, there’s a few ways it can look, I mean, one way it can look fairly transactional. So it doesn’t feel like there’s a connection between you and you know, that, that it’s really about just kind of pure business. But the other way it can look is it can feel to kind of practiced and perfect and not authentic. So you hear people who have this perfect sentence that they built around what they do, you know, I, you know, I offer this to this type of type person or, you know, whatever that transformational sentences, and it feels kind of like the sentence you’d hear from lots of other people who do the same thing.

So I used to go to these coaching conferences, because as a coach, and I would say to people, what do you do, and they say, Oh, I’m a coach, and I work with people who want to transform their lives, or whatever it is. And I would hear blabbity blabbity, blah, you know, really nice, smart people who had a lot to offer. I love coaches, and they’re doing great things in the world. And yet the language just would leave me feeling completely cold.

But when I would dig in and say, oh, so tell me more about that. Tell me about your How did you get into it? How’d you get started? What’s your story? Suddenly, I would hear these incredible things. And I would think to myself, Why didn’t you say in the first place, and I would have been engaged from the first moment. I wouldn’t have had to dig deep to find out who you are. And so I started to help people do that to discover what is the story that can connect them to the prospect to the potential client. And when they started telling those stories, suddenly, the magic happened in their business.

Chris Badgett: I have a nuanced question for you. If you’re an expert or a coach, or you’re you’re trying to help somebody, how does the story of the expert interact with the story of the client or the customer? Because there’s like two stories there. We’re on our own story paths. How does how does the resonance happen there between those two stories?

Lisa Bloom: Well, there’s a few things here. Firstly, what you know, in order to become an expert, you’ve experienced certain things, oftentimes the pain that has, you know, transformed you into the expert. If people who have, you know, for example, let’s say. I don’t know, weight loss coach, oftentimes there are people who have struggled in their life with their health and wellness. And so when they talk about their struggle that connects with the prospective client, but they also talk about how they’ve transformed their struggle, that’s the next part of their story. And that becomes inspiring for the client for the prospect. So our stories connect on the basis of us being willing to open up to the places that we’ve experienced pain and struggle, but also to continue to talk about what we’ve done about it and have, we’ve managed to somehow get beyond that.

And we only have to be a little bit of head of our clients to be able to inspire them to take those next steps. So I think that’s the first part. But the other part as well is that, you know, we need to tell the stories that resonate with our audience. Because if it doesn’t resonate, if it’s not relevant to them, it’s just not interesting. So if we become the hero of our own story, then we’re, we’re telling stories for the mirror, you know, we’re telling stories for our ego, what we have to do is tell a story that helps the audience identify themselves as the hero, the potential for what they can become, that becomes the hero, and then suddenly, it’s like, it’s about them.

So if you’re telling a story, because you need to tell it, because you need it for your own well being or for your own ego, or whatever it may be, or for your own healing. And that’s a story you need to tell but it’s not in business, you need to tell it to your, your therapist, or your partner or your your friends, the story you need to tell in your business is the story that serves the audience that you want to serve that you want to connect with, you want to be there for. And that becomes a very transformational experience for them.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What do you say to people that have self worth around, or self worth or impostor syndrome around the value of the story of their lives? Or they feel like they don’t have enough for it to make a good story? What would you say to people like that?

Lisa Bloom: What can I tell a little story? Yeah, please do. I’ve done a lot of work in corporate over the years. And I remember going into a corporate client. And the minute I walked in the door, she said to me, oh, Lisa, we had an amazing Inspirational Speaker yesterday, it was this guy who he was a fighter jet pilot, and he had to eject from his plane, and he crash landed, and he ended up, you know, in a coma for six months. Then he woke up. And then he did this, and then did that and became an Olympic athlete, and, you know, this incredible story. And I said to him, you know, I’m thinking. Wow, that’s awesome and I knew of the speaker and I said to her, you know, that’s, he’s, I know that this guy’s incredible.

I’ve heard he’s a brilliant speaker. And I suffer. But to be honest, I’m much more interested in the small stories and the little stories of our day to day lives, because they’re the things that our audience can relate to. And they’re the things that actually matter in our lives, and that people feel connected to people who feel like well, I don’t have a story, you don’t have to have a, you know, jump out of an airplane near death experience, in order to have an interesting story.

You have to have insight into the these incredibly magical moments that happen every day in our lives. That a lot of times, we’re just, we just don’t notice. And I remember years and years ago, one of my first coaches I ever hired to help me with my business. She said to me, Lisa, if you want to build an audience, you got to tell a story every week, and you got to send it out in a newsletter. And my first response was, you know, my host is not that interesting. You know, I’m a mother, I’ve got a bunch of kids, I, you know, I live an ordinary life.

I’m trying to build a business, I’m trying to be a coach, like, There’s nothing interesting there. And she said, always, I trust you. And from that day on, I wrote a blog of a story. I told a story every week for 10 years, religiously, I did not miss a week. And I discovered in the tiny moments, the amazing potential for story for compelling story. I built an audience of 1000s of people over the years, because people were waiting to hear the story every week.

And again, it’s not that my life got any more interesting. My life was still an ordinary life, like most people live, it’s still his. But I honed into those, what I call these pivotal moments, there’s moments in life, where something happens, that slightly changes us where something happens, it’s unexpected. And the world feels a little bit different after than it was before. And that’s the seed. That’s the potential for great story. And when you can hone into those moments and tell them as a story. You capture people because they’re moments that they recognize in their life, that they’re probably missing too.

So you don’t need to have had this crazy exciting, you know, amazing experiences in your life to tell and sometimes when you do, they’re less compelling than the little moments. Yeah, so and it’s very, very common. People say that to me all the time. But I assure them that it’s the most compelling stories or the interesting little moments that we almost missed that are so proud. shows that we should be able to capture them.

Chris Badgett: How do you? What are what’s your story around getting so into story? Like, how did you end up here helping people in this way?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, I so so there’s a kind of a I think the reality is I was always interested in story. I was an avid reader from a very early age, I used to steal my mother’s book club books. And she was in a book club and I would secretly read all her books. I always love story. And I had a vivid story based imagination as a child. I grew up in Ireland, I grew up in a Jewish family. So I sound genetically predisposition to be connected to story being Irish Jewish.

But aside from that, I think that I just, I was always interested in you know, I studied literature, I studied film, and I was I was always interested in story, I was always moved by story. And I was the kid of boys went to my, the older members of my family, my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, and would say to them, so what was it like when, you know, what was it like when you when you were living here, or when you grew up there, or when you got married, I was always interested in that.

As I got older, I kind of let it go. For many years, I went into business, I went into, you know, to university, Business, School, whatever. But I was always fascinated by stories. And I began to see the potential for story, as I went into my own business, and realized that people were just not very good at talking about what they do in a compelling way. And at the same time, I trained as a professional storyteller. So I went through, you know, I kind of fell in love with it. And I remember the day. I went to my first professional storytelling event, and I walked into the room, and I had this amazing feeling like the walls were shaking like, this is this is who I am, this is what I do.

And I didn’t know it was called this. And I think that’s an experience that many people have, and in lots of things that they do, you know, they become a coach, and like, oh, that’s what I’ve been doing in my life. I didn’t realize or they build a course and like education, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And I think being able to identify that moment where you’re passionate about something, and then share it with somebody. Firstly, that’s a gift to you. It’s a gift to them, but it’s also a great story. Yeah, that answers the question. But that’s, that’s where I’ve got to Yeah,

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What about story structure? Like, how does somebody kind of put some framing around what to say? Or what? What to tell? I mean, we have lots of stories. So there’s kind of like these big meta stories and these small stories, like you mentioned in your newsletter, from the day to day, how do we structure a story if we feel like we don’t know how to tell one?

Lisa Bloom: So I think that, you know, there’s lots of different theories of story structure. And, you know, stories have to have a middle and, you know, beginning, middle and end. And they have to have, you know, there’s all these different structures, you can look up story structure, you know, get all the models in the world, you know, look it up and do it or whatever. What, to me what’s interesting as you have a person who’s experiencing a challenge, and something happens, that shifts their experience, they may be experiencing a challenge, or they may be, they may not be, they may be in some kind of status quo, but something happens.

And that’s the pivotal moment concept, something happens, that changes them emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, whatever. And as a result of that, there’s an outcome. That outcome sets them on a different trajectory, what’s important about the characters, we need to care about them, they need to be somebody that, for some reason matters. I remember years ago, I was creating a story for an event. I would often test my stories out on my kids. And I remember saying, telling the story to my son, and I, and he said to me, he said to me, I don’t really care about her. I said, Oh, really why? and he said, I don’t know.

I don’t care. Like maybe she needs to be an orphan or something. This is my my kid. And he was like, 12, at the time of 14 at the time. And I said, Really, she was been always it was something bad has to happen. So I can relate to her. Because if she’s just some Princess, like, what do I care? Who am I related to? You know? So I realized in that moment, it’s years and years ago, I remember realizing, we have to feel some connection to the protagonist to care about what happens to them. And then what happens to them, we’re invested, and we want to know, and we want to learn something. So that’s kind of the way the story will flow.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do we think about story in marketing? I mean, I know we can do like a video video seems kind of like a natural medium for storytelling. But there’s also like, if we have a sales page, and we’re using words, like how do we integrate features and benefits with story?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s opportunities to use stories in lots of different ways in marketing, as you said, in a sales page, for sure. I mean, they’re in the flow of the sales page, whether it’s a long page or a short page, you’ve always got an opportunity to to to tell a story of a past client or somebody who you’ve worked with, or your own story to show the transformational potential of the work you’re going to do with them. And ideally, on any given sales page, you would have several of those stories embedded in the page. Stories are also articulated through testimonials.

So they’re in the words of your client to talk about what you know, what was the before, what was the after, and what happened to make that happen, which was obviously the work they did with you. So we have opportunities to use stories. And people are often mistaken, where they think that well, if I give a one line of here’s the results, you know, such and such a person made $10,000 from doing this, this particular, you know, process that I taught them, that’s not a story.

But if you talk about the person, and you give them some character, and you talk about what they were struggling with, and who they were, where they lived, and what they look like, and what their problem was, and you kind of really give some life to the individual, and then you talk about, people get invested, they, you know, they can see the person, then they feel like, okay, I care about what happens to them.

And then when you understand what they’ve struggled with, and then you see their outcome, they celebrate with them, and they’re really impacted by the story. So you can’t just give a one liner of the results, people make that mistake and think that’s the story that you have to actually have to build it out a little bit and get people invested in get people to care. Like, why did I care about that person? Like my son didn’t care about the Princess, you know, why should I care? And then once you’ve embedded that, then people are impacted by it.

Chris Badgett: Do you have like an example or to have like a coach or course creator whose story or their ability to deliver it is so good and powerful that the success of their business was pretty inevitable, or it just worked really well. Like somebody that just just so we could look kind of look at a great story example, of transformation that just magnetizes and attracts people and that whatever that niche or pain is,

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is the person who, you know, the coach, excuse me, a health and wellness coach, who I always come back to this example. Because I could really relate to it, it was a person who was involved in a corporate career for many. Many years, I started out in corporate and, and she was climbing the corporate ladder, and was doing really well and was kind of piling on the pounds every year without really noticing. But as a person who as a young person, she was a swimmer, and she would run and so on she, over the years, became less and less active, because she was in this huge corporate career and being extremely successful.

But she got to the point, midlife where she began to feel like I become this different person, I’m successful. And yet I feel horrible, you know, and my body feels horrible. My energy levels are horrible, and, you know, eating junk food or not moving, I’m feeling awful. And then she started that incredible journey that most people go through where, you know, they try the diets, and they try the routines, they, you know, they try all these different things. And it just helped her add on more and more pounds. But ultimately, she did find a way as a particular system.

And that system, got her through, she lost, you know, 30 pounds, she became active. She became, she just really did phenomenally well. And most importantly, managed to maintain it for a few years. That coincided with her realizing that’s that journey she went through was so much more meaningful than anything she could have achieved in her corporate career. And so she made the choice to leave corporate and to become a health and wellness coach and now works with women in that field to do a similar thing to go on a similar journey that she went on. And that story, which is like, you know, she she lived and she understands that she gets it so perfect for the niche that she chose that it was just incredibly compelling and she became very, very successful with the story.

When she started out. She was like, Oh, I’m so new to coaching How am I ever going to, you know, be credible, like what he told me your life is credible, you know, or another one, a woman who she she had a excuse me, she had like this blended family. Her partner had a couple of kids and she had a couple of kids and got together had a few kids and it was kind of like a Brady Bunch scenario. And years later got really, really interested in parenting advice and studied coaching and parenting, whatever, and went into sort of putting together parenting groups. And she was somebody also Kenton said, you know, I have to build my credibility and I have to figure out like how I’m going to convince people that I know what I’m doing. It’s just like, you’ve got so many stories.

You’ve got a lifetime the last 15 years of bringing up these kids from all these in this way and building up a successful family and reaching out to your friends and your family and helping them with their have issues and families. And it was only when she leaned into her own stories and the stories of the people that she’d actually interacted with throughout the years, that she built up the confidence and the kind of repertoire that she could share it with people, that just the credibility and the trust was there, it was embedded.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you have any advice for people that may have stage fright around telling their story, particularly, especially if it involves some like, vulnerability or, you know, talking publicly about something they’re not used to talking about?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah. So I suffer from stage fright pretty seriously, which is crazy. Seeing as I’m, I’ve been a speaker for the last 15 years. And I’ve spoken on stages across the world. But I still suffer from stage fright. And I have a process that really helps me and I’m, you know, it’s it’s solid, and it works. So I still get scared, but I still managed to do it. And that’s fine. But I think one of the things that is a mistake that’s out there is people think you have to be vulnerable, in order to, in order to, to appeal to people. vulnerability has its place.

And vulnerability is super important, but not for the sake of vulnerability. I think that’s an important distinction, you shouldn’t be vulnerable, because you have to be vulnerable. And you should never tell a story that you’re not ready to share. So I’m, I’m pretty much an open book, and I, you know, tell stories about pretty much everything. But I still they’re sitting there that don’t talk about because I’m not ready to share them because they’re too personal. Or it would make me feel unsafe in some ways or another. And I think everybody is in that situation, there’s nothing worse than listening to somebody tell a story that is pushing them beyond the place that they’re comfortable, because it’s really uncomfortable for the audience. It’s inappropriate, and it feels almost abusive, it’s really not a good thing.

So I think the first thing you have to do is think about what am I ready to share this story? And more importantly than that, than Am I ready to share the stories is the story of service to others? Does this story serve people to a certain end and to an end that serves the reason I’m here in the first place? And if the answer to that is yes, great. Like, let’s figure out how to get yourself to a comfortable place. And part of it is to be able to create a distance between the experience and, and how you feel about it and to understand the transformation in the experience. So for many, many years, my father died very, very suddenly, and I couldn’t talk about it for three years I couldn’t talk about it was just too painful.

And there was a certain point in time when I realized. Actually, the story that I was telling about his death was holding me back about, you know, how unfair it was how awful it was a sudden that was, you know, traumatic it was. When I flipped that story and started talking about him as a person. I was able to talk about him and tell stories about him in a way that felt wonderful. And people would say to me, gosh, if I didn’t know he passed away. I think he lived down the street. And it never held me back anymore. And it felt vulnerable.

Because yes, this is a part of who I am and what I care about. And part of my my personal life. But if it’s relevant to the audience, that I share something about him or about my experience of, of telling his story. Then I’m going to do it because it serves the audience. And I have enough distance and enough ability to tell my own, like that inner story to myself. Because you have to remember the average story, the story we tell others is always dependent on the inner story, the story we tell ourselves.

And if they’re not integrated, well, then we kind of get lost, we tell stories that feel inauthentic, or we tell stories that are oversharing and are over vulnerable. And we have to get them back that balance, right and that balance is created by really doing the work on our inner story. What’s the story? We’re telling yourself about the situation? Are we ready to tell it to others in a way that will feel safe, and feel powerful, and most importantly, inform them and inspire them and be relevant for them?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If somebody’s kind of separating out story to like, okay, maybe I’ll write a biography or memoir one day, and they just kind of keep work in personal and separate buckets. Can you speak to that and like why maybe an integrated approach might be beneficial?

Lisa Bloom: I think we can’t help it to be honest. Like I think our own life experience will show that it’s very difficult to separate and compartmentalize our life into all these places. And I think that people do it but I think what they do is. They create much more transactional relationships and their work than the people who are a little bit more fluid in the way they move in and out of their stories. I feel that being authentic and sharing a part of yourself Alf, is as much of a gift to you as it is to your client. But it creates relationships.

And I think in a world where trust is a commodity that’s hard to come by. I mean, you know, I always say once upon a time, you could trust everything you can trust the banks and the government and the church. And however, you know, it was, it was easy. We can’t trust very much anymore, we can’t even trust our own health or public health. We’ve gone through and, you know, the level of communication and information is so broad. That it’s really hard to know what we can and can’t trust nowadays. But we can trust authentic story. And we can trust the connection of the personal and the business, if it feels real, because as I said before, you can’t fake authenticity. And that builds trust, and that is really good for business.

So I would like to think that anybody who I’ve ever done business with has trusted me that I’m going to take care of them. When I work with them. And if they, if ever the trust gets broken, then that relationship can’t grow. And that means, you know, pretty soon it’s going to separate and there’s not going to be any more business interaction. I think that if you’re not willing to bring yourself your true self. Your true authentic self into the business situation. You’re losing out.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If we put our instructional design hat on, like, as a course creator, let’s say we’re making some content. And it’s known in like schools and universities the value of like a case study to, which is a story to teach a point or further elaborate it. If you’re if we’re teaching, like a process or something. How, as an instructional designer, should we think about the mix of theory and story like, within content? Am I? It makes sense?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, totally. And I spent a lot of time working in. You know, I do a lot of work with organizations around story. And I’ve worked a lot with the big kind of corporate. You know, the computer scientists and the coders and everything and the engineers, for whom story is ridiculous. It’s just not something that I used to feel comfortable with. But what I always say to them is, at the end of the day, every process is impacting a user. And every user is a human being. And the human being has a human experience, the story speaks to the human experience. So every process that we design is going to, you know, it’s going to ultimately impact behavior.

So we need to tell the stories about that behavior. And we need to tell the stories about the people who are using and building and designing and ultimately being impacted by the process or by the system. And that’s what happens, people rely upon information, they they feel safe and information. If I give them lots and lots of information, though, they’ll know what to do. And they’ll know how to make a decision.

But in reality, we make decisions based on our emotions. All the time based on how we feel in this situation. So if we can speak to that in our instructional design, then that’s it’s not instead of the process or the or the tech piece. But it adds on to it and it brings it alive and apart from anything else that makes it more interesting. Courses that are completely devoid of story are really hard to get through. Because they’re just not that interesting.

Chris Badgett: All that? Is there a place for made up stories like parables?

Lisa Bloom: Well, you know, you’ve touched on an important point for me. Because as a traditional storyteller, and professional, traditional storyteller, I love everything to do with fairy tales and folk tales. And in fact, I have a podcast called Once upon a business. And what I do is I take fairytales and folktales, and then I get interpret the lesson for business. Oh, that’s so yeah. So that’s a place if you want to, you know, if anybody listening wants to get a taste for, like, how, how would a fairy tale impact business, that’s the place to go. And there’s a bunch I don’t know, there’s like 2025. We just started it last year 2025 episodes where each episode has a story. And then we talk about the lesson for entrepreneurs and for coaches, and for course, builders.

I think there’s a lot of space. Because these stories are, these are age old stories that have come through all the different types of communities and cultures, to bring us lessons. And stories that one are incredibly compelling that we remember all our life. But also they teach lessons that are just as relevant today as they were hundreds of years ago when they were first created. So yes, I love using them. It’s not for everybody, that people that I’ve taught storytelling to over the years. Some people are like, I never want to use a fairy tale and that’s fine. I personally think they’re so rich and there’s so layered. And there’s so much meaning embedded in them that it’s a fantastic source of inspiration.

Chris Badgett: How about as a business person, social media and stories like whether it’s Tik Tok or Facebook or YouTube or whatever, there’s kind of like the business stories we can tell. But there’s also like just sharing personal life to resonate with behind the scenes content. But how I mean, it’s any tips on social media because it can be somewhat overwhelming and what you’ve kind of already mentioned. Like things to share things did not share, but any just tips around social?

Lisa Bloom: Well, I think with social at the end of the day, oftentimes we’re interested in social. Because we’re interested in seeing the behind the scenes version, right. So social is a lot of behind the suppose it behind the scenes, actually. And that’s what the authenticity comes along, because it’s supposed to be behind the scenes. But it’s so practiced, you know. I think that when we tell personal stories, or we share these snippets of our personal life, or our personal experience. It’s what draws attention. At the end of the day is social media, there’s so much out there, it can be overwhelming.

But if we can tune in on something that’s memorable. Then we’re going to have impact and stories are what we remember. So yes, the challenge is always like. How do I tell a story and however many minutes or however many words that were limited by in social media. But I always think with story, less is more anyway. We want to be very careful about telling a story in a very specific and exact way. And stories can be as simple as one sentence, there can be whole story embedded in a sentence.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s in the book, The Story advantage?

Lisa Bloom: What’s the book? Well, there’s lots in the book. You know, firstly, there’s lots of stories in there. Every chapter starts with a story. So that’s fun.

Chris Badgett: Quick question on that, like for, like, let’s say a lesson about learning, like a lesson in a course, do you think it’s better to put the story at the beginning? Or after the theory? You just said in your book? Or maybe there’s a place for both, but just any tips there?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, it kind of depends, like, I think stories at the beginning, like, for example, for speaking engagements. So for live training, I always put a story at the beginning. Because it grabs people’s attention, and then you have their engagement. And they’re much more willing to be open to learn something if they’re fully engaged. So I’ll often start with a story. But when I’m teaching something, oftentimes I’ll use a story as a way to, to, to give an example. So that so that you teach something, and people kind of get it theoretically. And then when you put the example of this, like, oh, okay, that’s how it works. And then they really embed the learning.

So it can work both ways. It just depends in every situation like what’s, and this is part of the process. And it’s in the book, by the way of understanding like, what is the intention that I’m putting into telling the story? What what intention do I have? What do I want to create as an outcome for the person listening or reading or, or learning from the story. And what’s my core message? And what you have to go through this process? It’s a five step process. It’s in the book all about understanding. Like, what is the way that we design the story that’s going to have the most impact in the moment?

And part of that five step process is what is the resistance people have to this story in this moment? And can I embed that resistance so that they know that I see them? I hear them? I feel them as I tell the story. So yeah, I mean, that’s part of what’s in the book. And we also look at like, how do you find your stories? How do you craft them? What are the ways to build out a story? What are all the elements of story? And ultimately, like, how do you tell a story in an effective way?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Lisa Bloom, she’s from story dash coach.com. Go check out her book, The Story advantage, you can find that on the website. And then once upon a business is the podcast anywhere else? The good people can connect with you, Lisa.

Lisa Bloom: They’re really the core places, the website, the podcast. And the book. Yeah, that’s it. I mean, I’m everywhere in social media. I’m not big into social media myself, it just kind of happens in the background. But the all the core content you can get from the site and the book and so on. So yeah, that’s where to find me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Lisa, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it.

Lisa Bloom: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com For slash gift go to lifterlms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.