Speaking and Communicating Podcast

It was the exact same thing as my internal story, but he told his internal story externally.

So the thing that he thought about himself, he told other people about it.

And sometimes, when you are able to tap into your own internal story, and you share with other people, you actually give them the freedom to escape the prison that they locked themselves in based on being a slave to their own story.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now let's get communicating.

With Chris Cannon, who is a business coach who will help us with storytelling, especially with positioning ourselves and how to use stories in order to elevate our businesses and also our personal lives.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Chris.

Hi.

Are you doing today?

I'm doing fantastic.

How are you?

I am great and getting better now that I'm here with you.

I love that.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for being here.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

So I am Chris Cannon.

I've done a lot of things business-wise.

I've been an entrepreneur my entire life and I've had a lot of failures.

And through my failures, I learned about the power of storytelling from the perspective that we have two different stories.

One of them is an external story, which a lot of people talk about.

But then the other one that I actually lived most of my life, we have internal stories.

And the internal stories are extremely powerful, but very few people focus on those.

But those are what really drives everything forward.

And through that realization, had a lot of different successes, you know, financial, spoken all across the country, things like that.

But I would tell anybody that my greatest success in life to this point is my marriage.

Like my marriage is my greatest success that I've ever accomplished throughout everything else, because I realized that when you have the right spouse and you have the right support system, it just makes everything else easier, more fulfilling, you know, great.

And it helps you to show up at a higher level for the people that you're meant to serve.

That's kind of me in a nutshell.

Absolutely love that.

Congratulations.

How long have you and your wife been married?

We've been married for 22 years.

Wow, people don't stay that long anymore.

Congratulations.

Or maybe they do.

It's almost because we're only here, but the famous ones will never stay together.

Congratulations.

That's awesome.

I love how you spoke about that.

When you talk about how your marriage is the support system and it helps you elevate, what story before meeting your wife and before getting married, what story did you tell yourself about marriage?

You know, that's a phenomenal question because I actually told myself two stories.

Number one story that I would never get married.

You know, I had this story in my mind of like, why would anybody want to get married and be with one person for the rest of their lives?

And then I had another story, you know, like this world is so negative, you know, and bad and dark.

Why would somebody be selfish enough to bring kids into this world?

So two things, I never wanted to get married, but I also didn't want to have kids.

At least that was a story I told myself.

And the reason why I told myself that story is because I never really seen any healthy relationships in my family, you know, people that were married, it wasn't a lot of them, but they didn't even like each other, you know.

And the people that I saw that were just in relationships, they weren't married and they really weren't committed.

And I just remember seeing as a kid all of these different like broken relationships and just thinking like, man, I don't want any of this.

The model that I did see of marriage is like, man, if marriage is like this, like I don't want marriage whatsoever.

Another story that I told myself in high school is that even though I didn't want to get married, I told myself that I was always going to stay faithful to three girls.

So in high school, I had three girlfriends, believe it or not, and I told myself.

I'm like, what are we talking about?

Yeah.

So in my mind, the story I was telling myself is that, you know, I'm going to have three girlfriends and I'm only going to be with those three, and I'm going to stay faithful to those three girls, and I'm not going to talk to anybody else.

Horrible story, if you would.

In your defense, I'm South African, and in my culture, you are allowed to have more than one wife.

And as long as they respect each other, they know each other, and you take care of them.

As long as you have the resources to take care of them.

And most importantly, you do stay faithful to those women.

You are married too.

I said this three of them like your girlfriends.

You will be faithful.

I know that any listener who's hearing a story and is thinking, faithful means one, dude, come on.

Yes, but I'm thinking on the other side, if you are South African, that will make total sense.

Listen, even in that culture, I did it all wrong because they didn't know about each other, and I couldn't support any of them with my lech money, so it still wouldn't have worked.

Then it's a no.

No, you don't qualify to be a poli-copic.

Anyway, go ahead.

Eventually, that blew up, so none of those relationships worked out.

And I just remember later on in life, just getting to a point where the story that I told myself sabotaged me from having great relationships, but more importantly, from having an overall great life.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, one of those three girls was actually my wife.

She and I ended up breaking up, and I remember when I was in 9th grade, my mom actually told me that she was going to be my wife.

And when we broke up, we went our separate ways.

We graduated from high school, went to college.

I just thought, how is that ever going to happen?

How are we ever going to get married because I messed it up and she's moved on?

Fast forward, we still remained friends over time.

And I remember she called me maybe about a year after I graduated from college.

It was no like trying to get back together.

It was strictly just friends.

And so I really valued her friendship.

We just remained friends for a couple of years.

And then she moved out of state.

And so I remember she visited.

You know, we just went out to eat, had a really good time.

And I started thinking to myself, like, maybe there's hope, but I'm not going to try to push anything or mess anything up.

And we just maintained a friendship, talked on the phone.

And then she came to visit another time.

You know, we're from the same area.

The next time she came in town, it was more like a date when we went out.

From there, you know, we started to talk a little bit more, and one thing led to another.

Within a year, we were actually married.

Because I knew for myself, when I messed up all of those years ago, if I ever got another chance, I would do right by her this time.

And my thinking was totally different.

Two of my stories were different.

The story that I started to tell myself at that time is, I've made a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes were all to help me to be the absolute best husband that I can be to her.

This time around, when we're together, that's kind of the story that I tell myself every single day.

And it's like, you know, we've been married for 22 years, but every day, I'm very intentional and conscious about being the absolute best husband that I can be for her, because she's an absolute phenomenal wife.

And I don't feel like I could have asked for anything better.

So I'm constantly saying intentional about being the best for her, because I feel like she's absolutely the best for me.

I absolutely love that.

And I'm just wondering, listening to you, how did you come to have that much self-reflection?

Through trauma.

And I say through trauma because, you know, I grew up with teen parents, my mother and my father were 13 and 14 when I was conceived.

I was labeled dyslexic.

You know, I failed the third grade almost twice.

My family really didn't expect me to be successful because of the labels and the teen parenting and all these kind of things.

And so I grew up with a lot of trauma.

It was a blessing when I think about it later on, but it was very traumatic and painful early on.

But the trauma caused me to be super conscious and super aware of everything around me because of the environments that I was in were very unpredictable, if you will.

And so it's like the level of consciousness that I maintain from a safety perspective, they never left me.

And eventually, they served me to be conscious of positive things as well.

Early on, it was just more so like survival, life and death, a lot of negative things.

And I think that's why I had the thought process, I didn't want children because it's like, why would I bring children into this dark negative world?

That would be selfish of me.

But that came from my trauma, but it also came from my awareness.

Because the thing about awareness is that sometime, if you have a negative awareness, anything you expect to see is always there.

If you expect to see positive, it's always there.

If you expect to see negative, it's always there.

So anything that you expect...

Life always proves you right, yeah.

It always proves you right.

From that trauma early on in my life, it just helped me to be super conscious and aware of various situations that I'm in.

And now it serves me to be self aware of my wife and just how I can be a better husband for her.

Right.

You mentioned earlier the internal and external story.

You explained to us the internal.

What's the external?

So the external story is what you hear a lot of other people talk about.

You know, like storytelling, the antidotes, the techniques, you know, the cadences, when to share different stories.

Because I help people to sell like high ticket offers through coaching or through storytelling, if you will.

And there's ways where you can actually use stories to sell.

There's ways where you can use stories like when you're interviewing.

There are stories where you can use it in the workplace to even distinguish yourself from everybody else.

Like those are all external stories, because those are things that you can tell somebody else.

But the internal story is what you tell yourself, and it's also what shows up in your behavior.

The internal story, correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Is that what we call facts?

You know how we say, oh, I'm broke, these are the facts, look at my bank account.

And then you have someone saying, oh no, but in order to manifest, don't look at your bank account, just think to yourself, I got $12 million, even though there's $2.76.

So what's the story behind that concept?

Because we always say, oh, but the facts are saying this, look at this, these are the numbers, and something different, you can tell the story of it, and that's how change happens.

Right, right.

So like an internal story is really what you tell yourself.

Like you hear people talk about negative head talk.

That's a form of stories, and sometimes like an internal story is also a truth that we create that's not real, but it's real to us.

It's a perception that we have.

It's like perception is true to whoever perceives it.

And sometimes people can think that if you're wealthy, then you don't like poor people.

Like you think poor people should not even be here.

They shouldn't exist.

That can be a story that somebody has, and it's not necessarily true.

You can have one person out of a million that thinks something, and then people will say everybody thinks like that.

No, it's only one person, you know.

And so sometimes people create stories internally that only exist in their world, but not everybody else's.

And like for myself, when I mentioned that, why would anybody want to get married to one person?

You know, like that's negative.

But that was because of the internal stories that I created based on what I saw in my own family.

Now, my family is only one example.

They don't represent everybody in the world.

They don't represent all marriages.

But because of what I saw, I created an internal story based on my own experience.

And I think one of the limiting things that happens is that most people approach life from their personal experience, but never consider other people's experience.

Because if I only consider life from my experience, then I'm going to make my story your story, and your story is not like my story.

And so I might make you wrong because you're not me.

And I think that's what a lot of people do.

They make other people wrong because they're not them just based on their own story.

And we don't take enough time to consider other people's perspective based on their own personal experience.

That's true.

Your perception is your reality because you do what you just said, which is, oh, but look at this.

It is what it is.

However, when it comes to our experiences, we don't look beyond it and say, but hey, there's other examples of this.

We get so caught up in our trauma, and I'm not judging anybody, and we've all gone through stuff.

But we get so caught up in, oh, but this is how it is.

That means this will never be the case.

That means I will never be one of those people.

We look at other people with a different experience.

I think they are sitting on some pedestal that I will never reach.

Why is that?

I think the reason is because we limit ourselves to one meaning.

Sometimes we don't challenge certain things as to why do we think the way that we think, and why when this happened, did we make it mean that?

Something that was very powerful for me, I actually got coaching from somebody some years ago, because for me, I think that it's important for us to always work on ourselves.

So I got coaching and this person, he gave me a reframe of looking at something different with one question, and I passed this one to other people as well.

And the question is, what else can that mean?

When you have a negative experience, it's like you determine the outcome of it.

You know, somebody is broken, they got evicted from their house, and they had to move somewhere, and they were homeless for three days.

And then from that experience, they can say, you know, the world is dark, and it doesn't care about anybody.

Nobody cares about me.

That's the conclusion that they came to, but they can also ask themselves, what else does that mean?

And it's good to ask it from an empowering perspective, because if you ask it from a negative perspective, it's only gonna get like darker from there, you know?

But what else could that specific situation mean?

Is you know what?

I'm gonna be on Oprah one day.

And people really like an overcomer story.

And so because I'm going to be this multi-millionaire, it's just going to make my story that much more powerful.

And when I get to this status, people will now understand that I know what it's like to be them based on where I was.

And so this is only a temporary experience, but it took me going through this so that when I get to where I am, my overall experience is gonna be that much more interesting, and I'll be able to relate and help that many more people.

That can be a reframe.

Do you think that reframe is the reason you can have two people being brought up in the exact same household, and they come out differently?

100 percent, 100 percent.

So we all have these six human needs, and I won't go into what those are, but one of those needs is the need for significance.

And all of us have some level of that need for us.

Like some people have more of it, some people have less of it, but sometimes people use being a victim as a way to feel significant.

You know, like, oh, woe is me, like nobody cares about me, nobody ever caused me, nobody ever whatever.

And that's their way of feeling significant.

But somebody else, like you said, two people in the same household, they see things differently.

The other person might use their need of significance, like I'm going to take what happened to me, and I'm going to be successful because I've seen somebody else do it.

And if they can do it, I can do it too.

And so they use their need of significance in a way that's going to empower them.

Somebody else used their need of significance as a way to weaponize everybody else from not coming to their aid and seeing them as a victim.

Two people in the same household, but one is using it as a tool for empowerment, and one is using it as a weapon to manipulate people.

They choose to use their level of significance in two different ways.

Because of the story they tell themselves.

Exactly.

Let's talk about something happened with you when you were in third grade.

Would you like to tell us that story?

So when I was in third grade, I would never forget this.

I was number six.

And what I mean by that is, there were six people away from me before it was my time to read.

So when I was in elementary school, we used to go around the room and every single person had to read.

And we would just take turns and everybody knew exactly when their turn was and who was next.

And for about three weeks, because we did it once a week, for about three weeks, every time it came to me, I was either sick or I would tell my teacher, like, I really have to go to the bathroom because I didn't know how to read.

And nobody knew I didn't know how to read because I always found a way to manipulate the situations.

And the fourth week that we were reading, my teacher's name was Miss Anderson.

Before it was my turn, I raised my hand and said, Miss Anderson, I really have to go to the bathroom.

Like, please let me go to the bathroom.

And she said, Chris, she was like, you're not going to the bathroom, you're not sick and you're not doing anything but reading.

This time you are going to read.

And I said, please, I really have to go.

And she was like, no.

She was like, you really have to go, then we'll realize that after you read.

But for now, you are reading next.

I remember struggling through so many words.

Like all of the classroom was almost in unison.

And they was like, the word is that, that, Chris, that, that.

I didn't know what that word was.

And so like I'm struggling through.

And finally, I get to the end.

It's the next person's turn.

And all of these stories are in my head.

I'm thinking like people are not going to be my friend anymore.

Like they think I'm stupid now.

People found out my secret because nobody knew I didn't know how to read except me.

But now everybody knows.

They're probably going to go tell everybody on the playground, and go tell their parents and everybody in the neighborhood is going to know like I can't read because I'm dumb.

And that was my story that I told myself for a few years.

However, Ms.

Anderson, even though she exposed me, she helped me because at the end of that year, she brought me and two other young men to an empty classroom.

And she told each one of us that you're not going to pass the third grade.

Now you have a choice.

You can either repeat it with me next year, or you can go to Ms.

Doosby for your class.

And now, I love Ms.

Anderson.

Even though she pointed me out, but I loved her because the thing that she did is a lot of things that we read, she allowed us to go on vacation in different worlds and different countries and see different things just through the power of reading.

And I always enjoyed that.

So I'm like, I want to be with Ms.

Anderson again.

That really started the realization of me healing.

And so I say that because when I was in sixth grade, I still wasn't a really good student.

I wasn't really a good reader, but my middle school counselor brought me into her office, and she was just asking me how things were going, just very general.

I remember I told her, it still bothers me that I'm just not a good reader.

We talked about me failing the third grade.

She asked me one of the most powerful questions that I ever had to this date.

And she said, Chris, how do you know that the grade that you're in right now is not the grade that you were always supposed to be in, but it took you repeating the third grade to get to the grade that you're supposed to be in?

And when she said that, it just reframed everything.

It's like, wow, maybe this was the grade I was always supposed to be in, but it took me repeating the third grade because she didn't say fail.

She said repeating.

That just really changed my entire thought process.

I went from like C's and D's to all A's and B's.

Like I really became somebody different because she helped to transform my identity.

Power of words.

She didn't use the word fail because even as grownups, you know how afraid we are of the word failure.

Exactly.

Now back to the story.

You told yourself that nobody's ever going to be a friend and they're going to make fun of you in the playground.

Did that happen?

No, it didn't.

No.

The stories we tell ourselves.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It was so surprising and shocking because people were very supportive.

Even in third grade, people were very supportive of me and they weren't cruel.

Like you hear people talk about like kids can be really, they weren't cruel at all.

Like they were very compassionate.

And it's almost like, had we known that you struggle with this, we would have helped you with the kind of situation.

It turned out to be a really good experience for me.

How many times do we have skeletons in the closet and think this would be so humiliating?

It's my dirty little secret.

I don't want people to ever know because we tell ourselves that same story.

But we don't know that nobody's going to make fun of us in the playground.

Instead, they'll be supportive.

Yes, and I think especially when we become adults, we don't realize that we become an older version of child peer pressure.

Like some of the things that we don't want people to know about are the same things that kids don't want people to know about.

And we don't realize that we're suffering in silence because it's like as long as you're not still doing those things and you've grown from it, you can help people with it and sometimes it gives you more credibility.

For instance, if somebody struggled with alcohol, it's like as long as you're still not a full-blown alcoholic, that's a great story to tell to help somebody else.

Now, if you're still struggling with that, then you probably don't want to tell that story because you're not healed enough or you've grown enough past it to share that.

But if you have, that's a great story to share.

And I learned this when I was speaking at conferences all over the country, and these people would come and they were like PhDs, New York Times bestsellers, like they had all of this credibility that I did not have.

The only thing I had was my story.

And after the conferences, it would be nobody waiting to talk to them.

But it would be a lot of people waiting to talk to me.

And I didn't understand why, but they couldn't relate to them at all.

Like they couldn't relate to anything that they said.

Like they couldn't relate to this person having two doctorate degrees, but they can relate to feeling hopeless.

In a lot of our stories, like when we share, we allow people to understand that I know what it's like to be you.

Because you've felt hopeless before, and so did I.

We had just different experiences, but it was the same feeling.

And so that's what really connects us a lot of time, is our failures a lot more than our successes.

And by the way, disclaimer for all our listeners, we're not knocking achievement and peace.

No, we're not knocking that.

But as you say, because sometimes, yes, it's great to aspire to people who've achieved a lot more than we have.

It's something to aspire to and look forward to.

However, knowing when they started and some of the challenges they might have overcome makes you sitting there thinking, oh, even though it's tough for me right now, I can do it too.

Let me give you a quick example.

So there's this family that I know, their nine-year-old daughter was telling me the story the other day.

I just met them when the mom is a lawyer.

That's all I know.

The mom is a lawyer.

That's all I know, right?

She was telling me the other day, she said, one time, my mom, when she first wrote her bar exam, she failed.

I remember she was crying, and she sat on the edge of the bed, and she was crying.

I said to her, you know what that tells me?

Because all I know about your mom is that she's a lawyer.

She didn't let that pain of failing the bar the first time, stop her from trying again.

Because that's why she's a lawyer now.

She didn't let that first bar, the pain of it, just stop her and say, oh no, I failed, I'm done.

The fact that she's a lawyer too.

Do you realize that your mom is a lawyer and nobody cares that she failed that first bar?

Exactly.

Exactly.

And she didn't tell herself the story that she's a failure just because she failed the first bar.

And that's why she's a lawyer today.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think that's so powerful because it's like sometimes what we do and who we are is two different things.

Even if you quote unquote fail at something, it doesn't make you equal to a failure.

That's an activity.

It's not an identity.

And sometimes we make the mistakes of making activities our identities.

And what I mean by that is because somebody failed the bar, if you will, they might make that mean that I'm a failure.

And it's like, no, that's an activity that you did.

And even when it comes to failure, quote unquote, who determines failure?

We do.

We define what failure is because really failure is just feedback.

And it's just feedback to say, when you go back next time, you could do it a different way.

But it's really not failure, even though we label it as failure.

Because now you know what not to do.

Exactly.

And we're going to come to public speaking in a moment, because that's a huge, huge issue with especially our listeners.

When you think of the successful entrepreneurs, we don't know the day to day challenges and things that fell apart and they did them again in a different way.

They don't have time to do that because they just keep doing what they need to do.

Right.

So now, when I heard your third grade story, it reminded me that several guests on the podcast, whenever we mentioned public speaking, you find that a lot of the time if they have a fear around that, it's because I had to do a book report in third grade and they made fun of me, and I never stood in front of people again.

That's usually where the fear comes from.

That humiliation, that story, you told yourself that the kids are going to be miniature in the playground.

Right.

So they told themselves the story that if I'm so dismal in my book report, and my classmates are laughing at me, that even as a grown up, I'm not going to speak in front because I'm going to humiliate myself in front of the audience.

What would you say to anyone listening who thinks like that?

Well, number one, you have to understand that that's a part of somebody's belief system.

And our belief systems are created between the age of zero to seven years old like the imprint period.

And pretty much after that, everything that happens is just evidence that we layer on top of it.

So we find this one event and we tell ourselves a story, and then we look for evidence to prove that to be true.

Even though it might not be true, we look for evidence to prove that it to be true because one of the biggest fears that we have is the fear of being wrong.

Can you say that again?

One of the greatest fears that all of us have is the fear of being wrong.

So not just the fear of failure at trying something.

So you have the fear of failure, you have the fear of success, but one of the biggest failures is the fear of being wrong.

So think about this.

Have you ever watched a movie and you anticipated what was going to happen next, and then you end up being wrong?

Then you say, OK, well, because that didn't happen, well, you make another anticipation.

And so you keep making different anticipations until you end up being right, or you find some kind of way to justify why your anticipation wasn't right.

We do it all the time, and a lot of time it results in self-fulfilling prophecies.

People do it at work, people do it in relationships, people do it, you know, entrepreneurship, where they tell themselves a story, and they only look for evidence to prove themselves right.

Now, it's evidence everywhere for everything else, but they only look for evidence to prove themselves right.

And when they don't find enough evidence to prove themselves right, they just keep looking for evidence to prove themselves right.

They totally ignore all the other evidence that's there and only look for evidence to prove themselves right because we fear being wrong.

If I say that people are negative and people are bad, and then I'm wrong, what does that say about me?

That means that there's something wrong with me, or maybe I'm the problem, maybe I'm the negative person, and people don't want to be viewed as the same thing that they ridicule other people for.

And so being wrong is a really big fear that a lot of people have.

And it results in a self-fulfilling prophecy a lot of different times because of their belief system and the stories that they associate together.

You also mentioned like public speaking.

Now, a lot of people would disagree with what I'm about to say on the surface.

Nobody has a fear of public speaking.

Called a bigger fear than death.

Chris, what are you talking about?

Like that's what people will say.

But here is the reality.

People are not fearful of speaking in public.

Because think about this.

People might be on the phone talking to somebody they love, and they're talking in public.

Or people might be in a lunch room talking to a friend or somebody that they feel is safe.

They're talking in public.

They're not fearful of public speaking.

What they're fearful of is saying the wrong thing and being judged for it.

Because when you think about this, fear only lives in the future.

Like fear does not live in the present.

And so when it comes to people saying that they're fearful of public speaking, it's like how do you know you're fearful of something that has not happened yet?

But when you think about it, people speak in public all the time.

But when they talk to somebody where there is not a threat of them judging you, like again, you are a phenomenal person.

You're a phenomenal listener.

And so when people talk to you, there is no fear of being negatively judged by you, because you make people feel safe.

But when you talk to somebody who you don't know, you don't know if they're going to accept what you say or not, if they're going to ridicule you, or if they're going to make a viral video about you.

And that's more so what people are fearful of.

They're scared of saying the wrong thing and being negatively judged by it.

Not so much just speaking in public.

That fear of being wrong again, this is the second time you mentioned it.

Yes.

So, it's the fear that they're going to be wrong.

But also the fear of public speaking, Chris, is because the spotlight is on you.

If you're sitting at a cafeteria with a friend, it's not like everybody in the cafeteria is looking at you.

Right.

It's just you and your friend who's not judging you, well, most of the time.

But if you're standing on stage and there's 500 people in the arena, the spotlight is on you.

Right.

So think about this, even though the spotlight is on you when you're on stage and there's 500 people, if you're in a lunch room and you're on a stage, even though it's two different settings, both of those are public places.

Would you agree with that?

You were giving an example of just having lunch with a friend.

You're not at a sports arena at school, in the gym, and the students are listening to you.

That's different.

That's the same.

Right.

Exactly.

But what I'm saying is this, both of those are public places.

One place, it just has one friend that you're used to talking to.

You don't think that you have to be perfect, or they're going to judge you.

Now, when you go to the stage and there's 500 people, those are probably 500 strangers that you don't know.

So even the same thing that you say to your friend, if you say this to the same audience, you don't know how they're going to respond to it.

It might offend somebody, like it might make somebody mad, it can cause somebody to want to talk about you.

So you think about it.

But both of those places, even though one has one person, and one has 500 people, both of those places are public.

Both of those places gives you the ability to speak, public speaking.

But one of them over here, you have a greater risk of being judged.

You have a greater risk of people not accepting what you're saying.

You have a greater risk of offending people, because you don't know the right thing to say, per se.

But over here, because you talk to this person all the time, you already know that whatever you say, like they're going to accept it, they're still going to love you, and there's no risk there.

Those very fears of being judged and wrong and potentially humiliated are the very reason people are afraid to speak in front of 500 strangers.

Right.

And I agree with you on that 100%.

Just specifically focusing on public speaking, though.

The 500 people, this person, they're given a cheat code.

They know exactly what these people like.

They know exactly how to make them laugh.

They know exactly what they're going to respond to.

And somebody gave them a script word for word, verbatim.

And they told them, like, look, if you just read this 30 second script, these people are going to love you, guarantee, and they're going to give you a round of applause.

And they're probably going to want to pay you $50,000.

And there is nobody in the entire audience that's ever going to boo you.

Like they're going to love you and you're going to be great.

And they're going to invite you back.

If somebody guaranteed you that, do you think there's still a fear of speaking to these same people?

Of course not.

And the question is, are there any guarantees?

This is life.

Come on.

You know, I know like the odds of that happening is slim to none.

But when you think about it, if somebody wouldn't be fearful, if somebody gave them a script, gave them the exact same thing to say, and told them exactly what these people will respond to and what they like, they no longer have a fear because they know the right thing to say.

But when they go in front of them, they don't have the right thing to say and they don't know how they're going to respond, that's what they fear.

It's not so much about the speaking as it is about not saying the right thing that's going to be accepted.

Because no matter who we are, me, you, everybody, we all want to be accepted.

None of us like to be rejected.

And so when you go talk to a friend in the lunchroom...

And the significance you mentioned earlier, yes, the significance.

Right.

You know, and you're talking to a friend in the lunchroom, you know there's probably a 100% chance that they're going to accept what you say.

But when you speak to 500 strangers, you don't know what the percentage is of them going to accept you.

So that's what you fear.

You fear saying the wrong thing, not so much speaking in public.

That is the distinction.

Chris, any last words of wisdom on the stories we tell ourselves, especially when things don't go our way?

The one thing that I really want people to understand is that every single person has a story, and we actually have multiple stories.

Our stories are very powerful because they have the ability to liberate and free people and just help people overall in their lives.

And I think most of us here that are good humans, like we want to serve and we want to help people, and we want to make the world a better place.

And sometimes the very thing that you have struggled with in the past, you've had some kind of internal story that you told yourself about it.

The most helpful people in the world that I've seen is the people who tell their internal story externally to other people who probably have had the same internal story.

And for me, it was Les Brown.

Les Brown was labeled educational, mentally retarded.

He failed in school and things like that.

So he and I, his story resonated with me because I failed a third grade almost twice, and I'm labeled dyslexic.

And so when he told the audience about his internal stories, what he was experiencing, it was the exact same thing as my internal story.

But he told his internal story externally.

So the thing that he thought about himself, he told other people about it.

And sometimes when you are able to tap into your own internal story, and you share with other people, you actually give them the freedom to escape the prison that they locked themselves in based on being a slave to their own story.

And that is more powerful than I think people even imagine.

And that can take place anywhere, whether it's the workplace, entrepreneurship.

And so, I just really encourage people to use their stories to not just liberate and help people, but also to get their need of significant met as well by knowing that they're making a positive difference by sharing something that happened to them that they also overcame.

Words of wisdom from Chris Cannon, the business coach who helps us tell our stories internally and externally.

This has been very powerful.

And most importantly, I want to thank you for sharing some of your personal stories for being vulnerable.

And I know that a lot of it will resonate with our listeners.

So, thank you so much, Chris.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

My absolute pleasure.

Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach you and where?

If people want to learn more about what I do, they can go to compellingstorytelling.com.

There I have like trainings that go in a lot more depth than what we talked about here, but they can go to compellingstorytelling.com to learn more.

compellingstorytelling.com, Chris Cannon.

Thank you very much.

I want to tell a quick story when you were talking about how everyone had a PhD and you didn't have those credentials and you felt that, wait a minute, that's the people they're going to gravitate towards.

Chris Rock tells the story during his divorce.

You've got all these lawyers who went to law school at college and all of that.

XY sitting on the other side, you've got the judge.

I don't know how much of law school the judge does and all those bar exams.

He said when I was sitting there, I'm thinking, wait a minute, you've got the judge, you've got the lawyers, you've got my XY.

He's like, I never went to college.

Everybody here gets paid with my money.

I won.

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