If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.
Bruce Lee, martial artist and actor
So you have a good story, but how can you ensure you have an inspiring story — one that is going to land you that multimillion-dollar deal, get you promoted, help you exceed your sales targets or make you the stand-out speaker at your next company event?
If you want to achieve all that and more, this is the chapter for you. We want to make sure your stories ‘shine’ to give you every chance of getting people hooked on you and your messages.
Avoiding story roadblocks
One of the first things you have to do is to ensure you do not have any ‘roadblocks’ in your stories. A roadblock is a point in your story where the audience gets stuck.
One presenter we watched shared a story where she was shopping on Thursday and was rushing as the shops shut at 5 pm. Everyone was thinking, ‘Thursday is late night shopping. The shops are open until nine’. Immediately there was a roadblock that distracted the audience and made them think, ‘You haven’t got your details right. Is the rest of your story true?’
Examples of roadblocks include:
• incorrect details
• far-fetched facts
• sensitive subjects
• cultural cringes.
Let’s look at each of these in detail.
Incorrect details
A client of ours once started ...
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