Power of storytelling in business is the difference between being heard and being unforgettable. In this episode of Six Figure Business Mastery, we break down how storytelling for entrepreneurs can transform your brand, your messaging, and your sales.

Featuring Kyle Gray alongside hosts Kirsten Graham and Jeanne Willson, we explore storytelling for coaches and consultants, the signature talk framework, and how to tell your origin story in a way that builds authority and trust.

You will learn presentation skills for business owners, public speaking for entrepreneurs, overcoming imposter syndrome with storytelling, and how to use a story based marketing strategy focused on how entrepreneurs double conversions.

Helpful Links:

The Story Engine

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Welcome to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where every week

Kirsten and Jeanne dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation mindset, to video marketing.

They've got you covered.

Tune in for expert guest interviews on all things marketing and

business, and learn how to work on your business, not just in it.

So.

Get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

Our next guest has helped coaches, executives, and startups unlock the

one tool that's been driving sales and building trust since the beginning of

human history, the power of storytelling.

I'm excited to introduce our guest.

His name is Kyle Gray, and he is presentation coach,

story strategist, and author.

Thanks for being with us today, Kyle.

Today's episode is sponsored by our Profit Clarity Masterclass,

and we'll just keep this real.

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So come join us.

You can sign up free at less math, more money.com.

We look forward to seeing you there.

I am so excited to be here.

I had the pleasure of having Kirsten on my show not too long ago, and

I've been looking forward to this conversation for such a long time.

I think what you two do is a brilliant, huge support for

entrepreneurs and I'm excited to.

To get some questions asked as well in some of the magic I provide.

So thank you so much for having me today.

Uh, we did have such a great conversation.

I too have been looking forward to having you here.

First of all, can you tell everyone how you became so

passionate about storytelling?

Yeah, there's lots of different threads, but I'm gonna highlight one of them.

I'll give a few quick things.

I was a singer songwriter for a long time and really wanted to

learn how to express myself, and I think that was a good foundation.

I spent a lot of time living in South America and learned how to speak Spanish

and Portuguese, and there is something to struggling through learning a different

language and expression that I think has served me and I received an incredible

gift while living in South America.

I got very sick.

And that ended up cascading into really bad gut health

and an autoimmune condition.

But as of my career was developing, I learned that I wanted to continue

to travel and live anywhere I wanted.

And I started out as a rider.

I did blogging for a great outsourcing startup.

It was called WP Curve.

We had WordPress developers all around the world, and people were paying a

recurring fee to have small WordPress fixes at their disposal at any time.

And so I was telling the story of this startup.

And how we were growing, how we were managing ourselves.

I got to live in Thailand at the time, and while my skillset was growing as

a writer, my health was declining.

And a couple of years in, as I helped grow that startup to a million dollars in

annual recurring revenue, started learning more about copywriting and storytelling,

and I found myself facilitating a workshop filled with health and wellness

professionals somewhere in 20 17, 20 18, a little bit before this workshop.

I remember talking to one of my first life coaches ever, and I was so mad.

Because I have this thing called Hashimoto's disease, which made

me have joint pain all the time.

I had fatigue, I had anxiety.

You don't, when you have anxiety like this, you don't think, man, my gut

dysbiosis is really messing with me.

It's always, I'm not working hard enough, or the other political

parties ruining everything for me.

And you would just get so mad and not actually understand

the reason why you're so upset.

And so I was certain that this was the worst thing to have happened to me.

And then my life coach was.

Trying to, he said something that I thought was the most outrageous

thing I heard at the time.

He said, you know what?

If this is your superpower, what if Hashi disease is your superpower?

And I said, ha.

That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

I'm gonna hang up the Skype call, sir. Thank you very much for nothing.

So fast forward a little bit, and I'm in this workshop and there's

health and wellness experts that have very high ticket businesses.

They're incredibly intelligent and talented and because of these two

things, they have a very difficult time actually communicating the value

of what they do to their client.

And I remember sitting next to one woman and she said, Hey, my name's Dr. Grace and

I help people overcome chronic autoimmune diseases with better gut health.

And I remember for the first time everything that I learned about being

a storyteller and a copywriter and a wordsmith looked at my own life

differently for the first time.

And the pain and the suffering and the confusion that I had

gone through actually made me.

Standout and unique and valuable to this group of people and who I was and

what I experienced, not what I knew, not what I had done, was what made

me valuable to this group of people.

And that was the first time that I really started to grasp

how powerful storytelling was.

And I see this same thing play out at every level of success in every genre

of people that I work with to get to where you are listening to this show.

We've gotta get some wires crossed, and a lot of times we get

addicted to our own achievements.

And it's right, like in the early days of grinding things out, which people,

if you're still grinding things out, then you've come to exactly the right

podcast, you're gonna get supported.

But we learn that, okay, that's what helps me out.

That's what's going to win me grinding harder and working harder.

And this implies that who I am and what, like my person is not good enough.

And this is why we're bad at talking about ourselves.

If we don't know which stories we need to tell about ourselves when we have

this opportunity, and it ends up slowing down this whole process quite a bit, I

am so fascinated because you always know that stories are important, but every

time I listen to you, it just takes it to a whole new level of understanding.

How stories connect us as human beings.

So please tell me that you reached back out to that life

coach that you hung up on at all.

Oh, yes, I have let him know that it took a long time for that insight

to land, and that's a good thing.

Sometimes the coaching that you get doesn't pay off until several years later.

Are you ready for it?

Really?

Sometimes.

Yeah, exactly.

Like it takes two to be coached.

Yeah.

I know that storytelling is hard for all of us, and I love the fact that because of

your health issues, you really experienced what the health coaches could transform,

and so obviously that does make.

You more powerful because you understand it from the consumer's perspective and

how that changes people's lives when they get their gut health in order and

they start to feel better and they can go back to leading a more normal life.

Let's talk about for other business owners in different industries, a little

bit about the power of how stories can literally help you double your income,

like getting your stories down and talking to people about taking them through that

journey with you through your story.

Yeah.

Doubling your income or doubling your conversions is something that happens.

Regularly.

Often when people embark on this process with me, it happens and they don't notice

it because they're becoming somebody else.

So I like to do intake forms.

I had this one guy named Andy Hickman, who I remember when we

first started out on a six month pro.

He would be like, I would love to fill my next cohort with 20 people or something.

And he was like, that's a pipe dream.

That's gonna be amazing.

And then six months later he was like, yeah, I got 23 people.

That was pretty good.

I think we could have done better.

And I remember going back through the interview and I was like, do you see this?

And he was astounded himself, but what's actually happening here?

So we had a good example of like my story with health and wellness.

And one of the things that I notice when people are trying to approach

storytelling, they're asking the wrong questions and they also relate to

themselves wrong, which is causing a lot of these problems in the first place.

A lot of times when we think, what story should I tell if we're putting

like a search into our own brain?

It's like, brain, what story should I tell about myself that will prove to them that

I am smart and capable of helping them?

How do I show them that I am worthy?

And it's a very natural thing 'cause we're high achievers and we work really

hard and we've done a lot to become the person that's skilled and worthy.

And the twist is, and you hinted at this, at what it feels like to be the

consumer and how I usually stand for people, and you even got to go through

this on the podcast, Kirsten, is I ask you questions about who's your ideal client

and what are they feeling right now?

What are the biggest.

Pains that they're experiencing.

What are the limiting beliefs that they have right now that's holding

them back from taking action?

And we use this as the foundation.

So this is what storytelling, at least in the context of a

great talk and a great messaging, storytelling, listening before talking.

And if we can listen to who our client is sitting across from

us, who is in the audience.

The right stories will appear.

Instead of trying to think what do I need to do to prove to them, or what's exciting

for me, or what's interesting for me.

And when we start to think these things, this is where

imposter syndrome comes from.

And you'll experience imposter syndrome from zero money, six figures, money, seven

figures, money, eight figures, money.

It's always gonna be there.

But the good news is the cure is always the same, is who

actually needs me right now.

And when we start to think about that, then we get over all of

our insecurities and flaws.

'cause we're always gonna have 'em and we start to focus on serving people.

Yeah, that's so true.

It's funny because often say that when people talk about how do they

get comfortable on video and it's, I don't know that we ever get a

hundred percent comfortable on video.

Most of us did not set out to be actors or actresses.

It's just having that heart to serve someone and just thinking that if

this video, this podcast dinner that we put out into the world,

if it helps one person we win.

Instead of thinking about what will it take for me to be like super confident

or comfortable on camera, just thinking about that person that we can truly serve.

It's magical and it opens up so much opportunity and when we can start

to think in that way of, instead of like, how do I prove myself

to, who really needs to serve me?

It changes how we relate to our own moments and often the moments

that you think, just like I did.

I was cursed.

This was the worst thing ever Get out.

Life coach.

We all have those and it's like we're sitting on treasure chests of our

own stories, of our own information that would magnetize clients and

we've labeled them poop or something.

And so we feel like we're sitting in a desert like, where is everybody?

Nothing's working and it's right underneath us, but we just can't

access it because of these judgments that we have about ourselves.

So what is your recommendation for once somebody presents.

Or talks about what their issues are, how do you remember which story

to tell and what part of the story?

'cause sometimes they can be unnecessarily long in there.

Absolutely.

It's hard to be yourself and talk about yourself because like you said,

a lot of things are unnecessarily long.

And when we do our.

Own brain, Google searching.

Sometimes zero stories come up, or sometimes 10 stories come up.

And because of how we relate to ourselves, like story number one's 94% good stories.

Number two is 92% good.

Story number three is 98% good.

And we can't quite tell.

And so we usually decide to.

Tell all of it.

And it often feels good to us when we are doing that and it feels good when

we are teaching as much as possible, but we've just gotta focus on the clients.

And what I like are storytelling is not about having one single story.

I like to think of it like a yoga practice or a martial art.

And if you learn one really good karate.

That doesn't make you a great martial artist.

It may win you a couple of competitions here and there, but as soon as somebody

figures that out, it's not going to work.

And so there are many different kinds of stories with many

different kinds of utilities.

There's the most common story, which is what I work on my podcast, an

origin story or an authority story, and that's something we would use in the.

First five to seven minutes of our talk and those stories should say, listen, I

know exactly what it's like to be you, and I've worked really hard to figure

out a solution that's gonna help you out today, and you should wanna listen

to the rest of what I have to teach.

But we also want to have stories when we are teaching about, Hey, I have clients

just like you, and I've been able to help them with the same limiting beliefs

that you have right now, and look at the results that they've gotten, or

stories that we would use to end our talks and conclude our talks, which

often don't have anything to do with what we've been teaching or talking about.

I have a same moral conclusion, like I didn't want to take action

then, but I'm so glad I did and you should take action right now.

And so when we start to learn the different frameworks and formulas that

make up great story, which usually comes by like creating a signature talk.

Almost like a foundational yoga practice or a kata.

This is something that we go to and we practice over and over again.

But as you start to understand or write a couple of these talks or practice it

or change up the audiences that you're speaking towards, you start to learn

this like a martial art, like the.

Mr. Miyagi wax on wax off from the karate kid.

For those of you who don't know, this kid wanted to learn karate from this master,

and he made him wax a car for so long and he was like, why are you doing this to me?

And then all of a sudden, the way he was waxing the car was teaching him how

to block different kinds of punches.

And so eventually, through practicing these formulas and movements.

Of your mind, you will find yourself in a con.

You'll be at event, and you'll realize that you can share your origin

story in this moment, or you'll be on a sales call and somebody will

present the exact objection that you created this customer story for.

And instead of the magical thing that happens is instead

of thinking in your own brain.

How do I convince this person to buy from me?

You'll start to listen to them and they will tell you

by what they're saying to you.

You will know which story to be told, and so you become more present

and at ease in every situation.

I love being able to share client stories, to overcome objections.

That is such an incredible framework.

And you teach them.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

It's a very simple formula and we've gotta just figure out what's the biggest

objection that somebody would have.

To working with us.

I imagine, just knowing what I know about you two, one of the biggest objections

I would guess is I don't want to have to train this person because I'm already

so busy as it is, and if I bring on this new person and then have to train

them and put out all these fires, I'm already strained and I'm gonna pop.

And so we could tell a story like this.

We could say, one of my clients, Tim, he came to me running a six figure business,

just like all of you are out there.

And Tim, on one of our.

Discovery, our onboarding calls, and of course you guys have a

much cooler name for it than we are said, I'm just so strained.

I'm already working 60 hours a week and there's no way that I could just

tell this person what to do and have all of these extra burdens right now.

I don't think there's any way.

And we said, Hey, Tim, most of our virtual assistants, they're already trained.

They already know exactly what to do.

They're gonna ask you a few questions.

Of course there is gonna be some onboarding, of course, but you're

gonna find yourself freed up with more time, a lot faster than you think.

And I can remember a few months in Tim calling us up and he

says, wow, I'm finally excited.

I get to take my first.

Vacation in years because my assistant is finally doing the work for me.

And so knowing how to tell stories like this, I've got a lot of

metaphors today, but it's like thinking like a chess player.

And we want to be able to anticipate the moves, the objections, the

limiting beliefs that will naturally come up when somebody starts hearing

what we have to talk about and we want to meet them in our education.

And the big difference changer here.

The thing that is huge that most of us who are addicted to our own achievements never

notice is like we don't need to teach them everything about what goes into all of the

things that our virtual assistants can do.

If we can find that one single objection and teaching point, and instead of showing

them everything that goes into solving the problem that we do, we teach them how to.

Think about the problem a little bit differently, then their minds open up to

new possibilities, and it makes teaching so much easier and smoother for us when

we can talk about one simple idea for 10 minutes instead of trying to cram 13 ideas

into 10 minutes and blasting them with as many slides and knowledge as possible.

I love that, and I love that you start with their signature story because

that's, I would say probably the most important one is what happened

to me and how I ended up here.

So when you're working with your clients.

As far as objections go, do you have them maybe list all the objections

and then have maybe a short story like you just told us for each one?

Yeah.

What I love to do is when I'm building a signature talk, I usually like to do it

in a single day with my private clients.

So over the course of about five hours, it's just like what I do on my podcast.

But I will ask you questions and draw out the information.

And then I will reflect a story back to you, just like I've improvised one

with this fictional Tim that happened.

And for a lot of people who are high achievers who are maybe A DHD or highly

creative, if we can just have a smell of what a good story is, then we can

start to run with it a lot more easier than trying to intellectualize every

single component that goes into it.

So I ask questions like, what are the biggest problems your clients face?

And I also like to get a little bit deeper and a little more emotional.

Than most people.

Okay.

What do these problems, how would they express them if they were sitting across

a table from a friend at a coffee shop?

How would they express these problems if it's three in the morning and they

woke up and they're stressed and they just have called you and you've come

and sat beside their bed and they're saying things that they've never.

Admitted to anyone before, and when we can figure out that language, then

we can magically start to paint that language on our stories and our moments.

And of course, we ask what are the biggest limiting beliefs?

What are the biggest objections?

Not always to working with you because that's the way we like to think.

Like how do we come up with an objection on a sales call?

But what's the biggest objection to hiring a VA at all?

Or needing any help.

How are they limited in their perspective about this problem and what pain is

that causing them in their business?

And when we can start to figure these things out, then we create a map that

we can use to create a signature talk that's rich with stories that has

teaching that's precisely targeted to get them to take action instead of

just to prove ourselves as a really smart person and we can move them.

Towards it, and also understanding exactly like what the talk is supposed to do.

Sometimes it's meant to get the whole sale done, but a lot of times we

think that, man, my origin story or my authority story needs to be good enough

to make the whole sale in five minutes.

It needs to convince them, and then these teaching points also need to do it.

And we put so much pressure onto every single thing and having it

laid out and strategized like.

This, again, takes pressure off us and lets us be ourselves, which is

what people want and need right now.

Especially in a world of so much information, so much ai,

so much fake stuff going on.

We don't need more knowledge.

We need wisdom and insight and somebody that understands us.

And that's what story is going to do for us.

And we can go to chat, GPT or Google for all of the rest of

the knowledge that we need.

We need somebody who can take that knowledge and contextualize it for us.

And that's why we use story like mic drop.

There's so much more I wanna ask you.

I love your passion for this and it's so true.

It's interesting because with Jeanne and I, every offer we've rolled out truly does

come from something that happened to us.

We originally started outsourcing for Jeanne's marketing agency because her

business kind of blew up back when, this was back when fan pages first came

out with, with Facebook, there's all a sudden a fan page for a business.

It was back when business owners were really reading about

email marketing and blogging.

This was a long time ago.

And so by teaching some classes, teaching people how to do it, she had

a lot of people reaching out saying, I don't wanna do this, do it for me.

And then that kind of led us down this path of outsourcing.

So we have, and it seems like that's been with every single thing

that we've offered, is something has happened in our business.

We decided to fix the problem with some form of outsourcing, and then we mastered

it, and then we've ended up sharing that and helping others, people with it.

But we do, even though that is the case with us, we often forget

how to go down that painful part.

I do always say, when we started outsourcing, I joke about it,

if it could be done wrong.

We did it wrong often, more than once, which is truthful, but we

probably should share more of the details of some of those stories.

Yeah, and because we have judgements about ourself and we have already labeled

those moments as, man, if I've talked about that, how would they trust me?

They would be like, whoa, this person's crazy.

I need somebody who's perfect and flawless.

To help me with my outsourcing, and this is like everybody's suffering from this.

A lot of times we just like what I like to do and what people pay me for.

They don't come to me for answers.

They come to me for questions and they come to me to trick you into letting

your guard down a little bit and getting around those judgments that you have about

yourself to finally start sharing stories.

And one of the most amazing things is like when you can start to see those

moments that you just described of like when I made mistakes, changing it from.

Wow, this was a really bad, painful moment too.

Whoa.

This is like a defining great moment for me.

It not only changes how we relate to our past, which gives us more

energy in the present, it changes how we relate to ourselves in

our present and in the future.

There's like secret personal development medicine.

I'm giving away the secret now, but there's real personal development stuff

happening, and all we have to do is articulate our stories differently,

which is a lot better than talking to a therapist for a long time.

And of course you should do that.

I highly recommend it.

But there are shortcuts.

If we just learn to view our own lives and experiences, which are rich with

what our clients need a little bit differently, then a lot of the burden

of being ourselves and the challenge and the judgements that we have

about ourselves that make our already complicated and challenging lives

harder, unnecessarily can be lifted.

And so I hope that this gives.

Everybody out there listening a little bit of hope and like I hope

you can start to maybe look underneath you and see that there might be a

treasure chest there for you too.

This is amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

I do.

I think Jean and I do also joke about the fact that we don't know if we're

incredibly stubborn or stupid or both, that it made us stick with it, but it's.

Going through the hard parts that brings you out and kinda makes

you the expert on the other side.

And I love the fact that you're encouraging all of us to look

deep and find those stories.

Absolutely.

There's such treasure there for you and for your audience,

and they're waiting for you.

They're also like, yes, our lives are unnecessarily difficult and like we

said earlier, you're audience and the people that you serve, they're waiting

for you and they need your help.

So let's get over these small things so we can do the work.

We can grow abundant businesses, and right now, more than ever, with

the way the world's changing, like we need everybody at their best.

We need you to be supported, and that means having great stories.

And that means having a team that allows you to do what you do best.

We need this right now because this is a great time of awake for us as humans.

This is a great.

Creative renaissance.

There's so much opportunity out there and you need to be at your best,

sharing your gifts and believing in this because the world needs you right now.

No matter what you're doing or who you're serving, now is the time.

This has been tremendous.

You are creative renaissance.

I love that You are such an inspiration and you make it sound so simple.

We'll walk away and make this feel simple, but.

It never works out that way with Kirsten and I, but we're gonna try.

Yeah.

Or we're gonna hire him one or the other.

There you go.

Even better.

But Kyle, it's been such a pleasure to have you on our show today.

We so appreciate it.

And I can imagine that all the people listening are thinking,

wow, I learned so much.

I'm excited about writing stories or speaking stories.

But Kyle, what is the best way for them to reach out to you if they wanna learn more?

Absolutely.

I recommend going to my website, the story engine.co.

And I am creating stories every single week with six figure plus entrepreneurs

just like you and I highly recommend checking out some of the episodes,

check out what we did with Kirsten.

But if you're here, you probably already know.

And so check out some of the other episodes and if you want to go through

the same storytelling process, have me create a story with you live to showcase

your business and your brilliance.

I take applications for guests all the time.

Highly recommend it.

Come see me there.

Or if you just want to reach out and connect with me on Instagram where

I share a little bit more of just my personal goofiness behind the scenes,

you can find me at, Hey, Kyle Gray.

That's, Hey, Kyle Gray.

Thanks, Kyle.

That's all.

Absolutely.

Thanks for listening to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video podcast,

then you need to check out the Done for You and Done with You program.

At the marketing va advantage.com and take your business to the next level.