124 From SME to Storyteller

Speaker A: They are the Fabulous Learning Nerds. Cause if you're tired of the old ways of getting it done? You've got the Fabulous Learning Nerds. Scott, Dan and Zeta are making it fun. The best ideas that you've ever heard? So everybody spread the word. They're gonna keep you whispering. The Fabulous Learning Nerds. Fabulous Learning Nerds. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: And we're back for another amazing episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Trudy, your host, and with me, you love him. It's been a minute.

Speaker C: Dan.

Speaker B: Coonrod, everybody.

Speaker D: Dan the man. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: Coonrod.

Speaker A: Scott.

Speaker C: What's up, man? How you doing?

Speaker B: Good. I'm doing great. You guys had a wonderful, scintillating vacation, correct?

Speaker C: I did. I did. I took my mom up to go visit some family back in, uh, Pennsylvania. You know, real quick. Um, we got to drive through. I want to say it's not green belt green. Oh, man. I had the name, and now I'm going to mess it up. I promise. We can fix it in the show notes, folks, but we drove past the, uh, Radio Free Zone in West Virginia, and it was an experience. No WI fi, no cell service for hours and hours through the mountains of West Virginia. And it was. It was awesome.

Speaker B: You went through the neutral zone, then?

Speaker C: The neutral zone? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: Is this a planned neutral zone or. That's just the way it is?

Speaker C: Uh, it's purpose built. Let me see here. Let me see.

Speaker B: Is it really, like, somebody planned that? Okay, I got a Greenbrook Observatory. Okay? So for hours, I got nothing.

Speaker C: You got nothing for hours.

Speaker B: Unless I have a CD player, I'm screwed.

Speaker C: Not unless you have a CD player.

Speaker B: Uh, I don't have a CD player

Speaker C: in my car anymore. But since I didn't know I was going to be driving through this because, um, maybe I didn't do a great job planning. Uh, I had nothing. Like, we hit the road, we're driving through. I've got my mom driving in the car, and Zeta's with me. And, dude, it was hours and hours of. It was good. We talked. It was great. It was a good trip, and the scenery was gorgeous. It was absolutely a beautiful part of the country. But, man, I was, like, driving back in the 90s, only no radio. Yeah.

Speaker B: I would have killed somebody for sure. The last time that happened to me was during 9 11. And, uh, we. Long, um, story short. Short story long, whatever you want to put it. We landed in Cleveland, Ohio, and we were going. I was on a plane going to New York that day. Uh, believe it or Not. And didn't make it. We landed in Cleveland, Ohio. There's about eight of us. And so we quickly figured out that we were not going to fly anywhere that day. So we ran down to national, rent a car and got a van. The van did not have a working radio, so we had a CD player, and I had some CDs. And so we played my CD over and over and over again. Um, but, yeah, no radio, nothing.

Speaker C: What was the CD?

Speaker B: Oh, just a mixtape CD. It had all the great 80s hits on it. Had Jesse's girl, Grease Lightning. Yeah, we were doing the Grease Lightning. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a long story.

Speaker C: So, first off, uh, I will say hit the road. We're like. We're looking for a place to stop in between. And I just checked Google Maps, and I'm like, well, this is the halfway point for where we're going. It's weird, though, because I didn't know what I was looking at at the time. I was, there's no hotels here. Oh, except for this one. It's the, um, Mountain Quest Inn. And so we gave them a call, and they said, oh, yeah, we've got room. And said, great, we'll be there in, like, seven and a half hours. We'll see you guys soon. And they're like, call us when you're 30 minutes out. And we're like, great. Uh, so we do, and we get up there, and, uh, it's the, um, Mountain Quest Institute. And it is this, like, working farm hotel in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of this. This Green Bank, Green Brook Observatory Zone. And, uh, again, they don't have any WI fi. It's a farm. I will say, though, it was absolutely, positively, stunningly beautiful. Gorgeous. Real, like, dark sky, look up, see all the stars was awesome. Absolutely wonderful.

Speaker B: All right, I have to ask this question, then we'll bring Zeta in. But have you ever seen the YouTube show another Dirty Room, Dan?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. You know what? Um, I think I need to ask this question to Zeta first. Let's bring in the Duchess of design. You love her. Zeta's in the house.

Speaker D: Uh, hello.

Speaker B: How are you?

Speaker D: I am doing pretty well.

Speaker B: Excellent.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker B: Have you ever watched the YouTube series created by Mr. Dan Bell, by the way? Another Dirty Room?

Speaker D: I can't say that I have, but I'll just say, just out the gate. It doesn't sound very appealing to me. I'm a clean freak.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Okay, so, uh, you two need to. Now, after you stayed at that, um, little off the road motel, you need to go watch. Um, you could start in the middle. Start in the middle of series one, really, honestly, because the first couple episodes are not that great, but you need to start in the middle of it. And basically the, uh, these guys go out to motels and, um, they inspect them. Um, and then once you watch this show, you will never experience m. A good night's sleep at a hotel, even a nice one, ever again.

Speaker C: Just so you know, what if. What if I lived in ignorance? I'm just saying maybe. Maybe it's a better life not knowing.

Speaker B: It might be. It might be. Although, you know, if you're paying 150 bucks a night, you should probably feel pretty okay that you've got a nice hotel. But, you know, if you're driving down the road and you're like, hey, that $30. A Super 8 motel over there, um, with the barbed wire fence around it, you might have some opportunities there, um, if you enjoy the show. Like, do you. Okay, I hate to say it. Do you like watching cringe TV like Hoarders does?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker B: Is that.

Speaker C: I am not a fan of cringe tv.

Speaker B: This is m. This is cringe tv. Like, yeah, for sure. Like, you just be watching it going, oh, my gosh. Every five minutes you're like, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. No, no, no. Oh, my. Um, when they inspect the pillows, that's my favorite part, honestly. They pull off the pillowcase and show you the pillow.

Speaker D: Oh, I'm just really glad that I bring my own pillow.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, that's, that's one way to. Do you really bring your own? I guess that's pretty smart because every. Almost 100% of the pillows that they inspect are no longer white. And I'm going to leave it at that.

Speaker D: Not only that, but, like, my pillow is perfect because I only take one pillow. And anytime we've gone to, like, a motel, it's always been, oh, one pillow is not enough, but two is too much.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, I, I, I totally get it. Um, and then just for word of the wise, the. Sometimes they'll use multiple pillowcases to disguise just how off color their pillow really is. So.

Speaker C: Ooh. Yeah.

Speaker B: And sometimes they'll sew the pillowcase on top of the pillow. Buy another pillow. How much are pillows? They're $5, right?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: At Target Tarjay Boutique. Five bucks. Okay.

Speaker D: Gotta get that.

Speaker B: Another dirty room. That's a plug. We didn't get any kind of advertising money for that, folks. But you should check it out and then just Go. Oh my God. That could have been us. That's all I'm saying is it could have been us.

Speaker D: It's a horror story.

Speaker B: Very, very cool. It's glorious. I love cringe tv. Um, we're not gonna talk too much more about cringe tv, folks. We have really, really exciting topic today. No guests. Um, but we're gonna spend a little bit of time helping you guys be better at what you do. So without further ado, let's dive into our glorious and not cringeworthy topic of the week. This week we're talking going from smee to storyteller. Smee to storyteller. Hey, Dan, before we get started, I got a question for you, sir.

Speaker C: Yeah, man.

Speaker B: So why are we talking about this? And what do you mean SME to storyteller? Help me understand, Dan.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Listen, I'm actually gonna uno reverso. And Scott, I'm gonna ask you some questions. Uh, I'm gonna tell you why the journey from SME to storyteller. Being a better storyteller makes you a better learning development professional. But I want to lead with an example. Scott, just a little bit ago we talked about a, uh, vacation that Zaden and I took. And I told you the story behind it. Do you remember where we went?

Speaker B: Kinda. You were in the mountains. I remember that part of the story. You had this beautiful.

Speaker C: Oh, not everything. That's fine.

Speaker B: I forgot.

Speaker C: Beautiful what?

Speaker B: You went to a beautiful hotel and they were super cool and got your room ready before you got there. And there was no radio. I remembered all that. I just remember exactly where you were going.

Speaker C: Um, who else went with Zeta and I. Do you remember that?

Speaker B: Well, I can tell you it wasn't Reed Richards. It was your.

Speaker C: It was not Reed Richards.

Speaker B: It was your mother. Right.

Speaker C: So, okay, in my defense, I probably could have told a better, more defined story, but no.

Speaker B: Or I could have been paying attention to your story. That's on me.

Speaker C: To be fair, I surprised you with this. So you did listen. Stories, mhm. Are the way that we as human beings have communicated and talked and spoken with each other and transferred knowledge for years. Years for time immemorial. There's my fancy phrase for the day. It's how we share our experiences with those people who we talk to every day. We don't show up to somebody and be like, Scott, I drove through the Radio Free Zone in West Virginia. It was very strange. And then I got to Pennsylvania on a road trip I took with my mother. I mean, maybe sometimes we do, but. And we just spit facts at one another. But that's not very interesting. It's not very engaging. Being able to be a storyteller, to be able to take the facts, weave them in and give them basically like emotional weight means that the things that we tell people, that information lasts longer, there's less cognitive load for them to carry in order to grab those facts. And those facts have more value to them because we've said, hey, this is an experience. This happened to me.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally get it. It was really interesting because I'm taking a look and you know, trying to please new partners. Right. And so, um, holy smokes. Hey, this is what's important about our product. And this is what's important about our product. And this is important, what's important about our product. That's great. But if I, if I want to create an army of advocates, I have to have stories around that so that people can understand it because you know, it's a complex product and people may or may not understand that. But if I have a story around, well, so and so used the product and this is the great things that happen from that. That, that, that helps create advocacy leads in my case to, to more sales or more engagement. It's just super, super important. Are we doing that today? No, no. But, but we're going to start like we're going to go ahead and babyship our way there for sure. Yeah.

Speaker C: I'll give you another example. At the beginning of this, uh, as we were talking, you shared with us a story that happened to you 24 years ago. 23. 24 years ago it did. And you remembered the songs on the CD player.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Again, that's a story that happened to you. And I'll remember that you had Jesse's Girl and Greased Lightning that you were listening to. Just because again, you're sharing that story, you're sharing those facts Too often as instructional designers, as learning development professionals, we go up to our Bloom's taxonomy, look at the verbs, be like, oh, okay, I need to look at uh, I need to go to my knowledge ones. I need to get this one and this one and that one. Okay, cool. We're going to understand. Understand is a really weak one. But I'm going to run with it. We're going to, you know, we're going to discuss, we're going to do all of these knowledge based things and then we completely forget about any of the emotional stuff and then we get really upset when everybody forgets our course a week later.

Speaker D: I think you just hit the nail on the head right there. I mean, who wants to read an encyclopedia versus reading a story about maybe the things that are in that encyclopedia? Right?

Speaker C: Yeah, 100%.

Speaker D: It's much more interesting.

Speaker B: So may I share a story about a story? This is relevant. Uh, uh, from a story perspective. So I was taking a course, um, it was a two day course and I had a master facilitator teaching it. I was super impressed. Right. So anytime, you know, somebody of our caliber is up there doing a really great job, that's great. And at the end of day one, this gentleman starts telling a story and I'm going into my head like, why is this relevant? I have no idea. And then he got to a point in the story where there was a cliffhanger. Right. Someone opens the door and there's this person that's not supposed to be there and they've got something in a package in their hand or whatever. And then he stopped and he said, and I will finish the story tomorrow. And everybody went, wha. What do you think? I thought about all night long. Oh, that story, the story.

Speaker D: What came next?

Speaker B: Right, exactly. So what's going to happen? I have no idea. So then we show up and 3/4 of the way through the class, he finally decides to finish the story. What were we all thinking about during the entire time while he's going through all this other stuff? What's gonna happen and why is it? And by the way, from a relevancy standpoint, I can't remember the point he was trying to make. I just can't. But I do remember that it tied

Speaker C: in really, really, really well to what

Speaker B: we were talking about at the time. And the impact was huge from a story and relevancy perspective because he just kind of dangled this carrot. Right? So if you have a couple day class, like, go ahead and try that. That worked really, really well. I don't know how you figured that all in, but my point is from, um, an engagements perspective from, um, hey, I'm in with you and I'm going to pay attention to where you're going kind of perspective. I thought that that was really, really great.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, that definitely made it more interesting.

Speaker B: Right? And don't we want our learnings to be interesting?

Speaker C: Oh, dude, 100%. Yes, of course.

Speaker B: Is interesting. More impactful?

Speaker D: I would say so.

Speaker C: Uh, man. Okay, so as we grow up and we go through school and we sit in the classrooms and we learn and we learn and we learn and we learn, how much stuff would you say you remember from high school?

Speaker B: Not Much. I remember. I remember things that. Okay, so I'm going to back up. I remember things that, um, were emotionally important to me in high school. But as far as the things I was supposed to learn in high school, probably not much at all. But anything that's tied to an emotion, I'm in.

Speaker C: Yes. And those things that were tied to an emotion, would you say those were maybe interesting?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, and relevant?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, 100%. So much. So much of how we try to teach people is through knowledge retention. Knowledge retention, Right. And fact checking. One, it's super easy to build tests. If I throw a bunch of facts at you and I ask you to regurgitate those facts, I don't need to worry about understanding. I just need to be like, oh, did you, were you able to regurgitate these dates back at me? Yes. Great. You pass. Understanding is a complex, difficult to measure thing. We demonstrate understanding when we tell, share, and create stories.

Speaker B: All right, so here's the big question, right? Um, now I want to tell some stories. Where do I start? What stories do I tell you?

Speaker C: So I would say so. I usually tell everybody. You start with the stories that mean the most. And those aren't always work based stories. But I believe that the jobs we get nine times out of ten have value. The things we do have value. And if they don't have value, we go out usually and apply value to them. Scott, what do you do? Not where do you work, but what do you do?

Speaker B: I tell everybody that I am the resident learning nerd. That's what I tell you.

Speaker C: Resident learning nerd.

Speaker B: I am. I tell it all the time. We get new people all the time. I'm like, hey, because essentially that's what I do. So basically what I do is I apply, um, learning development theory and uh, coaching to create relevant, engaging, impactful experiences that lead to personal growth and business results.

Speaker C: Why does your business, why does your new job need that?

Speaker B: Oh, because without it, you can't change behavior, right? So you need behavior change in order to get greater impact and greater results. And that's what the importance of learning is all about. Like, hey, how can I provide an experience so that you can do things better, faster, you know, more complete, to lead to a, uh, greater business impact and hopefully a greater world for the people that we serve.

Speaker D: Boom.

Speaker C: Um, what would happen if they didn't have you?

Speaker B: They would flounder in this space and, or just skip it all together. We were just going to go ahead, skip it all together. We'll just throw new ideas against the Wall and see what works and, or just become stagnant and not grow and then not be in business anymore.

Speaker C: So let's take all these facts that you just gave me and let's build what, what's called a three act structure. And that's the setup, the conflict, the resolution. And we're going to build a story. We're going to build it right here, right now.

Speaker B: Oh, no.

Speaker C: So the setup is here's this business and they are doing. Things are going fine. Every day they're doing this, they're serving their customers, things are going great. That's our setup. Here's Scott. Scott is a, uh, learning nerd looking for the right place. Scott is ready to change and revolutionize the right place, the right spot, looking for that right family to be part of. And here's the conflict. Scott, you've shared some of your journey, where you've left the company you're at for a little bit. And so you're looking for a new thing. That's your conflict. Your conflict is up. Uh, you have to find a new place. The place I was at, it's not working anymore. Their conflict is, hey, we know we're having trouble and we know we need to fill this role. We need to get somebody in here to help us do this. We're lost. We need someone to guide us. That's our conflict. The resolution is Scott and this business connect. Scott helps this business to succeed, helps them to move forward, helps to show them the way. This business begins to see turnaround and change quickly and the story is done. The little part of that story, we've created a story. It works the same with learning and development. It works the same with all of the things, the facts that you have to lay out. I was doing sales training for a company and listen, sales training is one of those things where too often people dive right into the numbers because everybody's very focused on the numbers. And it's so tough to get a story that isn't about the numbers because it takes all the oxygen out of the room. But people don't buy numbers and people don't sell numbers. Except maybe tax folks. Maybe they sell numbers, but people buy and sell stories. As I was helping these teams to build training to get, to get this information to like motivate people. Asking people why they would want to sell this product, at first the answer was always, uh, for, you know, look for a paycheck or because I have to or for the bonus or for any number of number reasons. But as soon as you dig A bit deeper. Okay, cool. You know, but why, why this product? Why didn't you go someplace else and sell? Why didn't you do something else? Oh, well, I really believe in the product. Oh, cool, great. Tell me why you believe in the product. What's so good about it? And that's when the stories begin. All of the training we create, we get really focused on the facts, on the numbers. We are trained to think of the facts and the numbers, but underneath those facts and numbers are stories that have made it necessary for us to be producing training. Sorry, I'm going to open Soapbox now.

Speaker D: No, no, that's great. Um, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm trying to follow along here. You're saying basically when you're coming across anything that's dry, which is most of the stuff that we do, that as long as you have uh, that structure, beginning, uh, a middle and end, like the setup, the conflict, the resolution, you can then transition whatever you're trying to teach into a story that has a beginning, middle and end. But how can you do that? Say, trying to train a class who is learning the new email server. How can you put a story in there?

Speaker C: Okay, so we have to build a new email server as an example, right? In this theoretical company, they've got a new email server, right? So let's talk. Why did they, what happened to the old one?

Speaker D: Do you want me to just be hypothetical here? Like the old one was maybe outdated.

Speaker C: Okay, so the old one was outdated and that was causing problems, right?

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker C: Pick a problem. What problem was it causing?

Speaker D: Uh, maybe the company grew too big and they needed have more, more of an outflow.

Speaker C: So the company outgrew the email server. So let's think about that story. You know, there was this company, things were going fine, but as the company grew, they realized, hey, we're really having trouble sending and receiving emails. We're missing some, we're losing some, there's some problems. It's in that conflict, if we talk a three act structure, the setup, the conflict, the resolution. It's in that conflict that people lean in. If I'm like, everything was great, everything was hunky dory and today we're going to do it different. Well, that doesn't make any sense. But if I say there's a reason emails were getting missed, we were losing clients, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars were walking out of the door every day because we weren't able to effectively communicate with our customers. Yeah, the setup, there's the conflict the resolution is this training. The resolution is. That's why we purchased a new email server. Now, because of that, some things have changed. And today I want to talk to you about those changes. I want to talk to you about why those changes were necessary. I'm going to talk to you about why, once we get this process down, instead of watching those customers leave, not be able to communicate with us. Us not be able to communicate with them, we're going to talk about how we're going to be able to communicate with them. Not just as good, but better than before we got this new server. That's the story. That's the story for your email training. If you're making email training, please feel free, grab that and run.

Speaker D: It's also the wifm too. Like, what's in it for them? Which is awesome. Um, yeah. So there's your motivation right there.

Speaker C: When I teach instructional designers and, uh, when I used to and even now, I always tell them that they should pick up a book by Joseph Campbell called the Hero's Journey. And it's one of those books that's like, you know, sometimes people go, what? Because it's a book that gets handed out in English lit a lot, and it's pretty popular there, but in our world it's not so popular, but it should be, because it's all about storytelling and how these stories stick with us and move us. And that's the kind of retention we can only dream about right now.

Speaker D: I mean, that just to jump in real quick, that totally tracks because our stories were how we recorded history like before we had the written word. So m. It's more memorable and we have, like, a history of it being memorable. Love it.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, by the way, if you don't want to read a book and want to watch something, um, highly recommend in and of itself with Derek delguardio. He's a magician and he's a master storyteller. It's on Hulu. Uh, bring it Kleenex box with you. It's absolutely amazing. But he, uh, just weaves stories throughout this entire incredibly emotionally, um, impactful hour and a half. And it will impact you, which I think is really great. I think ultimately that's what we want.

Speaker D: But.

Speaker B: Good question for you, though, Dan, or Zeta, like, okay, what parts of our learning are critical to have stories? Because if we have stories on everything, then I think we might lose people. Uh, where should we have stories? Where are the best places? If I'm going to pick my content and I'm going to make sure I Have a story for this. What is it? Or are you going to disagree with me that I might lose people with, uh, stories?

Speaker C: I honestly and earnestly think your training should have stories in it everywhere. But you probably need to think about, instead of 30 to 40 individual little stories, one for each module, you need to probably think about the overarching story. Somebody has joined your company. Somebody has come out, gone through the rigorous process of applying and becoming part of your company. Obviously, they believe enough to put in the work and time, or maybe you're compensating well enough to attract them. But for whatever reason, you have somebody. At this super vital moment, it's easy to start throwing facts at them to just regurgitating knowledge and being like, hey, I know it's a lot. It's really drinking from the fire hose. But after a year or two, you get it. Oh, after a few months, you'll feel right at home. If somebody's going to join your company and they're in this new process, the story is there. Their story and your story are touching. They are becoming one. And you have this opportunity to look at them and say, hey, um, we're going to go through a new higher experience and we're going to cover a lot of things. And all of these things are important. And I think that there's probably a story behind why each of these lessons exist. There is no sign without a story behind it. It's the same thing for training. There is no training without a story behind it. So I want to talk to you about why this new hire program is the way it is, the role that you guys are going to play in it, why it's important. And we're going to talk through the story of the business and the company through this new hire experience. We're going to talk about boring stuff. We're going to talk about new email servers, we're going to talk about some of the HR stuff. You're going to roll your eyes at some of it. I know that some of this training doesn't feel like it's going to apply to you or it's going to feel like it resonates with you. But I promise you, there's reasons and purposes for all of these trainings. As you sit down, you take that HR paperwork, training, that HR stuff, and you're just like, oh, man. I want you guys to know that that's important enough that we want you guys to take a look at it, that there have been incidents, maybe not with our company, but with other companies in the past. That have shown us that if we don't talk about it now, we'll talk about it later and not in a good way. So I want you guys to sit, listen, ask questions and know that today is the start of your story with us.

Speaker D: Awesome. Um, um, I would be a little bit lost in the weeds here with that question though, Scott, and that I don't think the whole course should be the story. I think the course should be illustrative of whatever you're trying to teach. From the way I like to incorporate stories. I like to say what the thing is first and then say for example, and then go into the story. If I'm writing say a course where someone's trying to learn to use a new email server like we were talking about earlier, I would say, ah, uh, this is first you would have your wifm, like what Dan said, where you're like, hey, this is the way it was. Which is the story. This is why we're changing it. This is what that looks like. And then we'll go through. What I like to do is to put an avatar of whoever's trying the new thing and then naming this person and having her walk through it and then having almost kind of like a stand in for the learner to then go through on their own.

Speaker B: I feel like what makes good stories great are when they all kind of tie together. And you kind of mentioned that, Daniel. So for me, master level storytelling is really kind of thinking about, okay, what's my objectives for the learning? What's going to be new, better or different. And then I think maybe the second question we need to ask ourselves after we do that, is it necessary? Well, I mean, there's going to be the agenda. What am I going to talk about? What's the important information? So that's number two. Number three is like, what story can I tell that ties it all together? And that's where you start. You start with that story to drive the whiff him. This is Zeta. Zeta's on her bike and she's riding to go get groceries at Publix, right? And then all of a sudden, you know, and then, you know, then there's that thing that happens which kind of brings people together into the, you know, where they can see themselves. Oh, I'm Zeta. I've been on that bike. I've gone to Publix on my bike. And it's scary thing, especially if you live in Florida where you're going to get run over by a bunch of people, don't know how to drive like you know, I get it. I'm with you. I'm with you, and something happens, and you tie that into the why or what's in it for me. And then what's really great from a master storytelling perspective is we've thought this story out long enough to be able to tie all the other pieces into it as well. So we can go back to Zeta. Okay. Zeta is in the hospital now because she got hit by Dan and his big jacked up pickup truck. You know what I'm saying? And this is why she needs this and why she's that you tie everything together and you weave that narrative, uh, along. But how you start that to create the what's in it for me and then get people's buy into. Oh, I see myself here too. Oh, I've been through that as well. I understand. Now they're with you. Then you can tell whatever ding dang story you want around that character, because then that character becomes part of your audience journey. And in any time and every time that I find myself within the nested story, it's relevant. And relevant learnings are wicked more impactful. Holy crap. I just ranted. I'm so sorry, folks.

Speaker D: No, sounds awesome. Yeah, and you sprinkled some emotional investment in there, too. It was perfect. I thought it was chef's kiss.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, worst case scenario, you bookend it. Right? Um, I think we talked about the start em, laugh and leave them crying. Start em with something interesting and funny that they can relate to and everything, and then just go right back at the end. Uh, hit them with something impactful and deep because they like you. It'll have more impact if you can tie that to the overall narrative of the story. That's fantastic. If you can go one step level, pause in the middle of the most exciting part of the story and come back to it later. Holy crap. What are some things that we want to, uh, leave with our audience today, Dan and Zeta, that really reinforces everything we've talked about.

Speaker C: I have been a trainer. I have been an instructional designer. I've up, down, left, and right. Been lucky enough in learning development to do lots and lots of things. And I know sometimes that you get tasks and asks where you just go, oh, uh, man. And you're just like, let me just check the box and move on. Because you're like, hey, I just want to, like, just get this done and move on to the next. And I would push each of you to pause and think before you just check the box that there's a story, a Business doesn't ask to make a training to pull their people out of their daily tasks to take a training. Unless there's a. Hopefully a good reason. Unless there's a reason, there's a purpose. Find out what that story is. What's the story? Can I share this story? If I can't share the story, can we build a scenario based on this story so people understand why it's important?

Speaker B: Well, that's awesome. Hey, everybody, uh, don't just be a subject matter expert. Go ahead and become an expert storyteller. That's fantastic. Dan, do me a favor. Could you let everybody know how they can get in touch with us?

Speaker C: Absolutely. All right, party people. You guys know what's up? Email us@nerds learningnerds.com this week. We would love to know what is your story? What is your learning and development story? The story of a training that you had one time. The story of how you got into learning and development. We'd love to know if you're on Facebook, you can find us at learningnerds for all of our Instagram peeps. Fab Learning Nerds. And lastly, for more information about us, what we do and updates. Www.thelearningnerds.com Just a quick note. We have recently updated the page. If you'd like to find the podcast, you'll need to go to the top bar and click on Fabulous Learning Nerds. Scott, back at you.

Speaker B: Hey, Dan, Thanks a lot. Hey, everybody, do me a favor. Hit that like button. Hit that subscribe button. Share this episode out with your friends or tell them a story about how awesome it is, and that'd be great. Or you can go ahead and leave a review or a story, uh, over on itunes or on Spotify or anywhere where you can go ahead and listen to your podcast because you want to know what doing so is going to help more people find this great information. And that's an awesome thing with that. I'm Scott.

Speaker C: I'm Dan.

Speaker D: I'm Seda.

Speaker B: And we're your fabulous Learning Nerds. And we are out.

Speaker C: Uh, 1, 2, 3, 4. Hey, it's Dan, Zeta, Scott and Sam.

Speaker B: Um, your favorite learning Nerds podcast hosts. But did you know we do more than just talk about learning and development.

Speaker C: We're out there in the real world, transforming organizations just like yours. The same passion and expertise you hear on our podcast, that's what we bring to our leadership, coaching, training, development, and learning consultancy.

Speaker D: Same nerds, Same straightforward approach, same flat pricing. Just a lot more hands on, ready

Speaker B: to work with the voices you already know and trust, visit www.thelearningnerds.com and let's create something fabulous.