Storyliving

Live a remarkable life. Tell beautiful stories. Awaken change in others.

Hemingway says “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit at the typewriter and bleed.”

Understanding this statement is the key to connecting with your audience.

If you feel like you are disconnected from your audience currently, it’s likely because your first step when creating is starting with your audience in mind.

I don’t blame you. This is what taught in the marketing space.

You’ve been told to identify your niche, understand their problems and desires, speak directly to them and the clients will come running when you make an offer.

If this isn’t working and you’re feeling disconnected from your content, it’s because you’ve immediately disconnected yourself from your content by starting with them first.

Your message feels like a watered down version of what you really wanted to say.

Your content begins to feel soulless.

This feeling sucks and you feel like you have lost the entire purpose of why you began this journey in the first place: to do work you love and to love the work you do.

If you really want to create content that resonates with others, you must first create space to sit at the typewriter and bleed.

Is this anything?

Jerry Seinfeld (creator of multi billion dollar TV show, “Seinfeld”) spent his life walking around with legal note pads observing the world around him and asking himself if there’s a joke somewhere in that moment.

He’d notice something, then ask “Is this anything?” then write it down on a yellow legal pad he took with him everywhere, and then he’d play with the idea.

Most of the legal pad is filled with jokes not worthy of anyone’s time or attention, but in between the hundred bad ones are the great ones (he published his legal pads into a book, Is This Anything? My dad has it and I’ve read some of the jokes. Some are really really terrible haha)

Like any great comedian, Jerry didn’t nail his jokes at once. The only way to nail a joke is to go on stage and tell the joke and see how the audience reacts. He didn’t always get a lot of laughs (usually he didn’t, not at first).

That means the joke required reworking, “I don’t edit my jokes, the audience does,” he shared in an interview.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of the joke is bad, but that it’s simply not being presented in a way that resonates.

Then he’d go back to his legal pads and fiddle with the jokes, try them in front of a new audience, get a few more chuckles, and back to the legal pads for more revisions.

This is something so consciously applied to the journey of a comedian, but in reality is part of all our lives.

It’s how you learned to walk (good thing you didn’t have an ego as baby where you required over a thousand steps and hundreds of falls to learn how walk with any efficiency [1])

It’s how you got good at any sport you’ve ever played.

Practice. Drop balls, miss shots. Practice. Drop less balls, make more shots. Play in a game. Repeat.

It’s not that every rep was the perfect rep, but it’s the bad reps that got you to hitting the game winning shot when it counted.

I propose getting back to this way of living as the path to falling in love with your content, becoming a thought leader in your industry and deepening your connection with your audience.

Communion: Proactive Ideation Time

There are 3 types of Communion I practice:

1. Communion with Self: A space to journal with the parts of you who are calling for attention (usually the ones we don’t like: anger, frustration, sadness, etc.). This is a similar practice to Morning Pages made popular by Julia Cameron in The Artist Way​
2. Proactive Ideation Time: I’ll break this down in this section
3. Soul Journaling: Taking inspiration from the outside work that spoke to your soul and transmuting it into your own work of art

Today, I’d like to talk about Proactive ideation time. A space to make where you get to make your work messy and to play with ideas where nobody else will see or judge them.

We go so fast through life consuming another self help book, listening to another podcast, reading another newsletter (hi), when we don’t really need more information.

What we really want is to come up with and share our own unique frameworks and ideas like how Mel Robbins got wildly popular for her 5 Second Rule (soooo freakin simple) and more recently the “Let Them” theory.

That’s the sticky work that will change the world, but we can’t come up with these things if we never give ourselves space to be creative, make things messy and just play.

It really is easier and feels super productive to be consuming more information, but at this point you gotta ask yourself, is that working? Is it producing the results I want?

Are people deeply resonating with your work and commenting on your posts?

Are people smashing the save button and asking for more?

Are people sharing your work or is it going left unheard?

If the answer isn’t what you desire, then it’s time to put away the consumption and create space in your calendar for communion, specifically, Proactive Ideation time. It is going to change your life.

I tend to do this best in 3 spaces.

1. Morning journal when the coffee is HITTIN
2. Unplugged walks or runs
3. Unplugged car rides

I go into these sessions and I intentionally think about a specific event in my life and begin to deep dive into it.

It actually doesn’t matter what event I choose because I can find lessons, metaphors, frameworks and stories from all parts of life that I can use for content (and so can you!), but thats a different topic for a different article.

Today, let’s specifically talk about deep diving into your own work.

I will share my work so you can relate it to the work you do and learn how to utilize this process for yourself.

My work is StoryLiving: the act of living a life of no regrets and telling those stories to awaken change in your audience.

I embody this everyday. Everyday I am doing my best to pursue my bold life and tell those stories (and I help others do the same).

Every day I spend time in Proactive ideation. At least one journal session, or one unplugged 30 minute walk, or during runs (it ends up being what I do on every run whether I intend to or not because ideas just start popping in my head).

Again, this is an intentional proactive hunt for gold. I go into these containers think about one core thing in my work and deep dive on it.

Something like this…

• I’ve committed to PR-ing my 10k and I’m 3 weeks into training. How’s it going? I have actually been super committed to my runs AND my physical therapy. What’s different this time? Why am I so committed? What am I doing that’s helped? Am I finally just sick and tired of my lack of commitment? Is there something bigger going on here? What’s helped me take bolder action with more ease? Am I learning anything? Could I teach my younger self (aka my audience) how to be more consistent so they can live a life of no regrets?
• What stories did I tell that really landed with my audience? Why? Could I have told them better? How did I unravel that story out of my own mind? How can I teach that to others? Is there a framework to follow? Were there stories that were hard to write? What happened there? How can I better get into flow state next time?
• What content did well and is there a way to make it even better? What content didn’t do well and if there’s a way to make it better. I noticed I was overly obsessed with checking my metrics, I don’t like feeling anxiously attached to social media. If I was my own client, how would I coach myself?
• What did I just teach my clients? What landed with them? It took me 5 minutes to share that concept, could I articulate it in 1? What could I have taught better and how can I explain this more effectively? What did I get lit up about teaching? Did I have any of those moments when I thought, “I should really take my own advice here,” and can I take my own advice? Is there a framework I could layout that would make this easier to follow?

Just to be clear, I don’t go through all these topics at once. It’s more like I am following the energy of what wants to come up and I commune with it (hence the name communion).

The real practice is to simply get curious and to see what’s there for you.

I’d hesitate to be absolute about anything, but I’ve found, whatever is there for me is always amazing medicine for my audience.

If you get stuck, stop trying to make it perfect. You’re not there yet. Begin by playing. Throwing ideas out there. Just see what you can uncover.

Metaphors. Frameworks. Stories. They are everywhere if you let yourself explore.

My journals usually look like a scrappy mess with arrows pointing in all directions and crossing things out and rewriting them.

My unplugged walks usually look like a schizophrenic rehearsal of one idea over and over. Yes, sometimes I’m quietly whispering to myself on the street (I’ve gotten plenty of looks).

The more I let my ideas flow and toil around with them, the more a better thought will hit me like, “oh no wait it’s more like this!!” or an old quote will pop in my mind out of nowhere that sums it all up perfectly, or some idea that I had 5 months ago but never used will resurface and find it’s home in this new idea.

There’s no better feeling than feeling like you got something good, unique, and true to your soul.

The more you do this the faster you find things.

Once you feel like you have something, like any good comedian, clean it up so it makes sense (get it about 70% good), then try it out on your audience.

Make content.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get the whole place roaring with laughter (aka a ton of engagement). It’s a fresh idea and it could be your best idea, but maybe you just didn’t articulate it well enough. And why should you have? It’s a fresh idea!!

Any really good idea will have energy that lasts. That’s when you get to go back to your proactive ideation time and keep playing with.

Maybe you find a better name for this concept.

A simpler way to lay it out.

A new metaphor to explain it.

A new quote that ties it all together.

The options are endless.

However, if the energy from it fades and you don’t feel like going back to it, that’s also great! Don’t try to hang on to it for dear life as if you’ll never have another good idea again. That is the practice of low self trust and it’s keeping you stuck. We do NOT want to practice poor reps.

Think of it like sports. The less you trust yourself the tighter you play. Nobody who plays tight reaches flow states. Ya gotta be loose and relaxed to play your best.

So let that shit go and remember to trust yourself as the almighty creator that you are.

When the energy from an idea fades your goal is to create the environment that got you feeling so good in the first place. The idea came from the energy. The energy did not come from the idea.

Pro tip: Oftentimes it can be helpful to practice gratitude before you get started.

It’s a great way to start the day anyway. You can either look for reasons why life is hard or you can look for reasons why life is so beautiful. It’s your choice.

Whatever your weapon of choice, get in a state where you feel good and the ideas will flow with more ease and then you get to play…

Is this anything?

Besides, what else do you have to do?

I love this dialogue between Jerry Seinfeld and Howard Stern (you can watch the entire 3 minute clip here)

STERN “Can you go to a Chinese restaurant and not sit there and work on material?”

SEINFELD “I’m never not working on material. Ever… Every second of my life I’m thinking, ‘Can I do something with that?’”

STERN “That sounds torturous?”

SEINFELD “Why?”

STERN “So if I came over to your house and we’re hanging out, you’re kind of really looking for material?”

SEINFELD “Not kind of. I’m looking for material.”

STERN “That’s working 24 hours a day. It’s neurotic.”

SEINFELD “Making jokes is not work, it’s a gift.”

STERN “That’s your day, you memorize this material?”

SEINFELD “Howard, what else do I have to do? You say to Tiger Woods, ‘how do you remember what club to use?’… what else does he have to do?”

STERN “It sounds like a tortured life”

SEINFELD “It is, but the blessing in life is finding the torture you’re comfortable with… Find the torture you’re comfortable with and you’ll do well.”

STERN “Do you ever dream of the day where you could go to your wife with a Chinese restaurant and not think about [material]?”

SEINFELD “I’d shoot myself in the face. What fun is life if I’m not making jokes all the time?”

Jerry is right. Life is going to challenge you no matter what. Might as well choose what you get to be challenged by and let yourself fall in love with it.

Like I said at the beginning, you began this journey to do work you love and to love the work you do.

It’s inherently selfish and it’s your gift to the world!!

*“Where we had thought to find abomination, we shall find god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”* - Joseph Campbell, A Hero With a Thousand Faces​

If you really want to connect with your audience, reconnect to yourself first.

Reconnect to the love of this work.

Write what your heart needs to hear.

Write what your soul is begging to say.

Not for your audience. For you.

Sit at the typewriter and bleed.

If you resonate with this, you’ll love thet 4-week StoryLiving bootcamp I am running in the new year.

Registration opens after Christmas. It’s only $150. Be the first to know by tapping here.​

With Love,

Matt

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