The Output #5: Define your voice by writing one story a day

The strong smell of black coffee hangs in the air as the screen flickers from the waiting room to the call. A bird chirps during our open pleasantries and then we get into it.

"I'm frustrated about my show" I tell my coach Jeremy.

"Tell me more. What is frustrating you, or what do you think is going on?"

The list starts as caffeine rushes through my answers. The answers drift to everything else in my business that feels up in the air. Everything I say appears on screen as boxes.

As a coach myself, I notice the follow up questions and how naming the frustrations makes them seem silly. I have an idea already on what I need to do, and like most people I work with there is a block.

My block is part overthinking, part impatience, part trying something new.

I also realized this session has been great.

Why? Because we all live in stories each day. The feeling is the nudge I need to capture and reflect on something that might be interesting for you all.

More importantly, stories are how creators find their voice, perspective, and opinions. When these are missing in your content, you are making content more difficult than needed. I found this out the hard way myself.

The first ten years I created content were not successful at all. Things were published every week like clockwork.

In the span of ten years, I had created over 700 youtube videos, 700 weekly newsletters, 430 landing pages, and over 150 podcast episodes. All with flat growth. The kicker is each episode I created felt off: it didn't feel like it was me talking or creating.

At first, I chalked it up to just learning how to do youtube, newsletters, and podcasts. I learned how to speak on camera, how to publish things, and get something, anything, shipped. I copied ideas from my heroes and that was ok for the time.

Like many creators, I got stuck in this phase. The next step seemed to be share everything in your life online, and that scared me. So I hid behind borrowed ideas so I didn't have to put my thoughts, feelings, ideas, and beliefs out into the world.

These are the exact things that help you connect with people. I've noticed more people reply and engage with my content since incorporating more stories.

Eventually, I started asking the question "what gives?" The frustration of putting in tons of time to script, edit, and publish content and still feeling invisible was too much.

I was past the initial learning, but unable to move forward. "What gives" was the first question to find out exactly what.

It led me to join business and creator groups, and in one group the leader Patrick shared how he used stories to sell multimillion dollar deals during his consulting career.

He challenged us to write down all the stories we continually told as creators.

I panicked.

I didn't have any stories I told regularly. Because I was hiding myself from my content. And I didn't think I had anything worthy to say.

The good news: we all have stories and have things to say. He challenged us to notice what stories we are in each and every day, and to record at least one.

It felt awkward at first, but it is quite liberating. Capturing a story a day was kinda fun. Working on telling the stories in a meaningful way showed me "What gave" in my content.

Telling and presenting a story requires a point of view, so you know what insights to share. It requires you to explain how you think, and to find your point of view about things.

Telling and presenting stories is transformational as a creator.

A question for you: have you ever felt this way about your voice or content? Let me know, I'd love to hear about how you've faced or dealt with a similar situation to me.

Just hit reply.

Cheering you on, Shawn