How to Steal the Stage with Magnetic Storytelling

Jim James (00:00)
Alas, poor Yorick, for I knew him well. We all grew up with stories, and forgive me if I probably butchered a little bit of Shakespeare, but you'll find out why in just a minute. When we were kids, we were told that telling stories, or what we might have called porky pies in England, porky pies are lies in rhyming slang, telling stories was something we were told not to do. We were told to really be quite factual and to tell the truth,

and to keep it clean. But as we get older and as we've got businesses, we're actually told to tell stories. We're told to get back into storytelling because it's the best way to build engagement with our members of staff, with our customers, and with our partners. And it's an art form, telling a story. It's not just a long-winded narrative about something that you think's interesting. And that's why I've brought an expert, an actor,

turned professional storyteller onto the mic today. Peter Bray is joining us from Warwickshire, which is the home of Shakespeare, and he's a Lemington Spar. Peter Bray, welcome to the show.

Peter (01:11)
Thank you very much, Jim. Thanks so much for having me.

Jim James (01:14)
Well, you know, I only did a snippet there at Shakespeare. I know that you could have done much more and much better than I did, but I wanted to introduce a little bit of my thespian skills. Nothing compared to yours, because I know that you were on, literally on stage for many, many years until you had a transformation and got into storytelling and helping business owners, entrepreneurs, including people like medical staff, how to tell stories. So Peter, we're going to talk about what makes a good story,

Peter (01:25)
That was very good.

Jim James (01:44)
what makes a bad story. I'm going to challenge you to tell your story in six words, the old Hemingway test, and then we're also going to talk about some mistakes people make when they're trying to build stories for their companies. Peter, you went from perfume sales to storytelling and consulting. Tell us a little bit about how that happened and your own story and then we're going to get you to tell your story in six words.

Peter (02:10)
Fantastic. Well, it all started, you could say, when I was selected by a wonderful tutor that I had in secondary school, to go on a course that introduces you to drama school and the prospect of studying acting at a top drama school. And I was chosen because I kept on

being put into school plays and goofing around at lunchtime performances and stuff like that, which I very much enjoyed secretly, but I didn't show it because I didn't want to get bullied about it. You could get picked on for showing too much enthusiasm at that age. So I was in my mind going to do something very cool where I'd go to drama school and get taught how to be in the next Ridley Scott blockbuster

with swords and horses and guns and just looking awesome and cool. And what actually happened was that I went through three years of vocational training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and then started a career as a young, bright-eyed actor in London, where I was promptly put into plays. And some of my early performances will show you the extent of my delusion of what I thought I was in for.

I was cast as a clarinet playing dog in one of my first acting jobs. I was cast as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, where I got to wear an extraordinary dress in an all male production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And that's how my career began. It was with Shakespeare and with theater, not movies or getting to play with guns or

swords and horses and I accidentally totally fell in love with Shakespeare which is not what I thought I would do as a small town boy from South East England. I ended up absolutely loving Shakespeare and getting more and more into it the more jobs that I did and eventually going into

tours around America, we went to Mexico, we went to around Europe, went all sorts of places performing Shakespeare and then I started getting asked to teach the act of acting, the art of acting and storytelling and then I started to teach storytelling itself and somewhere along the way I stumbled across while I was, as you say, working very similar to Joey from friends

spraying reluctant department store visitors with perfume as they went past trying to get them trying to fulfill my sales quota frankly and I was really sick of it and I was in at lunchtime break in a bookshop and a title caught my eye and the spine of a book on the shelves the four-hour workweek by Tim

retire early, escape the nine to five and everything that I just wanted to do. And I read that book and got introduced to the world of entrepreneurship and marketing, and that started me off down a side path while I was an actor, where I started to get more and more into marketing, entrepreneurship, in between acting jobs, I'd build these little micro businesses and then totally forget about them when I went head first into the next acting job and

Eventually that grew and grew until it took over from acting. I got very tired of having to pack my bags and go where people told me to go to as an actor. So I'm now a full-time marketing consultant and storytelling coach who helps entrepreneurs, business owners to extract the stories that they need to extract to connect with their audience.

Jim James (06:24)
Okay, Peter, well, so I did say to you that I was gonna challenge you to say that in six words because one of the skills of being a podcast guest, or frankly, if you're on a Zoom call in a network meeting, is to not say what you do, but to give a story that anchors you in the mind of your audience. So I'm gonna challenge Peter Bray here, take that four minute summary of the last 10 years of your life and make it into the

Six words, which of course is what Hemingway did when he said, for sale, baby shoes never worn. The shortest story ever written. Peter, can you condense your life story into six words?

Peter (07:14)
Tell

Beautiful stories, ex-actor declaims.

Jim James (07:21)
There you go, you see. So I left the pause in, it was dramatic pause, but the point is it's not as easy as it seems to think of a story. And stories, yeah, and stories take some time to work out. Now, Peter, I've invited you on the show because entrepreneurs often have got quite a long winded story that loses an audience, whether it's investors or customers,

Peter (07:22)
How's that?

I'm sweating.

Jim James (07:51)
or listeners to podcasts, or journalists. With your experience, and I'll put you on the spot there, but with your experience, what makes a compelling story the kind that an entrepreneur should learn to tell?

Peter (08:08)
That's a, that is the question. That's an excellent question. I'd say that is the golden question. And my answer is the one that earns you the trust of your best customers, your true fans, to put it in the words of Kevin Kelly's famous article, 1000 true fans. It's the story that hooks someone in, first and foremost, because without attention

doesn't matter what how the rest of your story is. So it has to hook them in first, get their attention, earn their attention. Then it has to take them into a fascinating and rare and compelling world that they have, that you help nurture an appetite in your audience for them to find out more. They have to find out more, they have to be compelled in forwards, they have to care and empathise.

And then you have to take them to a satisfying conclusion, which satisfies all the questions that you've built up and sticks the landing, so to speak. It has to have an emotionally and intellectually satisfying resolution to that story with a message that possesses them. And one of the godfather of story, you could say, in my opinion, Robert McKee talks

about how a story is an idea wrapped in an emotion, which I didn't love when I first heard of that. I thought, well, that's a bit cynical because I've spent 14 years living stories as an actor. I'm on the inside. I respond to it on a gut level. And sometimes I kind of jerk away when I hear something articulated so casually. And actually now I think that that

entirely nails it. It's an idea wrapped in an emotion.

Jim James (10:05)
So Peter, there's a lot of talk for entrepreneurs of building your own story. And the thing is Campbell's hero's journey. How do you take this idea wrapped in emotion and make it into a story, which has this idea of, you know, a story arc? Can you give us an example, maybe in your own case or somebody you've worked with, where

someone could articulate that idea wrapped in emotion because that's a great theory, but me and my fellow listeners are going, okay, so that's great for an actor on the stage. But here I am about to go and do a TED talk or to go on a podcast or do an interview with a journalist.

How do I go about making my idea wrapped in emotion into something I can actually say that I can believe in?

Peter (11:01)
Right, well, that's a process of extracting first information about who your audience is. So it's about deep diving into who you're talking to, because that's going to dictate the answer to that question. What idea? What emotion? So the idea has to be something that is intellectually fascinating, specifically to who you want to listen. It has to elicit curiosity

which is one of the main emotions that you can wrap a story in for business and marketing purposes. So really how you start making those decisions about how to create your hero's journey is thinking about, well, what is the problem that this solves? What's the transformation

that this story needs to deliver? And by deliver, I mean, I guess, my audience has to resonate with the transformation. That's what, you know, if you're going on to say, I've got a thing that I offer that's valuable and you should listen and here's its story, then you have to know and be able to articulate the transformation that is inherent

within that story, within your product, within whatever it is. And that can be on any level. It doesn't have to be a grand transformation. Tony Robbins is a big transformation where it's like, I will transform you into your full potential from the small place that you're occupying now or whatever it is. But a burger stand would be, I will transform you from being starving and a bit drunk into belly full of really great food that-

Thank goodness for that, you'll feel better tomorrow because of that burger. Whatever level of story that is, you need to understand the transformation. So you need to know who, what the problem is that's at the beginning of that arc and what the transformation turns that problem into, what the resolution is. You need to know who has that problem and the details of them and what their world is made up of. What do they see every day as a result of that story? And

often people use language that's in their words as the expert, how they solve a problem. But you need to understand what the world of your listener looks like in their words. This is something as an actor I was paid to step into the world of other people. It's really a similar thing. You need to do your research as if you're an actor playing a part to understand on a...

on a visceral level what that world looks like.

Jim James (13:50)
Peter, let me ask you then a question. Some of the most famous work that we have on stage or TV, including Shakespeare, was written Shakespeare over 400 years ago. Shakespeare didn't have today's audience in mind, and yet it's still compelling. So you talked about getting to the mind of the audience, but plainly that playwright, his mind is

long gone. How do you marry up your own story with the narrative that the audience will find engaging? Because we can't just take their story, right, and be in their world because we've got our own story. And the whole transfer of value as an entrepreneur is, I've got something that I've solved that you will also

find solves your problem too. So how do you reconcile the need to have your own story and to make that resonate with the audience?

Peter (14:55)
Yeah, that's another golden question because what you're looking for to answer that is the fragments of universality, the pieces of the puzzle that transcend an individual's experience and resonate in a larger sense. For example, if I told you that I have a very particular

dog toy in my house, I've got a greyhound and that she has got this dog toy that she loves that's sharp and she chews it and she actually ends up making it sharper and then she drops it around the house and then walks away and I stepped on it and have and experienced the most excruciating agony in my foot and was hobbling, fell against a wall,

bumped my tailbone on the floor, was rolling around, and it was sheer agony. Now you could probably relate to that, even though you don't have a dog toy, the same as my dog's toy. So the details are different, but you can find the archetypal elements of story. And one of the ways you can do that, and how I've run lots of storytelling workshops in the past, is by getting people to find the stories that they

are drawn to, their attention is drawn to. And then deconstructing it with the setting, who's in this story and who's it for? Who are the characters in this story? What's the location of this story? What happens? What's the main transformation that changes from beginning to end? For example, in that story, it's from, I was in a total physical piece,

physical agony, that's the transformation, that's the exchange of values as Robert McKee talks about it, the value exchange that can go from positive to negative, or negative to positive. I can talk about a story where I start off with my foot in agony and take this wonderful lotion and put it on my foot and I'm transformed into my foot being better than my other foot, you know, that's a transformation that you can look at. So,

It's about extracting the archetypal elements that are universal and then wrapping them in your individual experience, because that's the balance. That's why we're still hungry for stories. That's why Apple, Amazon Prime are still making stories. Haven't they all been told? Yeah, they have, but the details matter. The details are what we need to change and update to keep people fed. We've got one appetite for the archetypal same old stories.

And they're not, in some ways, they very much are the same old stories, the Romeo and Juliet, two lovers, there's an obstacle to them, being able to be together, and then they go through a journey and either it's a happy ending and they get together or it's a tragedy and they are irreconcilably separated. It's the same story, but the details matter. We update it over and over and over again. We take, how many

remakes of Romeo and Juliet, how many non-remakes, people just doing the same script of Shakespeare? Thousands, hundreds of thousands throughout the ages. And we're still hungry for it. And that's because you can change the details. You can update it with setting, with characters, with music, with the spectacle, with the staging, with the style, with the delivery. All these things can make the same story unique, but you can borrow the same universal archetypal elements.

Jim James (18:43)
Okay, Peter, so thank you for explaining that. And I think this idea then that you've got some essential human conditions, love unrequited, a pain from comfort to pain, from happiness to grieving, these, if you like, emotional states that we go through. And then if you like, the dressing up of those things are modern, urban, rural, group, individual, male, female.

And that, if you like, translates that universal theme into something that's relevant to the audience and it's how you package that. That's wonderful. Thank you for explaining that. Okay, well, I took it off your explanation. So that's great. There we go, just a bit of mutual compliments. Any mistakes, Peter,

Peter (19:23)
Yeah. No, that's a great sum. That's a great summary.

Yeah

Hehehe

Jim James (19:37)
that you see people making when they tell stories. I often ask my guests to tell us a mistake that they've made in marketing, but we're having a kind of a deep dive into story with you because as a story consultant, I think it's too good an opportunity to miss. So any mistakes that you've seen people make when it comes to telling their story.

Peter (20:00)
Yeah, it's the opening. Often there's a great story hidden in there. But the opening doesn't let people get anywhere near it. You lose people, you know, people do judge a book by its cover. I can't remember the amount of messages, marketing messages that we're exposed to per day. But the last number I remember hearing about was something about 5000. 5000

marketing messages a day, bids for our attention. So the market's more cynical than ever. And if you, if you don't, if you underestimate that opening to your story, then you all that wonderful work that you've put in is very likely to be wasted, to not have the attention it deserves. And you can earn that attention with things like

practicing frameworks, for example, time, place, tension. That's a great simple way. So the time, it was midday, the place I was in, the middle of a maximum security prison in Utah State, and tension, it's not where I was supposed to be. Here's what happened. So you create a really clear picture in someone's mind

of where it is, what's happening in a very practical and concrete way, and then you introduce the tension. And sometimes people skip straight to, they try and just get some clickbait curiosity opening line and they miss the practicality or they start and underestimate the amount of curiosity it takes to break through people's attention guards.

Jim James (21:50)
That's wonderful. So time, place and tension are three ingredients to a great opening. And could those be switched around? Could you have tension? I shouldn't have been there in the first place. It was a Thursday at three o'clock Utah penitentiary. Could you, if you'd like, mix and match the order?

Peter (22:11)
Yeah, you can, you can, you can. I would say that is, that's exactly what you should explore and it's exactly what you should look to deconstruct in stories that capture your attention. So I...

You know, my philosophy is that there's no rules, there's only principles. And once you understand the principles, once you understand why these things are there, then you play with them. And then you do that by respecting the form that already exists. And you can shortcut that by looking at what's being successful. So you can, there's all sorts of AI tools that you can use to see on LinkedIn, for example, what

with creators what's their most successful, what's their most viral posts, and you can find that. And you can look at why. You can just study the opening lines of the most viral pieces of content or ads that you notice. You keep seeing, and you keep seeing over a long period of time. Well, if they keep on spending money on that ad, then it's doing something. And so you might wanna deconstruct and look at how did they open? Is there time, is there place, is there tension? Is there a story? Maybe it's...

Maybe it's not so much a story, maybe it's a story in a different way of, if you have this problem and that's how they hook in the attention, they go straight for the, there's no dressing of place and setting. They're going for the transformational story in the, in the bare bones and practical do this, do that, and then you'll get this outcome. That's still a story, but it's changing the setting.

Jim James (23:43)
Peter Bray, storyteller extraordinaire. If there's a number one tip that you would give us because it's such a big topic and we don't have unfortunately any longer, the curtains will fall on us if I could tell you that analogy through. What would be your tip? What would be your tip for entrepreneurs?

Peter (23:58)
I'd love it.

My tip would, yeah, my tip would be to start telling more stories in public, show your work, work this out by publishing more and that can be if you've got an email list, that's just a marvelous way to have that interaction to talk to your email list, find out their stories, tell their stories, watch, tell stories that have a great opening, that have a point and a

a moral that's valuable for people to pay attention to and delivers value when they're finished reading. And notice what gets responses. If you don't have an email, let's do it on social media. Start telling and publishing stories. If you don't want to tell stories about yourself to start, we'll look at your reviews, your best customers, tell their story, look at their transformation. Where did they start? Why did they need your solution in the first place?

And if you don't know that, ask them, have conversations, interview them and say, what made you, where were you? What did your world look like before you started using this? And what was the tipping point that made you take action and say, I need whatever it is.

Jim James (25:15)
Peter, that's a great, great advice really. And so often you find people will post what they've done or they are posting what they do. And you see this a lot when you do networking and people explain what they do, as opposed to coming up with some kind of a narrative that anchors that person in the mind of the person who's listening. Peter, I always ask for a book. Should I say, No Shakespeare Allowed to you? A book or podcast?

Peter (25:42)
Yeah, you should. You should definitely warn me.

Jim James (25:43)
And yet, tis wonder that enruts me thus, as I remember rightly from Twelfth Night, or he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, bit of Julius Caesar there.

Peter (25:49)
That's so impressive.

My gosh, I mean, I never knew you had it in you. That's really impressive.

Jim James (25:59)
Well, that's the joys of Google. I had to confess, I was actually on stage with my sister in a production of Twelfth Night, and we were the twins. Which is why I remember the, and yet it is wonder that in Ratsumi thus, because...

Peter (26:08)
Oh, you were the twins.

Oh, I love that play. I've been in it and directed it and it's marvellous. Yeah.

Jim James (26:20)
It was one of, and I had a lovely blonde wig, so that I would look like my blonde sister, which my grandmother didn't recognize. But that's another story, Peter. That's another time, place, and tension moment. How did I resolve that? Peter Bray, your book or your podcast? No Shakespeare allowed.

Peter (26:25)
Yeah, fantastic.

That's...

Yes, I would say read Story by Robert McKee and ignore the breakdown of all the genre bits if that's slowing you down, but it's an absolute, you'll see that every film you watch, every book you read, you'll see it in different light and I found it profoundly transformational and moving. That's my recommendation.

Jim James (27:01)
That's a wonderful one. Peter Bray, I'm glad that you left the perfumery, that probably the women being sprayed by you were probably quite happy that you're no longer there either. But if people wanna find out, find you in Leamington Spa, how can they do that?

Peter (27:06)
Me too.

Yeah.

Yeah, well you can try me on my website at peterbraymarketing.com and there's lots of wonderful resources that you can download and you can see how I tell stories in my emails to my email list to create that connection.

Jim James (27:32)
Peter Bray, thank you for getting a connection with me today.

Peter (27:35)
Thanks, Jim. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Jim James (27:39)
It'd be my pleasure. My story is Plane Jump, Entrepreneur's Journey in Progress.

Peter (27:49)
That's amazing. There's so much time, place and tension. What happened? What's the plane jump? See, dramatic questions.

Jim James (27:51)
What do you think?

Oh, well, there you go. Dramatic question. But we've got to say the curtain has fallen. The matinee is over the ice cream cups are being picked up off the floor. As Peter Bray and I have to leave the stage exit left followed by a bear. Peter, thank you for joining me.

Peter (28:11)
We'll take our bow. Thank you, Jim.

Jim James (28:15)
Okay, well, what a story is such a massive topic. And I wanted to have Peter on to explain how it can work. But you can see how difficult it is as well to condense your story into something. Peter used three to four minutes of a 30 minute interview to tell his story. That's great, but it means we have less time for the work that he can do with you and me. So bear in mind, time is so important, especially if you're giving interviews,

get an engaging story that has time, place and tension in any combination that you seek. If you've enjoyed this time and place and conversation with Peter Bray and myself, do please leave a review. It all really helps and share this with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.