Ep141 Transcript: Stories Make a Big Impact – Top Takeaways from David Otey

Andrea Vahl: Tell a story to make a bigger impact. That’s my number one takeaway from my interview with David Otey, who went from engineer to master storyteller, speaker, and author. Tune in to more of my top takeaways from that episode.

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Andrea Vahl: I absolutely loved hearing from David Otey about how he went from engineer to storyteller and speaker. And I love this because I was an engineer myself and I resonated so much when he was talking about how he thought he just had to give people more information. Like just, yeah, give them all the info all at once, dump it in there and that’ll be all they need. And I tend to do this too. And I think I do that both with my sales letters, my newsletters, things like that, as well as some of my training materials. I tend to think I’m over delivering, but that’s not always a good thing for your audience. They need a story to grab onto.

We are hardwired to remember stories better. And so I think that is the message that I need to learn over and over. Try and wrap that into a story. Try and see how you can illustrate your point with a story, whether it’s in your sales messages or in your training. So that was a huge thing for me.

And the other thing I loved about David’s episode was the way he went from one career to a different career. And I think he really described how it wasn’t quite. Perfect. Obviously I think none of it is, but there’s always a messy middle time where maybe you aren’t getting it quite exactly right.

Maybe you’re trying something new and it isn’t landing and then you get everything dialed in and it takes off. And so I think that’s another good lesson for us. If we are trying some new things and it seems to be like we’re swimming upstream or not getting where we need to go. It’s possibly just needing a little bit of tweaking.

It could be in the positioning. It could be in the audience we’re trying to reach. As David said, he had an audience that was too broad and it wasn’t really landing. And when he really embraced his technical background and really blended that with where he wanted to go with storytelling. That’s when he found that sweet spot where he had success.

Now he’s getting hired to go into pharmaceutical companies and help people with their training and go into Places where he can do some speaking and things like that. So when you really hone who your audience is, then you will have more success. And remember to just take a look at what might not be working here.

Where are things not landing? And can you just make a few simple adjustments and maybe embrace your uniqueness to really stand out from the crowd? And I think that’s a huge thing too. There aren’t many engineers who are also storytellers, right? So that’s a really good lesson. I love this interview.

I would encourage you to go back in, take a listen to it and learn some really good tips from David.

Hope that was helpful and make sure you grab the free guide top tools for late starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.