The Universal Running Cadence When I first started training for the Boston Marathon, I ended up injuring myself because I was new to running.
improving your pitch
Focus on the ACTION: How to Make the Change Actually Happen – EP057
The Action Categories The holy grail of messaging is finding a way to make your message actionable.
Focus on the CHANGE: Defining the Intent That Guides Action – EP056
The Commander’s Intent What is the Change in thinking or behavior that you need someone to make?
Focus on the TRUTH: The Difference Between “Understandable” and “Inevitable” – EP055
The Idea Behind the Idea Great ideas aren’t just found, they’re built piece by piece. To make that idea irresistible to someone else, we have to do the same thing: build that idea piece by piece in their mind.
Focus on the PROBLEM: Why Your Audience Needs Both Context and Contrast – EP054
Unlocking Perspective We want to put an intractable problem in front of an irresistible goal for our audience because it creates context. It makes the goal more valuable because the audience feels like they need to work harder for it, and it creates urgency because they really want to solve that problem.
Focus on the GOAL: Why Your Audience Needs an “Irresistible Outcome” – EP053
Focus on the Audience’s Goal To celebrate a year of Find the Red Thread, we’re going to get back to basics and spend each of the next five episodes focusing on one piece of the Red Thread. This week, we’re looking at the Goal.
TraPIT – An Easy Way to Keep Your Audience With You – EP051
Transition, Point, Illustration, and Takeaway We all need certain landmarks in our messages to help point our audience in the right direction, but are you telling your audience how those landmarks string together?
Why Your Messages Break When You Say Them Out Loud (And How to Fix Them) – EP050
Dialogic Processing Sometimes when we get up to give a big talk or presentation, the speech that sounded great on paper suddenly falls flat when we say it out loud. Why does this happen?
How to Make What You Do Unmistakably You – EP049
How to Be Recognizable We covered the origin of the Red Thread in Episode 3 with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, but there’s another story that comes from Goethe.
What is the Shape of Your Story? – EP048
The Three Story Shapes Kurt Vonnegut had this idea that stories have shapes. Here’s how it would work: if you could map a story with the horizontal axis representing time and the vertical axis representing our characters’ fortunes, you could see how it’s structured over time.