How to Make Your Ideas Irresistible with Tamsen Webster

It's March Madness people. No, not the sports ball March Madness. It's my 13th anniversary of being in business. And I have a goal of hitting 100,000 podcast downloads. Here are three ways to help. One, download one or more of your favorite episodes, including setting your fundraising mindset with Ria Wong, ethical storytelling with Calliope Gleros, what the best fundraisers do differently with Sabrina Walker Hernandez, and my special series on what's next in social media for nonprofits, just to name a few. Number two, share an episode with a friend or a colleague. You can go to pod.link backslash nonprofit nation to find descriptions and links to all the episodes. Number three, take a screenshot of the podcast and share with your network. Be sure to tag me so I can find it and share it out also. I truly appreciate all of you, your time, your attention, and your passion to make the world a better place. Now let's get to today's episode. Hello and welcome to non-profit nation. I'm your host Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome back to non-profit nation thrilled to have you here today wherever you're listening. This is your host Julia Campbell, and today is very special. I have an old colleague of mine, an older colleague of mine, not by age, but by how long ago it was that we worked together. One of my favorite authors and my favorite email newsletter authors here today, so I'm super excited to introduce my nonprofit audience to Tamsen Webster, and Tamsen is part strategist, part storyteller, part English to English translator. She helps experts drive action with their ideas, and I think all of us listening can use a little more actionable tactics to convey our ideas. Tamsen honed her trademark red thread approach in and for major organizations like Johnson and Johnson, Harvard Medical School and Intel, as well as with hundreds of individual founders, academics, and thought leaders. She's a former TEDx executive producer and current idea strategist. She was named to the thinkers 50 radar thinkers to watch class of 22, and Chris Brogan, one of my favorite thought leaders and authors, calls her the best keynote coach he's ever met. And Tamsen's also the author of one of my favorite books, Find Your Red Thread, Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible. So I'm so happy to have you here, Tamsen. Oh, I'm delighted and I'm delighted. Yes, yes. I, yeah, I, nonprofit, the nonprofit world is my first and enduring love. So I'm delighted to chat with you. Well, I have been a huge fan of your work since I saw you work. We work together on the Boston Ed talks in 2018, and I was helping them do marketing and social media promotion. And you were working hands on coaching the speakers. And for those who don't know, the Boston Ed talks recognizes and celebrates teachers, expertise, and creativity. And as the name kind of hints, the format follows TED talks in which people address an audience for five to 15 minutes on an area of their expertise or an idea that they're trying to convey. So what I did, I would stay after the initial meetings to take photos and create posts and talk to the speakers and write content. But mostly I would stay because of the magic that Tamsen would create with the speakers. You helped these speakers convey their ideas in such a compelling way. And these are people who are up in front of classrooms for a living. So you would think they wouldn't have a problem with public speaking. But I absolutely loved how you helped them hone in on what their idea was and craft a narrative around how to best convey it. And I think that all of my listeners, nonprofits, especially definitely need that kind of help. So I'm just thrilled to have you here today. And I'd love to hear more about your origin story and how you came to do what you do now. Well, when I was growing up, just like every other little girl, I wanted to be an art museum director. So actually from very young age, I wanted to be an art museum director. But I discovered that there's not exactly a clear path to that. I don't know. I'm endlessly curious. So when I went to college, I started off in business and in marketing with the focus, very bored, discovered endless thanks to a wonderful academic advisor that I had that I had an opportunity to add a second degree to my undergraduate studies. And so I kind of filled that in with American studies and art history. And then kind of proceeded on to say, well, I'm still going to be an art museum director. So I went and got an arts administration degree and an MBA. And then when I actually started doing work, it was related to it, which originally started out the PBS6 Museum. Oh, yes. And so, um, it's a great museum up on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I was doing exhibition. Well, I started actually in what we would now call development communications didn't really have a name there. So my name at that point, like my title at that point was the marketing development liaison, right? Like, is this? Oh, yes. I'm sure we all know we just like makeup titles. We just make up titles. But yeah, my job was to kind of make sure that like what we were doing from a marketing standpoint was supportive of and reflective of what the fundraising priorities were and then simultaneously to make sure that the way that the gift officers were going out there was consistent with how we wanted to represent what the museum was about. And is anybody who has spent any time in any nonprofit knows that you're the gap between marketing and development can be as big as the gap between sales and marketing in the nonprofit for profit world. So that was fun. I mean, it really was actually I loved kind of sitting in between those two areas. And then I think in a lot of ways, since I had done that actually all through college and actually all through high school where I was very much in the arts, but I was also the manager of the varsity boys baseball team. Like just sitting in between these two worlds was always a thing that I enjoyed doing because it allowed me to figure out what was different about each, but also what was the same about each. You know, my path took any number of different twists and turns, eventually realized that the more I was working in the arts, the less I loved the arts, not because it was more that the jobs were killing like it became a job. And as soon as it became a job, then I didn't get the same kind of joy out of it. But the thing that I continued to get so much joy out of was this idea of what gives a particular institution or organization or fundamentally the idea behind it power. And so I spent the right, you know, the kind of the, from there, you know, working in agencies, working in, whether that was brand strategy agencies or advertising agencies. And then I worked for boutique messaging sales messaging firm before I went out on my own. All of that was me focusing more and more and more on what is it about an organization or an idea that really gets people invested in it, both figuratively and literally. And what can I do given this path that I've taken through the world, sitting in between two worlds so often? What can I do to help make that easier? Because there's so much good work and so many great ideas that just gets stuck behind the walls of the institution or the individual that created them. And in my experience, oftentimes it's really just the words and more importantly, the principles those words reflect that are getting in the way. And I just became an MCLM obsessed with how do we fix that problem? What is it that needs to be out there so that we can do that English to English translation that you talked about that we can translate from nonprofit to lay speak that we can translate from expert to every day so that really people understand and are galvanized by what we do and why it's so important to the world. And I know you are a TED and TEDx coach and the work that I saw you do in the Boston Ed talks, what I thought was so interesting about it is it's almost harder to consolidate your idea into seven minutes, right? Like how do you help people? Like how are you able? You just work so well, not letting them get ahead of themselves or helping them address the curse of knowledge. So how did you get into that work? Well, it's all kind of the same. So the TEDx work and I am even though some people think of me oftentimes as a speaker coach or as Chris Colby keynote coach, I mean, I am adamant that I am a message strategist that I have an idea strategist that I it's much more about how do how do you communicate the idea and to me the other stuff is incidental. But yeah, getting something down into 10 minutes or less, particularly if it's your body of work or something you're really passionate about is very, very hard. And I think that the best analogy that I can come up with on the spot for that is that have you ever been in somebody's house that's full of stuff? Like and I don't mean to the extent of hoarding, but it's just it's full of stuff. And I think everybody's house is full of stuff, right? But you know, let's use our own spaces, right? Our own spaces are full of things that by and large probably have meaning to us in certain ways. And even some things that are fairly kind of strange and casual, like to somebody coming in from the outside for the first time that might think of it as quote unquote stuff, they look at it as stuff and you look at it as like, Oh my gosh, that is like one of my favorite memories attached to that carton, certain thing or something that's hanging on the wall, like isn't just a thing that in my case is hanging on the wall. There's actually there's actually a story behind what that thing is. And I think that's the challenge because what I mean is that it's hard when you know everything about your area of expertise or your idea, your initiatives or your programs to decide, well, it's painful to cut out to do whatever feels like cutting out all of the detail about why that thing is awesome or important or world changing. But to the somebody who hasn't introduced it, somebody walking into your house for the first time until they start to understand why some of those things are important, it's just stuff. And it can be an overwhelming amount of stuff. And so the reason why that's like I said, it's challenging is because we have that curse of knowledge that you mentioned, we have like that full understanding of our darlings, our darlings, but but we can see because we've spent so much time steeped in it, the sophistication, the complexity of everything that we do. And we can't imagine that there is a simple way to put that out there. And yet there is. I found that over and over and over again. And you know, the answer as I found over and over again is to essentially keep digging until you find really the core principles that your your work and your ideas based on, because it's at that point where you can say, and you can kind of communicate what you do to somebody else in a way that they not only understand it, but agree with it is a hard, absolutely, because we are not, we don't walk around thinking in principles that we know of. We just walk around with our ideas. So it really is a process of excavation to get down to what's what's there. It's kind of this like, idea, archaeology, like, what's actually there? And then kind of reducing it to what you put in front of other people to the core principles behind it. And you can tune those core principles, you can articulate them in a way that is aligned with the understanding of the audience that you're talking to. So educator talking to fellow educators can use shortcuts and language and jargon and kind of elusive references that other people wouldn't really understand. But underneath those are still principles, like even below that. So really that was the work at Ed Talks. It's the work that I do, kind of prior to the performance coaching at TEDx Cambridge, where I'm still the idea strategist. It's the work that I do with all my clients, nonprofit, not as saying, what are the core principles understand underneath and behind what you do that anybody could understand and agree with. Because once we get there, kind of the magic that happens, is that you end up presenting kind of the story of your idea, the story of your programs, the story of your organizations, as something that they haven't heard before, but that they already believe in. And it's that combination that can be really magical. So every time, and I honestly do this, and I'm not, it's like the compliment brigade here, because I'm just, I've been a fan of yours for so long, that when the book finally came out, I mean, it is a framework for making your idea irresistible. So it's much more than a lot of what I tell my clients is, you know, I always show them Simon's and I start with why, or, you know, like you said, try to distill it down. You have 25 programs, what is the essence of it? But you created the framework and sort of the step by step way to do it in the red thread and also in your weekly newsletter. And I love the first sentence in the book. It says, this book could have been one sentence. The best way to make your idea irresistible is to build the story. People will tell themselves about it. And for any communicator, any speaker, I use it to prepare for my speaking engagements, even writing an email newsletter, preparing for a podcast. I think that this framework, however, you know, it doesn't matter if you're writing a novel, it doesn't matter if you're writing an email can be really helpful. So I know it's a, you know, it's a whole book, but can you, can you kind of give us a high level overview of the framework? Okay, sure. Yeah. Okay. So the quick unpacking of that thesis of the book, which is that the best way to make an idea irresistible is to build a story. People will tell themselves about it is based on a couple of things. One is that every, every decision has a story, and more specifically the story that we believe, because we're not rational decision makers or rationalizing decision makers, right? We tell ourselves a story about what we do. And story in this case, isn't necessarily a once upon a time story. It's a causal relationship. It's this happened because this happened, or this will happen because this is true, right? Like it's this causal relationship is really what I mean by story. And the idea that was behind the book, and the one that I tested out, you know, with text Cambridge and my clients and otherwise ahead of time, you know, so it wasn't just an idea. It was when I tested out before I wrote the book was that since that's going to happen anyway, right? Since someone's not going to work with you, they're not going to kind of engage with your programs. They're not going to give you money. None of that is going to happen unless they can tell themselves a story that they believe about why that's the right thing to do. Let's just skip to that story and build that one, because the hardest thing that we're going to try to do is to try to swing somebody over to our perspective, right? And I have yet to meet anybody who works in any branch of a nonprofit that feels like they've got enough time or money for something. So a lot of the kind of efficiency and expediency that I that I tried to build in with this approach is very much rooted in that background. I was like, I don't have time to figure this out. I need to do something that's going to work. It's going to work quickly. It's going to work for like all my different layers of donors. It's going to work, you know, for internally, externally, everything. And so it's this idea of really flipping the story that you're telling instead of it being your story, your way, it's your story, their way. It's basically saying, again, just skipping to the end, what is the story that they would tell? Now, great, there's the idea of like, okay, well, how do we do that? And that's where I could go from these pre conscious causal stories that our brain will build anyway to the once upon a time stories that we tell other people. So the stories that we tell ourselves, you know, the way that, you know, might again, you know, the next hypothesis I had was, well, what if the stories that we tell ourselves have the same components as the stories we tell other people on the surface that might make sense because other way like, why would the stories that we tell other people have certain components because maybe those are the stories that we need, those are the elements that we need to have ourselves. And it does seem to turn out that that works, right? So if you can break, you know, using the elements of the stories we tell other people to kind of figure out how to talk about your organization or your idea, you are essentially going to create a story that someone can tell themselves. And again, it's not necessarily going to come out like a once upon a time story, but there are going to be certain things that are the same one, it's going to have the same components to, and this is important, it's going to have the same elements that drive action in it. I'll get to those in just a minute. And third, so that's the intellectual logical piece, but then for the emotional piece, when you have these elements, when you can articulate an idea in this kind of structure, you're going to have the emotional appeal of the story, that kind of up and down. And you think that Nancy Duarte talks about like sparklines is kind of up and down and emotional highs and lows are going to be built into what you say. So even if you don't tell it like a story, it's going to feel like a story to your audience, and it's going to be understood as a story by their brains. And so that was really where that whole approach came from. So then the question of course was what are those five elements or what are those elements that all stories happen? And you're like, well, okay, well, yes, Sam, what are those questions? What are those? Well, I have them memorized. Well, so the quick version, you know what they are. So quick quiz, Julia, what are the five? Goal problem, truth, change, and actions. Now, I do have to confess, I still sometimes struggle with the truth and change aspect. So yeah, so those are the two that I struggle with, because obviously the action at the end, you want someone to take, I feel like I, for some reason, can really grasp that. I think nonprofits can grasp that, say it's donate or sign a petition, whatever it is. Or even it's just describing how you do what you do. Typically, those elements, so we've got three main, like so when I worked with the Boston Conservatory, we had three main divisions. So it's like, how do we deliver on our educational message? Well, we've got three divisions, we've got music, dance, musical theaters. How do you do with multiple audiences? Okay, so let me back up first, if I may, to why those are the pieces, just kind of a quick explanation, because some of that may answer that question of the difference between the truth and change. And then we can start to talk about how to adapt it for different audiences. So using the framework of the stories that we tell other people, and what drives the action of a story, is that the action of the story typically happens, like it starts when we discover something that the main character wants, but does not yet have. So something that they want, but don't yet have. And that can be really specific, right? Like, they can be like, I'm trying to figure out how to retain more donors. Yeah, how can we retain more donors, right? But it can also be, you know, to for your nonprofits, it can be kind of much broader, right? Like, how to get someone to care? How do we get someone to care? Or how can we, you know, to line up with a fair number of my clients these days? How can what can we do to mitigate climate change, for instance? It could be big things like that too. Little things, big things, but as long as it's something that your audience wants and doesn't yet have, your brain is going to go, is curious, and going to lean in, because it's like, well, what's the answer to that? Why do we have an answer to that question? So that's the goal. And what's really important about that is to remember, and I try to drill this into people's head, it's the audience's goal, not yours. I mean, ideally, it should be shared with you, but this is the audience's goal. So skipping forward to your other question about how do we adapt what we do for audiences at all, the adaption all happens at the goal, the adaptation all happens at the goal before you even start before you even start, because it's what allows you to say, do you want the answer to this question? Awesome. Great. We have the answer to that question, or I have the answer to that question to pull from a phrase that market researchers use, it removes the neutral position. And I love that, because if you're basically saying, hey, do you want to know how to mitigate climate change? Do you want to know how to ensure the success of your student, of your child, like post graduation? Do you as a child want to know what it takes to be, you know, as a college attending person, do you want to know what it takes to be successful in your life and career? Do you want to know how is it that we can kind of restore beauty to the world? Maybe that's something the museum and art museum might say. And if somebody goes, yes, well, you have just removed the neutral position from them. And then not everyone's going to say yes, and it's okay. That is the best gift that you can give to yourself and your audiences is to be able to ask that question and sometimes get a no. Because if they don't care about the outcome that you exist to provide, spend your time on the people who want that answer. Could you eventually get people to care? Yes, but we spend way too much time trying to get people to care about things they don't already care about. So that's the goal, right? Because if we've got that audience goal in mind, and again, ideally it's one you share because it should be a thing that your idea and by idea, I'm going to mean product service program initiative, whatever it is. But your idea should answer that. So you should also care about that thing, but it needs to be their goal. Now, in the audience, in the stories that we tell other people, there's always a problem that gets in the way that they didn't know about, right? So they know they want something and sometimes that is to solve a problem, but in before they can solve that problem or achieve that goal that they want, they have to actually solve another problem first, right? There's something else that they have to do first. And so that is that second element is that's the problem. And again, it's not always presented as a problem to your audience because with nonprofits, they're one of the groups that I recognize where some of the storytelling advice that's out there falls apart because there isn't a villain. You're right. Like poverty? I mean, that's not really a tangible villain. Exactly. Who's at fault there? And so really when you're thinking about it in the terms of an idea, again, product service program, initiative, organization, whatever it is, the way I think about it is the tension that must be resolved before you can get the goal. And that's going to vary. Organization, organization, individual, individual, but if you can identify, here's this tension that's got to be resolved. So let me use an example from the Boston Conservatory. So if you're trying to talk with, for instance, the parents and guardians of these rising seniors, rising freshmen that are coming in or potentially coming in, you know, they've got a big old question that's just like, what can I do to set my child up for success? And if your child is debating a performing arts college as their, you may have more concerns than other parents might about, this is a hard life that they are about to choose for themselves. What can we do? So there are many schools that could answer that question. But as the Boston Conservatory, we need to decide what was the tension that we solved that allowed parents and guardians to feel better about setting their student up for success. And so we defined, and again, I'm doing this retroactively, I didn't really think of it this way at the time, but retroactively, I would say we resolve the tension between artistic ability and employability and say that they're not always the same thing, right? Like somebody can be enormously talented and can be incredibly difficult and non-functional in the world, right? And non-functional in the workplace, whether that's an artistic workplace or not. And so that was the tension that we had to resolve. So it's not really a problem out in the world, right? But it's a problem that has to be resolved before we can satisfactorily achieve the goal. So with me so far. So that's the goal and the problem. Yes. And it's a problem the audience is maybe thinking about, or maybe they don't know they're thinking about, but it's in the back of their mind. It's in their back of their minds. And I do like the best kind of problem that you can articulate is one where either they are aware of the tension and just don't even think it can be resolved. And then you're like, guess what? We've got a solution to that. Or they just don't even actually realize that there's a gap between these two things that they haven't even thought about, like that they just never even occurred to them. And this is one of those places, by the way, that nonprofits particularly that do, that answer the same question, let's say, is other nonprofits can start to distinguish themselves a little bit because you can say, you know, we frame the tension this way, like, and other folks frame it this way. And again, it's another opportunity for your audience to align with you because if you can get articulate attention that makes sense to the audience, and it comes across as kind of urgent and important to resolve that tension, and you are continuing to say, yeah, and we've got a solution to that. Again, it's another place for your audience to align with you and just really start getting invested in your in the solution. And that's that's really what you want. So we've got a goal, we've got a problem. Now the truth. Now the truth. Oh, this is my I have to do. I know you're supposed to like love all parts of your idea equally, but this is the favorite part. Yes. So because as you look out at stories, we tell other people every story of change and transformation has what is known by various names, but for our purposes, let's call it a moment of truth. You know, Aristotle referred to it as the anagnorosis, which is translates roughly to recognition. And it's it's a moment in that story where the main character recognizes, you know, the quote is the true nature of their circumstances, either the true nature of themselves or somebody that they're working with or of the world and how it works or people and how they work. But there's that moment where they recognize the true nature of their circumstances. And in it's in that moment that the next piece that the ending of that or the course to the ending of that story is decided, because that moment of truth demands a choice. Like there's a moment where if because that thing is true, everything that has happened so far, like rests on a shift in thinking a behavior. Like it's the most famous one that most of us know about whether we've seen the movies or not is at the end of Empire Strikes Back, where Darth Vader says to Luke, this is not a spoiler because if you don't know this already, I'm sorry for you. That's true. I know I hate when people are like spoiler, it's like you know this Darth Vader says to Luke, Luke, I am your father and for anybody who doesn't know this, this is where like the person Luke is like our good guy, Darth is the villain. And this is the moment in the arc of these stories where all of a sudden you realize that Luke who's been trying to kill Darth Vader, Darth Vader's actually the villain is actually his father. It's like, it doesn't necessarily change the ending of that movie because in that case, like the movie pretty much ends like right after that, but it does change the arc of the story so that the third movie in that particular trilogy, instead of trying to kill Darth Vader, which has been the approach so far, where the arc of the story goes next is that Luke tries to bring the villain back of Darth Vader back over to the good side. So it shifts the approach, it changes the approach, right? So it's hard to talk about the truth and change separately because the change is what the shift is and the truth is the moment of truth is the piece of information that they receive right before the truth. So that translates back over to the ideas that we tell ourselves and the story that we're building ourselves where that's what I call the truth and the change. But the truth doesn't have to be something the audience doesn't know, like it doesn't have to be something mind blowing. It's even better if it isn't. Yeah, so my favorite example in the sense of what we're talking about, it's the running example in my book, is the De Beers Diamond Tagline, A Diamond Is Forever. And you see that that isn't something where you don't know about it. Like it's the reason why that tagline became so powerful for De Beers is it because it was something that people already agreed was true. Oh, wow. And then they just reframed what a diamond means. They actually totally rebranded the whole industry. They reframed what a diamond means and importantly, they created a mental gap between how people were thinking of rings as symbols of forever. Like they created a before and after. But as soon as they said that a diamond is forever, they created a before and after. And what I mean by that is before the diamond is forever came out, the primary symbol of foreverness, right, which so far we have a goal question of what's the best symbol of our forever commitment to each other. The answer prior to a diamond forever was a ring because it was a circle with no beginning and no end. It's a really good symbol of forever by the way, right? And up until that point, they would put things like other symbols ever on their leg. So very traditionally, they would have and forget me knots engraved on the ring and things like that. Of course, that makes sense too. So the tension, the problem, right, the tension that in this case, De Beers wanted to create so that they could then resolve it was a tension between thinking of the best symbol as a ring versus a very specific kind of ring. And so as soon as they introduced a diamond as forever, which as you point out is something that people already agree with, just they hadn't ever thought of it in this context. Right now, all of a sudden they're like, well, if I want the best symbol, admiring doesn't have a diamond on it. Am I actually getting the best symbol? Again, we're not necessarily having this conversation out loud, but it's the thing that the brain is kind of resolving that tension on their own. And all of a sudden, change was to see the stone as the symbol, not just the ring. And all of this can happen in a 30 second commercial. All of this can happen. And we're not even at change in actions yet, but all of this framework can happen in a print ad. Like it can all happen like in an instant. So I just want my audience to know like, we're not talking about you have to write a two hour keynote speech. This all can happen. And then once you see your message through this framework, like you kind of can't unsee it. So let's keep going. I love it. I'm getting like free coaching. So well, and when I when you since you mentioned the first sentence of my book, right, when I said this book could have been one sentence that the best way to make your ideas irresistible. That's the goal, by the way, is to build a story people will tell themselves, which is the change, by the way, right, is like, that's how you can get your idea across the power of your organization across in a single sentence. You know, the easiest way to do it is to have goal plus change. And there's other ways, but that's kind of the I like to refer to that for my tech clients is the minimum viable message, right? It has both your means and your ends. And ideally, in a way that's both desired. So, you know, the book is for people who actually want to make their ideas irresistible. And different, meaning I don't think anybody has said before that the best way to do that is to build a story that people will tell themselves. Like, so it's like, okay, great. But you notice that it's it's a minimum viable message. It's not however, a minimum viable argument. So you like, you don't agree with that until I've made the rest of the case until I've filled in the problem, the truth. But it peaks my curiosity. It makes me want to learn more. Right. But you have to have that argument ready to go. But that can still be really quick. If I'm not interested in a book where I want to make my days irresistible, then why would I read the rest of the argument? Right. Exactly. Exactly. And then so but even the argument can be expressed in 30 seconds or less when you've got those pieces like, well, it's like, well, if you want to drive action from your ideas, most of the time we focus on what we say more than what people need to hear, that's the problem. And yet, how we see drives what we do, you know, another way to say that every decision has a story that we tell ourselves. Right. So that's why, right, if you want to drive action from your ideas, you need to build a story because every decision has a story that people would tell themselves because it needs to be what they hear, not just what you want to say. So again, in 30 seconds, I can give you the complete argument. You may agree with it on principle. You're probably still gonna want the detail. That's why I wrote the book. But that's the whole point is that we can get the core ideas of it across in just those ways. So with that goal problem, truth, then we've got the change, which is the shift in thinking or behavior that results. So that is in the stories we tell ourselves that is kind of what are the like the high level, okay, what am I going to do instead? So back to store, whereas the high level is like, instead of trying to kill Darth says, Luke, I'm going to try to bring him back over to the Jedi to, you know, get him back to the good side. So to your question, what's the difference between the truth and the change? There's a couple ways to think about this. One is the truth is always descriptive. I'm just describing the way the world is. A diamond is forever. I am your father. It's not telling you to do anything. It's a piece of information. So another way to think of the truth is a lot of times it's surfacing a silent assumption to borrow from psychology. So there's an assumption about why things are the way that they are that you're just bringing to the fore and again, it should be something ideally people agree with. The change is what do you do as a result of this new information given that you still want what you want, the goal, and that the tension of the problem exists. What are you going to do now? Or what does your approach result in? So back to my Boston Conservatory example, want to set my child up for success, tension between artistic ability and employability, truth, the best performers can can perform anywhere. So therefore, that's the truth, change what we did and do, I would say probably. So it's Boston Conservatory. I don't know. It's been a while since I worked there. The core of our message at that point was that we replicate real life. That was the change that we represent because quite honestly, we had really, really crappy facilities. I remember I went to BU in the 90s. So I remember Boston Conservatory. But now it's amazing. Oh, now it's beautiful and it's amazing. So it's great. And so, you know, that means we need to shift certain of those messages. But basically, it was a way to explain. We're like, well, you know, even if we were just talking about the way that we, it was a great way to explain our crappy facilities, just like, how is your child more likely to experience and have to practice in a beautiful, soundproofed practice room or in a New York apartment where they can hear like the opera singer next door and all the traffic noise outside? Well, guess what? That's what our practice rooms are like. I mean, for real. I love that. Because it is real life. And you know what, if you're a musician, you probably are going to start off in the pit of an orchestra, not not like not first chair of the Boston anybody, if you're college student in general, you're going to start as like the third chair pit orchestra of something like even if you are an amazing instrumentalist that wants to play like classical or instrumental music for a symphony, your gigging work is probably going to be in the pit of musical theater or something along those lines. So again, even now they've got beautiful facilities, they can still replicate real life because they're giving, you know, just in this case, they're instrumentalists an opportunity to do the kinds of gigs that they're going to have and kind of get over themselves way before they get out there. Now contrast that with somebody who's just gone through a really pristine like traditional conservatory experience, who is still probably going to have to play in the pit, right? And they're going to walk in without all that potential, not all of them are going to have it attitude about like, I shouldn't have to be here versus, you know, the conservatory, we're like, replicate real life. That's the way to make sure that you're not only have incredible artistic ability, you have great employability as well. And resiliency and adaptability and resourcefulness. I love that. All the things that we would associate with success, employability, and all that kind of good stuff. That's the change is replicate real life. Do you see because it's prescriptive? It's what you need to do. But it's based on the script, the descriptive phrase of a great performer can perform anywhere. So that's really the shift. And then the actions are just, what are you doing? Like, what are the specific things that you're doing to make that change concrete? So it replicate real life. We could talk, you know, the way that the conservatory could still talk about it is that we have these three divisions. They work kind of in a multi-disciplinary way that you're, if you're going to, in one division, you get, you know, classes taught by the other, you know, you're going to get, you know, all these things are going to intertwine in certain ways. So it can be your programs, right, that you're listening. It could be like, how do we do that? It can be more about curricula, but it's the, you know, the action piece is the concrete nature of what you do. So that's where the goal problem, truth, change action all come in. And I have yet to find an idea that cannot be represented through those five. I mean, I, and I try. I'm like, that is an active part of my approach is try to like, disconfirm what I believe to be true. And literally thousands of ideas later, any idea can be put into this framework because every idea has a story, right? Every idea is a story. It can be articulated the way because it was produced by a story. So all we're doing is reconstructing even if it's a dramatic reconstruction, but it's a reconstruction of a line of thinking that closed the gap between a question and a particular answer. I know that one of your most popular posts from the last year, all of them, a lot of them have to do with stories and storytelling. That's something I know that my audience is very interested in. So I read your post, The Problem with Stories. I agreed with your assessment that there's a problem with storytelling. But what did you mean when you said that? Ah, so the problem with stories, so I could sum that up in a statement, which would be a very truth-like statement, which is I believe that business storytelling, non-profit storytelling, has been hijacked by heroes. And so there's a lot to unpack there. But what that translates into is, all right, first of all, we talk about heroes. The hero's journey is a kind of story. It is one of many. It is a very universal story, meaning almost all cultures have versions of this. It's a story form that we recognize. And so it is a very useful one. However, it is not the only one. And because to be a true hero, you know, and I, and from the perspective of business people and non-profit fundraisers and marketers and leaders, the hero's journey gets pretty problematic pretty quick. Yeah, in the nonprofit worlds, I think it's very problematic often. It's very problematic right now, particularly in the conversations around donor-centric communication, as well as it served us in some ways for the last 20, 25 years, it is now we're starting to realize how deeply problematic it can be. Not only for the reasons that we even knew about 20, 25 years ago, which could cause mission creep and all of that, but these just deep questions of when something is donor-centric, are we in fact some way reinforcing structures and systems that are actually creating the need for our non-profit to exist in the first place? Like, what are we even doing here? Like, are we unintentionally? Because of course it's unintentionally perpetuating and rewarding the very systems that are that are necessitating the creation of our, and the existence for our non-profit in the first place. So yeah, and why is that? Because there are certain rules that have to be true in order for hero's journey to apply, and one of them is there has to be a single savior. The hero saves the day. The hero solves the problem. And the hero has no faults of their own. Well, the hero does. Or maybe there are some faults, but... Yeah, and the hero, you know, the whole idea is like the hero changes, you know, and as a result of the experience, but like, if you start to put these things up, you're like, okay, well, first of all, again, most non-profits are working towards something, whether that's to solve a problem or it puts some kind of beauty or purpose out into the world, that it would be hard to argue that that one non-profit has the solution. And even harder to argue that a single donor to that non-profit would be the solution either, right? Like, so it's like it breaks down like, full stop right there. Because there isn't a solution that solves the problem. And that is something we already talked about before. There's not an obvious villain, right? There's not obviously something or someone that is actively working against it. And in certain cases, you can, you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, like, because sometimes like what would fall into that villain category is maybe the system that produced your wealthy donor in that first place. And so, so again, now we're into all sorts of problems. But the challenge, the one I was really speaking to in that post specifically in it, that the article version of a talk I gave at the non-profit storytelling conference is that a lot of times the biggest problem I think in non-profits with stories is that we are telling stories that are over. We're using stories as examples without realizing we're using them as examples. And we haven't figured out what they are examples of. And we just stop with saying, well, they're examples of our work. Yeah, okay, but what do we actually mean by that? What is the underlying principle that this story is actually articulating? And so what happens is a lot of times we don't even know what that is, so we don't articulate it, which means we can tell the story. We know what it means. The audience walks away having like maybe taking a completely different meaning out of that story or be just completely, we don't actually even know. We don't know what we stand for, which is, you know, beyond what our mission says or beyond what, and that like that way lies, absolutely lies with mission creep and tears and lack of effectiveness in the marketplace. So, you know, I didn't talk about it from this lens in that particular article, but the idea that started to become clear to me as a possibility, as a result of the non-profit storytelling conferences, you know, I love where we're trying to go with community centered fundraising. And yet at the same time you hear the concerns of like, okay, well, if it's community centered fundraising, that's still not necessarily driven by the problem that we're trying to solve or the goal we're trying to achieve as an organization. And we still need donors, still need them, you know, and yes, they can come from the community, but changing the structure of our organizations away from major gifts is not going to happen overnight, right? Like if it's ever going to happen. And so my thought was with this idea that there's kind of tension between individual stories that are over, which are a problem because of a story's over, how do you engage with it? How can you take part of it? And this kind of larger story that that story represents. So think of it as you will as a, you know, narrative is a great way to think about it kind of this ongoing kind of, I like to think of it almost like an everlasting story. Like it's a story still in motion. It's a story that you're still building that perhaps that kind of narrative centered fundraising would be a really interesting potential solution to the tensions of both donor centered fundraising and community centered fundraising. Because the one thing that connects the organization and the donor and the community is a bigger story, not yet over that all three believe in and are working to end and working to create a happy ending that isn't yet there, right? So if we can get better at articulating those big ideas about what our organizations are about that those everlasting stories, that kind of that big case like that narrative that you're trying to drive forward. And you can get your organization behind that. You can get that to be like, you can show donors how they can help move that forward without being the hero. So you get the organization behind it so that they're doing that. You can still give the donor a role in it, right? Because they can still be a protagonist, not necessarily the hero, you know, the protagonist moves the story forward. That's incredibly important role, right? And it's the community because the community also needs to be invested in that and, you know, that ongoing story, that everlasting story and can also be the ones that benefit from it. And together we can decide and build that story and what it should, should sound like. And yeah, it still has those five components that are true. And when you need it, those five components support a hero's journey. And when you don't, again, the power is it can build these big, beautiful stories that don't yet have an ending. But could with the right backing of the organization, right, the right investment from your donors, and the right support from your community. We could talk all day about storytelling. And I definitely want to have you back on the podcast, you hinted that you're working on something new. So as we reach our time, I would love to hear about what you're working on and where people can reach you now if they want to work with you. Oh, yeah. So best, let me answer the second question first. So best way to reach out is tamsandwebster.com. I am the only Tams and Webster in the world spelled that way. And as you discovered by thank you for being a subscriber to my newsletter, like that's where I noodle ideas first. So oftentimes you'll get a peek at that. And probably no surprise to you. It's very much this problem with stories and what are the kind of principles behind our ideas and this idea that you know, our pursuits, our programs, for my for-profit clients, our products are essentially our principles. They are kind of the manifestation of that. The new book is about that, again, if I could say it in a sentence, if I were to start with my one sentence version of the book, it would be that the best way to create an invested audience is to make your idea part of a story they haven't heard before, but already believe. Thank you so much for sharing all of that incredible wisdom. And I'm still unpacking it. I took a ton of notes. So I really appreciate it. I encourage everyone to check out the show notes, get the book, just go to, you know, Amazon or go to tamsandwebster.com, check out the red thread, sign up for that email newsletter. You will definitely not regret it. And are you speaking at the nonprofit storytelling conference this coming year? I don't know yet. I need to chat with my friends. Yeah, early in the year when we're recording this. So I know a lot of my listeners do go to that conference. So yes, I know I'm going to be at one of the AFP conferences this year. I apologize. I'm not clear whether or not like it's that's the, you know, the big daddy central one or if it's our regional one. But yeah, I am hoping to be on many, many more nonprofit stages this year just because it's, like I said, it's where my first love lies. And that's where I would love to have as much of an impact as I can. Oh, wonderful. Well, we will look forward to seeing you hopefully on those stages and in the future. So yeah, definitely come back when your new book comes out. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Julia. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode. But until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell, seven, seven. Keep changing the world. You non-profit unicorn. You. .