How To Make Your Stories More Relatable With The Universal Truth

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We are going to be talking about something near and dear to my heart that I often work with my clients and it is a common question from my listeners. What if my experience is different from the clients you work with or if you have never had the same problem as your audience?

There are many different situations and challenges. The grass is always greener on the other side until you learn a simple storytelling technique that will help you make your own grass green. There is a way to make your stories, whatever your challenge is, easier for your audience to relate to and engage with. It is called universalizing.

We discuss:

[02:25] There is a way to make your stories, whatever your challenge is easier for your audience to relate to and engage with. It is called universalizing.
[02:44] To universalize properly you have to have a clear picture of your audience and their problem and how they relate to it. Your story is not just about you. We have to understand how our audience will receive the story in order to tell it properly.
[03:26] What is the universal truth of your story or the moral that your story has that applies to every other story?
[04:04] Example #1: A former elite soldier who is now working in stress management for executive leaders and has endured some intense stress.
[05:40] Example #2: A health expert became an expert after suffering from a rare autoimmune disease and now works with another variety of complex cases.
[06:52] Example #3: A marketer with a rags to riches story.
[07:55] We reframe to focus not on the specificity of the problem but on the universality of the solution. There is one common solution and one common path.
[08:27] It is so essential to have a statement like this because we are not always ready to learn or trust you right away if you don’t make it clear why we should.
[09:07] Kyle is sharing some good examples of an extreme story that is universalized well and a simple story that is told well has an equally powerful and engaging effect.
[09:30] The first clip is from Brian Bogart who he had on the podcast earlier this year.
[13:53] The key to Brian’s story is finding a universal truth underneath the unique situation that he was going through and how he turns his story around into something we can all understand and relate to.
[16:35] Start with a sentence or two like the examples to turn it around to what you want to teach them and what you want to open their minds to. That is how we can make our stories universally relatable.
[17:07] The second clip is very simple and there is not a lot of action happening. It shows the process of discovering a problem, trying to find a solution, meeting friction, and then trusting yourself and seeing yourself through that problem.
[17:37] In the second clip Rachel creates this universal truth of how she stuck to the idea, trusted her instinct, and saw it through. That is what becomes valuable and relatable about this story.
[19:58] Universalizing is one of the most important skills to cultivate as a storyteller.