Kyle Gray – The One Clear Path (438)

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Episode transcript below:

0:00:00 – Mike Malatesta

Hi everyone. Mike Malatesta here and welcome back to the how it Happened podcast. On this podcast, I dig in deep with every guest to explore the roots of their success, to discover not just how it happened but why it matters. My mission is to find and share stories that inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in you. 

0:00:19 – Mike Malatesta

On today’s episode, I’m talking to a genius when it comes to creating connections with people by helping them understand where they want to go, overcome their limiting beliefs and find the fuel they need to accomplish their goals. His name is Kyle Gray. We talk about his music, his travel and his health journeys, the keys to refining presentations and stories, the danger of us being too smart for our own good aka the cult of familiarity and, oddly but interestingly, why you should chew your food more. 

0:00:53 – Kyle Gray

A lot of people. They don’t do these roadmaps, and so what happens is, maybe you’re on your third teaching point and there’s no like clear delineation. This is the end of teaching point one. Here’s teaching point two, and so I’m sitting there and I’m thinking is this still the first teaching point? Like this presentation has been an hour, are there three more things this person’s going to teach? I have to go to the bathroom. Mental static. They’re thinking about other things. 

But, if you can just say here’s where we’re going, we’re going to have much more attention. This is like public speaking, class 9th grade 101. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them. 

0:01:31 – Mike Malatesta

This episode is sponsored by the Dream Exit. The Dream Exit is a private, bespoke program for successful entrepreneurs with annual revenue between $5 million and $100 million who realize that they have one chance to get their Dream Exit right and that the odds of realizing that dream by themselves, all alone or at the last minute are stacked against them. In less than 90 days, we teach you how to design, build and execute a customized Dream Exit playbook that gets your business ready for sale at its maximum value and gets you ready to maximize your meaning and purpose in your post exit life, even if today you are not ready to sell. You see, dream Exits just don’t happen. They are the result of early, professional and proven planning. So if you’re an entrepreneur with annual sales between $5 million and $100 million and you want to learn how to 10X to 100X your chances of achieving the Dream Exit you deserve, go to dreamexitplaybookcom today. And now here’s Kyle Gray. Hello, kyle, welcome to the how to Happen. 

0:02:45 – Kyle Gray

Mike, I am so excited to be here. This is a place of incredible stories and it’s an honor to have a chance to join the long list of many awesome guests you’ve had. 

0:02:56 – Mike Malatesta

Well, thank you for that and I’m very happy to have you here. I am excited to turn the tables, so to speak, because I had the opportunity to be on Kyle’s podcast, the Story Engine podcast, back in May of 2023. 

I think my episode number was 245. So if you want to check out Kyle’s podcast, the Story Engine podcast, and you want to check out my episode on it, to get started 245,. If you haven’t experienced the podcast before, that’d be a great place to start. So let me tell you a little bit more about Kyle so you can get as excited as I am today. So Kyle Gray is an entrepreneur, story strategist and author who helps coaches, startups and influencers use storytelling to better communicate their unique value and create connection and trust with their audience. He combines timeless storytelling with the cutting edge marketing to ensure you’ve got the right story to tell while presenting on a sales call or in a conversation, both online and offline. And this isn’t part of his bio, but I’m going to insert this now For those of you who have heard and I’ve had numerous people on here who are talking about story, creating great stories. 

Our whole lives are sort of have always been run by and influenced by stories. 

If you’re hearing this and you’re like, oh man, another story person, stop, because we are going to get into some things that are going to make you think not only twice but five times about why you haven’t heard all you need to hear about storytelling and why you probably are not, despite how many times you have heard people talk about the power of story, leveraging your story power the best way that you can. I know that I’ve been telling stories and learning about stories for at least a decade, after a very successful career, and I can tell you that in that decade I feel like I’ve learned a lot, but I have not learned nearly what I need to in order to have the positive impact that I know I can have on the most people possible. So if you are interested in having a positive impact on the most people possible, stay tuned because Kyle is going to help you do that. So sorry for interrupting your bio with that, kyle, but I just wanted to throw that in there. 

0:05:18 – Kyle Gray

Oh no, that’s great. Yeah, I need to add that I need to get that transcribed and just paste it on the back right there. 

0:05:25 – Mike Malatesta

Kyle’s two books. He’s got two books on marketing, selling with Story and the Story Engine Help you quickly get clear on your story and start selling, and how to build systems to tell that story at scale. Both are filled with powerful and easy to use templates to help you take action and get results quickly. His podcast I already told you about the Story Engine podcast. He interviews experts on how they use storytelling to grow their business. Ultimately, kyle uses a system it’s called the One Clear Path to Sales, which I love the name of the system and it’s three things. It’s one clear message, one clear lesson, one clear offer. You can connect with Kyle at thestoryengineco, which is his website. Linkedin Kyle KYLE the Gray. That’s interesting that you’re LinkedIn. I actually like that. Kyle the Gray. That’s really good. And is there any place else that you want people to find you, kyle? I like to do that at the beginning because I don’t think people really I think, people want that stuff right away. 

0:06:26 – Kyle Gray

I have the most fun on LinkedIn these days and I’m also very present on Instagram at hey, kyle Gray, and the hey is like hey, not like the horse food. 

0:06:38 – Mike Malatesta

Got it. H-e-y Kyle Gray. Kyle, I have a simple question for you. It’s one that I ask everybody to get started, and that is how did it happen for you? 

0:06:50 – Kyle Gray

That’s a great question and I’ve been preparing for it and I unfortunately don’t have as equally of an elegant, or at least simple, answer. But for me there are three really important threads that have come together to make me who I am and do the work that I do. The first was around music, the second was around language and travel and the third was around health. People start with music In my late teens, early 20s. 

Like many, many people of my age, I thought the only way I was going to live a happy and fulfilled life was by being a rock star, our writing songs, and I wanted to write chord progressions that were different and memorable and lyrics that would move people, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to be writing these songs and somewhere around 22, I burnt myself out and once that was gone I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. 

I was going to college and I remember writing a paper about how stressed I was that everybody to the right and left me was pre-law and everybody seemed to have it all figured out. And I did, and I still have a teacher or a professor from there that I talk with every once in a while and she teases me about that paper, lamenting. I still feel that way in a lot. I have no idea where I have a slightly better idea. Anyway, I knew I wanted to travel and spend a lot of time in my early 20s in South America, learning both Spanish and Portuguese, learning to operate in a foreign environment, learning new languages, learning new cultures, redefining myself. 

While I was in Peru, in one of these mini adventures, I took a rope swing into an Amazonian lake which downstream would get me really sick with something called Giardia and had to go to a clinic and I think down the line that probably led to some gut health problems and autoimmune conditions. And so by the time I got to my late 20s, while I was starting a good copywriting career and growing, I was also incredibly sick. I couldn’t hike a quarter mile without some serious knee pain and my jaw felt like it was going to fall off my face. By this time I had started writing professionally as a copywriter, as a learning a little bit about storytelling. 

I was doing a lot of blogging and this was the beginning of the days of the story engine, my most successful book, and I remember at this time discovering the possibility of speaking from the stage and using that as a tool to grow your business, doing it strategically, repeatedly, effectively. And I remember having a certain feeling seeing myself as a 19-year-old playing guitar and creating experiences, and there was something just like it in that, and so I started doing everything I could to learn more about it. I started working for a company that facilitated these things and sharing my writing in exchange for learning everything I could and helping out with their workshops, and they started to grow and grow and grow, and I had my own business and small agency on the side as well, and there was this one group of people or one of these workshops we were helping facilitate. Everybody. Get ready to become speakers. We’ll build all of your assets for speaking. We’ll create the talks to your or your titles to your talks all these things. 

And it happened to be filled with health and wellness experts and I sat down next to one of them and she said, hey, my name’s Dr Grace Flu. I help people overcome chronic autoimmune diseases through better gut health, and she could see the signs of it in my face. But I was like, hey, your clients must want this. They try and do this, but that happens. She said oh my God, you need to come work with me and we worked out a deal where she would help me with an autoimmune protocol and I would help her with her messaging and her story. At the time I was really good at the story elements that made sales and as I started to recover my health, I got access to my mindset again. Before, no matter how many Tony Robbins books I would read, I would feel like crap and there was no way around it. But once I got my biology in order, it was like having the flu for like Five years and then finally not having the flu. Hmm. 

It was just a whole new level of clarity, of Peace, and I knew that so many people were suffering from this, that so many health and wellness experts were Having a hard time communicating and actually selling their products and services, because I hadn’t heard of anybody like this for a long time. And I was doing a lot of work, doing what I could to figure out how to solve my problem and and I realized that I I wanted to help this and that my disease, or the disease that I was working with in the past, actually led me to a really unique audience that I was passionate on helping, that made me that, that helped me be better, that I could run a good business around and I set myself apart in the health and wellness market. 

Hmm and in it allowed me to Go from just another copywriter to having my unique story you Recognized powerful, valuable in this marketplace, and over the last five or six years I’ve worked a lot in the regenerative medicine space and now More in the transformative inner storytelling. I’ve also worked a lot with experts in a psychedelic Facilitation and integration, and what all these people have in common is that they’re too smart for their own good and they have a dense forest of knowledge, but they have a difficult time separating which, which specific story to tell, which specific thing to teach on. They all seem like such good things and over the course of this journey what I have learned to do really well is ask the right questions, provide friction and and draw out the key ingredients that makes a good story in a way that the people that I work with, instead of like Stressing and staring at a blank screen, they relax like they’re at a psychotherapist session. I guess that’s maybe relaxing for some people, maybe not for others. 

But, um, and we draw out the stories and ask questions and get the pieces together in a way that’s much more fun, in a way that’s much, much easier than doing things on your own, and what I, what I really enjoy doing is it’s not just about creating stories that help you sell more when you go on a podcast or go on a stage, but it’s about Creating stories that become a fuel source to overcome your biggest problems, your biggest challenges, to inspire your team members and to get them in their lane and get you in your your lane by knowing the deep meaning, the bigger picture that you’re aiming for here. Hmm, so that’s, that’s a bit of a long story of how it happened, but I yeah, that’s the stage. 

0:14:48 – Mike Malatesta

Well, yeah, it does really why I appreciate you for laying all that down. I want to dig into a few things, if you don’t mind, but I want to. And I want to start with this too smart for your own good when you say that the people Perhaps, like the doctor you mentioned, too smart for her own good when it comes to influence and and and reach and Resonance. What do you mean by that? Too smart for your own good? 

0:15:13 – Kyle Gray

Let me give you a really great example of this within a story. I had a client and close friend named Alex Moscow working with me. He is an amazing event planner and copywriter and he was known For writing long form Facebook posts that would attract high ticket clients. And he came to me to write and refine a presentation with the core promise of you have a quarter of a million dollars in potential clients in your warm Facebook audience right now, and we created a 45-minute presentation To help you get. That sounds fun, right? I want to learn about this. Okay. So Alex is brilliant and he’s breaking down on all of the posts that he’s written on in his teaching and talking about this post here and this post here and on the second teaching point. He gets to this post and he’s like and I put a video on this post and it’s a video at my event, and At my event I have DJs and smoke machines and laser lights blasting everywhere. This Alex is in his zone of genius. This is what he nerds out on and he’s stoked to be teaching this. 

The audience is wrapped in attention, their jaws are dropped. Oh, laser lights. This seems really cool. Is this cool? No, it’s not cool, because the promise of our webinar was access, a quarter of a million dollars and warm leads. And Now this teaching point. It feels good for Alex to teach, it even feels good for me as an audience to receive, but it’s not actually reinforcing the promise and it’s creating mental static. Now I’m seeing this post and I’m thinking Should I go to Alex’s event? Should I have my own event? I don’t have lasers at my event. Should I have lasers at my event? But it’s so it’s causing a problem. But it felt good. It felt good for Alex, it felt good for the audience, but when it got to the end of the presentation, there was usually 20 minutes late. 

The offer didn’t go that well and Because nobody took any action, because the audience, the teaching, though it felt good, was not moving in a congruent, strategic way, getting people open to the right thing. And this is one example. This is called a tasty tangent, a Teaching point that sends you off in one direction, that feels Excellent to teach but is not actually serving your audience. And this is one example of being too smart for your own good. And what happens? 

Or what this? What this means, boiled down, is the expert Cannot help but look at themselves and their experience and their solution, because they’ve spent so much time immersed in it that they can no longer see past it. But what that means is they’re not focused on their client, they’re not focused on the specific language that their client uses to describe their problem, they’re not focused on the limiting beliefs that are keeping them stuck in that problem. And there is a big difference between your problem and my solution, and A lot of us experts are always talking about my solution, which leaves people Not taking action, just like the Alex Moscow example. 

0:18:50 – Mike Malatesta

Okay, so we’re as that person. That’s too smart, where we’re seeing the world from our Perspective as opposed to seeing the world from our audience’s perspective and bringing them on the journey to meet up with our perspective. Is that my on track there, okay? 

0:19:13 – Kyle Gray

and you can be forgiven for having that perspective, because most of us listening have spent a decade learning how to solve a problem and talking to other experts and reading books, and so, yeah, we could we could be forgiven for actually using this language, but it what we can say with our Entrepreneur buddies or our peers who are learning these same things, is not the same thing as that’s what we need to speak to our clients about and how we. There’s a certain kind of empathy. There’s a level like I measure empathy when it comes to Marketing and sales as how closely your words match their words. Right and if so, if we’re using a lot of fancy words, multi-syllable things you know, acronyms are all this fancy stuff Empathy is very low, but the closer we can get to them, that’s that’s what I think I know. 

0:20:14 – Mike Malatesta

One of the things that I Struggle with sometimes when I’m giving a talk or telling a story is I’m gonna call it and I’m just coming up with this right now, but I’m gonna call it the cult of familiarity. Meaning I’m very familiar with the story that I want to tell and Sometimes that familiarity kind of bites me in the butt because I make assumptions, as I’m telling the story, that you as a listener are as familiar with it as I am you, and so I find that when I do that, I often skip over things. That confuses the person listening. Kyle, because they’re trying to fill in a gap that I’ve left. That is very is not a gap for me at all, it’s sort of like completely level ground, but I’ve left that and then I’m continuing to move forward and they’re still trying to fill in this gap in the story so that they can move forward with me and it can take some of the well, it definitely takes some of the power away from the story. 

0:21:22 – Kyle Gray

This is a great example and this is one of the strange things that I think progressing in your entrepreneurial journey, this becomes more of a problem or more of a challenge as you become more successful. But it also becomes more subtle and harder to recognize or admit, and I want to just even acknowledge you for that, because a lot of people in the same position would be like well, I speak all the time and I have a successful podcast, or I have an Instagram or a LinkedIn following, so obviously I know what I’m doing. So how do we address this? And there’s a lot of common things. Another example of the cult of familiarity is you tell your story so often and your story you’re so immersed in it, and so there’s probably a couple of times you know. Maybe there is this one tough time here that feels really important and this detail that seems really important to you and this one here, and a lot of people were. Because we’re so immersed in our own stuff, it really is hard to tell which of the details matter, and this is why I like working with people in this one on one context and providing the right friction and pushes. 

I’m not judging necessarily anything. I’m asking questions, drawing it out. Okay, tell me about the biggest limiting belief that your client has. Okay, they think like this All right, well, what does that feel like to them when, when they’re having this thing like what? How’s this help them back in the context? Okay, okay, what’s one client that you’ve worked with that had this exact same problem? Okay, what did they say to you on their first call? What did it sound like? Okay, okay. 

And then drawing this out, and then when I have practiced many different storytelling and teaching frameworks to the point, in the same way that a martial artist has practiced moves, different martial arts moves, and so what I’m doing is I’m drawing out the key points and information so I can basically mad libs these story frameworks in my own head and apply the story. So I’ll, once I have enough information, then I tell you your story as if I was you, from the stage and it creates a result that’s about 80% good. It’s not going to be perfectly courtroom truth, because it’s just me piecing things together, but you’ll have a flow of it. You’ll. I will do a lot of the cutting and instead of going back and forth like but but the story about Jimmy the dog is important when you can just see the story done and completed in an arc that you’ve. 

You probably wouldn’t piece together in the same way on your own, especially with the same amount of effort Immediately especially for entrepreneurs and quick start people who don’t like to deal with scripts or like fighting a blank page a bunch If you can just get slapped with your own story in a way that you’ve never heard it before. A lot of the times it’s enough to like, make like a chiropractic adjustment and changes how you, how you do it. We can work with a script and we can practice these things, but this is this is a technique that really shakes things up in what we assume we should be teaching and I think is one of the fun ways to get results fast and to break through a lot of the barriers that that you’re talking about. 

0:24:54 – Mike Malatesta

1. So I have two questions on that. First of all, when you do that with someone, it’s sort of like, as you were saying it, I was thinking okay, so that’s sort of like being a magician. It’s like taking someone’s story as they’re relating it to you and you’re basically maybe magicians the wrong word but you’re basically taking no, that’s why. 

0:25:18 – Kyle Gray

I’m Kyle the Great. 

0:25:19 – Mike Malatesta

Okay, yeah, so you’re in a matter of a short period of time. You’re basically giving this person their own story back in a way that makes them think like they’re an audience member as opposed to the cult of familiarity member, and I wonder so two things. I wonder one how many, how frequently do you do that with someone and they’re like, wow, that’s so much better, versus you know, you left out this. Or, like you said, the dog thing, you left that. So how frequently does that happen? That’s my first question. And my second question is for the people who are wild what does that do to their confidence level when it comes to the next time they talked to someone about this particular thing or tell this story? 

0:26:18 – Kyle Gray

I get about a 60% cry rate when people hear their own stories for the first time told. It’s very confronting to hear somebody else telling your story to you as well, and they very rarely do. People expect like this, this thing, to happen the way it does, and so, yeah, I get some pretty good numbers on that, and it’s it’s so fun to do. So, that being said, they’re crying for good reasons and they they see a lot of possibility. They’re not. They’re not crying. They’re not sad. 

0:26:53 – Mike Malatesta

They’re happy. 

0:26:53 – Kyle Gray

Yes, but let me give you an example that I think will will illustrate a little bit more of what. How this changes somebody on the inside and how this changes somebody on the outs are how it would work for them. So I had a health and wellness coach named Debbie. Come on to a story ROI call, where we create a story together, and it’s really interesting when confronting the next level of visibility, whether you’re at $7 a month or seven figures a month. And so this woman got on the call with me. She’s like Kyle, I’m stressed out, I work with these women. They have hormone problems and I fixed them and I’m like Debbie. That doesn’t sound like a problem. And she said well, I want to work with children with ADHD and their parents, but I don’t know if I can focus on this audience and that audience at the same time. And I just realized that I have ADHD and I have been looking back at decades of dopamine driven decisions which have led my life every which way, and I just keep thinking to myself if my parents had only known they could have done something. So this is an attitude that is not conducive to telling or writing a story, not creative. We need to do something else. I asked her Debbie, do you want to play a game? Yes, amazing, I love it when they want to play games. I say, debbie, write down what you just said. If my parents had only known, they could have done something. I want you to read it out loud, take a big breath, read it out loud, take a big breath, read it out loud, take a big breath. She does that. How does that feel? It immerses her inner body of the feels. She says it doesn’t feel very good. Awesome, we’ll put a pin. 

There’s a very interesting use of this technique in other ways as well, and I say let’s change it one word at a time. We go from if my parents had only known to, if I had only known, I could do something Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe Feels a little bit better, right, okay, how about? I know now I can do something. Also closer, and I ask her, as we’re feeling through these words together, what’s one of the biggest objections that your clients would have to working with you? And she says well, these parents don’t want to open up a can of worms with an ADHD diagnosis, so they’d rather just ignore it. And I ask her Debbie, what does that lead to? It leads to decades of dopamine driven decisions. And her eyes light up and she writes down I know now, and that’s why my story is so important Now she’s ready to tell a story. 

Now we’re in the right vein. We can all feel it, even even listening in. Okay, tell me a story about a moment in your life or where you saw somebody with ADHD symptoms. Now she’s ready to go. She talks about her grandson bouncing off the walls, the boy’s father shouting at him trying to calm him down. They both end up frustrated, exasperated, exhausted. She stares across the living room at her grandson and she sees the look on his face and she wonders if he’s ever going to get the help that he needs. And in his eyes she sees her own childhood and growing up and decades of dopamine driven decisions that have led her life every which way and she thinks to herself of my parents had only known they could have done something. But now she can do something. 

And so the line that was the most disempowering road blocking line at the beginning of our call became the most important objection overcoming line, and we got there through first by With a little bit of friction and a little bit of questions and a little bit of playing, playfulness Applying with the energy. 

She showed up with a certain attitude and it wasn’t a very good attitude, but she was at least ready to play and we moved around and played with these ideas and we weren’t. 

She wasn’t sure where we were going, but we ended up on the other side with this really powerful stuff and it was it’s. 

It’s not just Something that will get her more sales, it’s something that changes how she wakes up in the morning, because I know now and that’s why my message is so important this went from taking her biggest Problem of I don’t know if I can focus on these things to. I don’t think there’s anything else I can focus on, and this is the real magic here. This is the the real magic stuff. It’s not just me listening and echoing your story back. It’s that the biggest walls in your life Disappear when you have an upgraded level of clarity on who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing in a way that makes sense for you and In a way that you can see clearly makes the say. It gets what’s happening in your head and your heart and it starts landing in your listeners and and you can tell it’s immediate feedback when you can tell these people are on the same page as me, and it’s very validating, especially when when you can start to see it work for the first time so. 

0:32:55 – Mike Malatesta

So I’m curious what this brings up. A couple of things for me. First of all, when people come to you Like her like. 

Debbie, okay, and she’s she’s. This is her life, that she’s talking about her life, it’s her experience. What is it Oftentimes? Is it the film familiarity, or is it? Is it a talent Stack problem? What is it that keeps us, debbie and me I’ll put myself in there, and, and, and a lot of people that might be listening, kyle what is it that keeps us from being able to tell what we have to share in the most Impactful way? Is it and I’m thinking to myself, okay, you see these great Ted speakers and you see these, you know you go to great presentations. You mentioned Tony Robbins before and people can just mesmerize other people and you think I could never Do that Because they have something that I don’t have, is it true? 

0:34:03 – Kyle Gray

They, you have everything, or you can learn everything they have. And it’s that problem with the cult of familiarity or being too focused on yourself. 

Yeah the problem is that most people don’t they they, when they hear the word storytelling, they think recounting, something that happened to me in the past, not such a great definition of storytelling. But there are. Stories have purposes, there are many different purposes that they serve and the purpose dictates the key ingredients that happen in this story. And if we can start Understanding the purposes of stories and all stories are created for our audience, so we’ve got to understand our audience what are their biggest problems? What are their biggest limiting beliefs? Holding them back right now and when we can start to do that, then we can ask better questions like what’s the one thing, instead of how much can I teach in these next 10 minutes becomes what’s the one thing I could teach in these next 10 minutes? That would make the biggest impact. Instead of cramming your slides full of text, you have a nice picture and can illustrate an interesting thought. 

Right and it’s really just another quick example. Another health and wellness expert I had a woman named Nicole Jardim who wanted to launch a book called fix your period and we put together a keynote speech so that she could invite People from her book launch into a group coaching program. And so I said okay, nicole, how do we? How do we fix our periods? And the first thing she says is you got to fix your blood sugar. I know 12 ways to fix your blood sugar. List them off, too many. I said, nicole, I’m gonna pretend to be one of your clients. I have long hair. The beard is not very convincing, but bear with me, maybe it is a formula problems. 

I say, nicole, I’m hopeless. I’ve tried diets before, I’ve tried all these things. It doesn’t work. I don’t have the willpower or the genes. But here’s, I promise I will do one thing With my whole heart, but it has to be the easiest. What do we do? 

She says oh well, that’s to your food more. But Kyle, that’s boring. Who wants to hear about chewing your food more? How can I teach for 10 minutes on chewing your food more? Well, let’s actually think about what this means, if we think about the limiting beliefs of somebody who is trying to fix their blood sugar. They’ve probably tried dieting before, probably hasn’t worked that well for them. And now, because of chew your food more, you’re telling me that I can get healthier without Changing my diet, that if I just chew my food a little bit more I can start to see results. 

This teaching is so nice. Actually, while I’m talking about it right now, your brain is thinking about chewing food a little bit longer and you can feel just the slightest bit healthier. And so, instead of getting into a whole bunch of how to Do tactical, practical things which we also impulsively, compulsively want to fire, hose our audience with we stay in that tension a little bit and we expand on this one thing we really see what the limiting belief is and we teach them in a way that doesn’t teach them how to do stuff, but opens up the playing field, creates possibilities, removes barriers, so that when they show up to our sales call, they have no objections. They can’t because we, like a chess player, thought about their objections in our presentation and Addressed them five moves ahead before they could even be thought of on the sales call. And this is how. This is what gets us from again, trying to teach all the things to. Okay, I just need to teach these three things right if we can understand the purpose. 

Okay, I know that an origin story is really showing that I understand them and speaking about their problems. So how can I listen to my audience, or how can I listen in conversations to what people’s problems are and find the right stories that reflect that? Similar, really interesting technique is as you’re listening and as you’re drawing out the words and conflict to length. Are the the words like If my parents had only known they could have done something from your people. And if you say those same words in your body, you can use them like a compass. One of the most difficult things is just having a blank page. But if you can find the dirtiest, darkest words of your ideal clients and start saying to them to yourself and Then think, when did I feel just like this, you’re gonna have stories come up but you probably never thought would be very good stories to tell from the stage. But promise me or I promise you, that’s where the treasure is okay. 

0:39:18 – Mike Malatesta

So, if I heard you right, is like Really, your stories are obviously important, your experience, or its experiences, are important and you’re gonna want to share those with people. But as you’re building what it is that you want to say, make sure that you are, to the extent that you possibly can, putting yourself in the shoes of your audience and addressing there what’s the biggest fear, problem, opportunity that I have that I am just too you you put in the word for afraid, lazy, unable to understand whatever and then solve it. 

0:39:55 – Kyle Gray

Not really solve it. 

0:39:56 – Mike Malatesta

Okay. 

0:39:57 – Kyle Gray

But at least change how they think about the problem, give them a path to solving it on their own. Yeah, or even differently, like with weight loss. If we say keto diet, you need a keto diet to lose weight, that’s kind of solving their problem to me. But if we say kind of like the blood sugar, if you just chew your food more, you don’t even have to change your diet, this is changing the way that they’re looking at the problem, in a way that they see different possibilities after. 

And so there is a subtle difference between how to and shifting the paradigm and shifting the lens. Okay. Because oftentimes the biggest problems aren’t the biggest problems and the actions to be taken once we see things in this way are different. 

0:40:49 – Mike Malatesta

Okay. So let me expand on that a little bit, because I appreciate this education. I’m getting here your system, one clear path to sales. You have one clear message, one clear lesson, one clear offer, and, as I’ve been listening to you and thinking about this, I want to say what I think that means, and then I want you to tell me what it really means. Okay, so one clear message is sort of like the way that you it’s a way that you gain credibility and resonance with the people you’re talking to One clear lesson is the story that ties you to your audience, where that you don’t just have credibility with them, you have sameness. 

And then the one clear offer is that’s all past stuff. Your message and your lesson is all past stuff. That’s all past stuff that’s already happened. Like you said, your story’s recounting something that happened in the past. That’s what every story is from an experiential story, because no one has a future story, right, until one clear offer which is taking someone out of the past, out of the present, in fact, out of their chair today, out of their podcast years, listening years today, and taking them to a point in the future where you’re going to present them with something that could very well be possible for them down the road because of what you’re sharing with them. That was sort of jumbled but did I get close? 

0:42:24 – Kyle Gray

It is close and I’ve thought about this a lot and I have a somewhat of a newer lens to look at this which might help. So, each of these sections, there’s a question we need to answer, and these three things add up to a great signature talk. The one clear message is our origin story. The goal of an origin story is to answer the question should I listen to this person? For the rest of the time it doesn’t, it’s not. Should I sell? Should I buy a $20,000 product from this person? Do I trust them enough to listen and internalize whatever they have to teach me? Or am I going to be checking my email and flipping through Instagram with my camera off on Zoom? That’s what our origin story. That’s all it has to do. 

Great, one clear lesson is can this work for me? Is what you have to teach? Can it work for me? I’m different and I have all of these hangups and what you’re saying, what you’re promising, really worked for me. That’s what we have to teach. Maybe I like to teach really three teaching points. So one clear lesson is a little bit of a misnomer, but I like having three teaching points, about 10 minutes each, as a standard issue presentation. 

0:43:45 – Mike Malatesta

So it’s still one clear lesson, but it’s in three segments. Let’s say Okay, all right. And then why three? Kyle, just before I leave there, why three? 

0:43:55 – Kyle Gray

That’s a great question because it’s usually just a rule that I put down to counter the worst impulses of my highly intelligent people that I work with. Because they want to teach five. They want to teach 17 teaching points and forcing them to pick three. 

Three is really nice. It’s easy to remember, it’s easy for humans to internalize. If you start teaching six or seven teaching points, I’m going to forget the first two by the time you’re on the fifth one. And then there’s the mental static again by the time we get to number six. I’m thinking about should I go to the bathroom now, or how much longer is this presentation? And so three is just very easy. Everybody can remember three. 

Two is too short, that feels weird. Nobody wants to hear a two teaching treason. No, we just won’t even talk about that anymore. But most people want to do five or six If you have a longer time. This is again the standard issue that I think of and a lot of the ways this is kind of the white belt for the people I work with. We create a 45 minute talk. The origin story is a nice five to 10 minutes, 10 minute teaching points and then a five to 10 minute closing offer. And with the people I work with we create dozens of teaching points. But depending on the audience, which teaching points we want to put in or how we want to construct those would change without necessarily having to throw out and write a whole new keynote speech every time. 

0:45:33 – Mike Malatesta

Okay, got it. And when you talk about the three let’s say three points, do you tell the audience I’m going to tell you three things that make up this lesson, or no? 

0:45:44 – Kyle Gray

Yes, that is one of the most important, most overlooked, very subtle. It’s called a roadmap. You tell your story. I went through this process and I figured it out. So I’m here to teach you today, and then you say here’s what I’m going to teach you today and here’s a. You say first I’m going to teach you this, and then you say a line, one simple sentence, about the benefit of teaching point one, teaching point two one simple line about the benefit. And teaching point three one simple line about the benefit. And then you go to your first teaching point and you say now we’re on teaching point one and you repeat the title you teach everything. And then, when you’re done, you say that’s all I have to teach about point number one. Now we’re on to point number two. Why is this so important and why am I so energetic about this randomly mundane thing? 

Again, one of the biggest enemies that we have as speakers is mental static. Mental static is them thinking of anything that’s not the action that we want them to take at the end of the presentation, and so mental static can be created in a lot of different ways, but having confusion or anything that leads to them away from the promise is one of the ways that we could do that, and so by being super clear on exactly like where, what the biggest objections are and and how we can move through those as efficiently as possible, we minimize the friction. So when we say at the beginning of our presentation, here’s the things I’m going to teach you, it allows us to kind of categorize things like a drawer, so we know when we’re at the first teaching point and then, okay, well, that’s all done. Now we’re on to the second teaching point and we can put it in second teaching point drawer and helps us organize and categorize things. 

And a lot of people they don’t do these roadmaps and so what happens is maybe you’re on your third teaching point and there’s no like clear delineation this is the end of teaching point one, here’s teaching point two. And so I’m sitting there and I’m thinking is this still the first teaching point? Like this presentation has been an hour, are there three more things this person’s going to teach? I have to go to the bathroom. Should I maybe put a little pizza in the oven and and just get that started, while while this is happening, mental static, they’re thinking about other things but, if you can just say here’s where we’re going, they’re going to have much more attention. 

This is like public speaking, class 9th grade 101. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them yes it’s, it’s truly, truly still stands the test of time great advice, even as you become more and more accomplished outside of your ninth grade experience. 

0:48:48 – Mike Malatesta

Okay, so you’ve given us so much great stuff here, but I think I need to go back to, if it’s okay with you, back to this music career or this desire to be a rock star. From the time you were 18 to 22. I you said you got burnt out. I’m wondering first of all, I’d love to understand what kind of stories you were hoping or you were telling at that point in your life, and then what got you burnt out about doing? 

0:49:24 – Kyle Gray

1. Amazing question back in my there was in my late teens or when I was starting out. There was just a bunch of fun. I was playing in bands, writing my own stuff and just loving the process. And once it got to the point where I was like I need to make this into something. 

I can remember just sitting there and trying to write songs that were good songs that would make the. I was, I was trying to make something happen and I wasn’t enjoying the process anymore. And after just a not too much time with this new energetic of like it has to work, it has to be like this I burnt myself out and stopped playing guitar. I would carry my I carried this blue acoustic guitar all over the world Peru, brazil, all over the world. Then I was playing it with me everywhere and then I stopped for several years until I found that writing tickled the same itch in a lot of ways, but and this is something that I still struggle with, even if this is my eternal thing and it’s my destiny to treat myself in the same way that I treat my clients, which means I need to be excited about my creativity and I need to primarily just be be working in my voice and making stuff and expressing things. But that attitude of it’s not good enough. It’s this I still have a hard time. 

I’m writing another book right now and I still rally against the. You don’t have anything interesting to say, even after three books, and this is also why I love doing what I do because I it’s. It’s such a challenging place for me to play in and when I can help somebody break through these same barriers that I have struggled with for so long, it it is a deep honor and it encourages me to. I am an artist first and foremost, in the work that I do and how I do my work, and I’ve got to treat myself both like an artist and a champion, and, and the important lesson from from those days is it’s important to it’s much more important to start playing guitar and get lost in time and forget that you know 20, 30, 50 minutes go by and you’re playing this song in the groove than it is to be like. Yeah, this is one badass lyric that I’m going to write. 

I want to love the process and and so now for me and a lot of the people I work with, we forget to love the process and we want the money and the results and the things right now. And why aren’t they here? And hopefully this next time it’s gonna all come together. But yeah and so this is. This is ultimately now like playing guitar, is making more videos on LinkedIn and giving myself the choice and and being excited about hey, where, where can I really expand on these ideas? 

0:52:33 – Mike Malatesta

and going back and just giving myself that same love and skills and talents that I so excitedly give to the clients that I work with it’s very interesting to me this and it’s and it’s there’s a certain practicality to it, just a life practicality to it, but there’s a real difference that I’m going to call it mental static. 

There’s a real difference in mental static, I think, and I’d love your opinion on this. When you want, or are unconcerned about the need to accomplish something, you just want to and ultimately you feel like you will, as opposed to I, like you said, I need to this needs to work in it, because when it needs to do, when something needs to be done, there’s a time stamp put on it, and when there’s a time stamp put on it, you often start thinking more and more about the time stamp as opposed to what you’re attempting to create, and so the time gets to be something that takes over and or just the expectations yeah, okay, yeah, yeah so it has to be a certain way and even I think, listening, I think you can, you can feel this like. 

0:53:59 – Kyle Gray

I have a certain feeling and my it happens right in my sternum, at the bottom of my sternum. It has to be this way yes it’s interesting versus well, I have a. 

I have a story of kind of a different kind of energy that that is really what I think we’re going for here. There’s a few shining moments in my life when I’ve made a decision with this level of clarity and I would love to have more and live every day from this attitude. Like I said in my in my college days, I love to travel. I remember spending a half a year in Argentina and hearing a lot of great things about Brazil and I wanted to figure out a way to get Brazil. 

I went back to the University of Utah and I heard about an internship for an airline in Brazil and I go to the internship office and the, the international internship coordinator and I say I want to go to Brazil and she says, okay, do you speak Portuguese? And I say no, but I will by the time I get there and I know that that’s kind of time related, similar to the problem but I there was a certain energy of none of these problems are going to get in my way. I know I want this and I’m going to get there. I knew that it was going to be hard. I didn’t speak Portuguese. 

I did speak Spanish, which makes Portuguese relatively easier still learning a new language right but I didn’t stop and and I didn’t like it took a lot longer than I thought. I ended up going to Peru for five months and and working there before I made it to Brazil in a roundabout adventure we can talk about later. So it wasn’t time, but I, I had made that choice and the I I don’t, but I will by the time I get there. There’s an energy that we, we can both feel in that too, and that’s what we’re going for. There’s a few, there’s been a few magical moments, and sometimes it’s travel related, but when I’ve made a choice with that level of fortitude and this is the energy that a good story can get you to tap into, right having that kind of clarity can allow that decision that will stay strong as you are tested by the storms and whatever. 

You know you’re going to be tested to the degree of the good choice that you’re going to make. No, nothing worth doing is going to be that easy to do, and so we can expect these things and be ready for them, because it’s worth it to us. 

0:56:34 – Mike Malatesta

I’m glad you told that, because there’s not only did you show commitment in saying that I will by the time I get there, but you also sort of created that offer in the person’s mind, like I’m going to take you out of today, I’m going to take you into the future, and you’re going to look back from that time in the future and said, man, I made a really good choice with Kyle, right, that’s it. 

0:57:00 – Kyle Gray

Oh, they definitely did. Yeah, I got a scholarship a few years later. Oh, nice congratulations because of my tenacity in those times. 

0:57:10 – Mike Malatesta

yeah, so, kyle, before we go, is there anything that I could have, should have? You would have liked me to have asked you, or you want to leave with my audience? 

0:57:25 – Kyle Gray

Yeah, I want to leave you with this and I want to leave all of your audience with this, and one of the biggest are a problem that a lot of people have when I talk about these kind of things is it feels manipulative to think about the people in this way. But if you ever are considering telling a story and you’re feeling that it’s manipulation, then you’ve already lost and you’re in the wrong place and instead. 

So if you’re thinking of manipulation, you’re in imposter syndrome and you’re not focused on what the client needs and the value that you can provide for them, and it’s very important that we shift this right now, because I believe right now, this world is faced with some of the biggest changes, the biggest problems, the biggest crises that we have ever faced as a species, and I am also certain that we have everything we need within us as a human race, as a human resource, to overcome these objections or these, these problems, gracefully. But what we need are people lined up with, with their best selves that are locked into those stories that we were just telling people about here and you and so when you’re showing up to sell, you’re not showing up to make money. You’re showing up because this is your divine responsibility. I don’t care if you’re an SEO agency. 

This is your divine responsibility to help people, to serve people, to stand for the better future that you can provide for them, and nobody else is going to be excited about it if you’re not, and we all need to be at our best. 

That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing is because I want to help people who I know are going to make the world better, who have big hearts, who have great minds and and I want this this human resource crisis to be solved. And so stand for what you are doing and believe in it as a divine imperative, sell as a sacred act of service and intimacy to help overcome your client’s problems, and do it from a deep purpose and alignment, and that comes from the right story, and it comes from focusing on them and trying to serve them. This is not manipulation, but this is the most powerful form of transformation that you can create, and I hope that everybody listening has gotten at least a few little nuggets of practicality that will change how people respond to you, and I hope that we’ve moved the world one little inch closer to the paradise that I believe is coming nice. 

1:00:19 – Mike Malatesta

I’m so glad you you mentioned that, because I that’s like a life lesson for everything. If you’re doing something and you feel even for a moment that it’s manipulation, stop. Just get your head around, figure out how you’re, not how the. What your real goal is and hopefully it’s not your real goal is not to manipulate and then just get back to being real, and right about this is I do this work because I help people, or I have this relationship because I want it to work, because I love the person, or whatever it’s. As soon as you that’s a really great litmus test as soon as you feel like there’s some manipulation, you’re telling yourself something’s wrong. Don’t do that, yeah yeah, it’s really binary. 

1:01:08 – Kyle Gray

Everything is all about very binary, yeah, focus off of yourself onto the client. If we’re focused on the client, we’re good. Focused on ourselves, we’re bad. Everything boils down to that well, kyle. 

1:01:20 – Mike Malatesta

Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been a great experience. I really appreciate learning from you and getting a chance to explore your story. Check out Kyle’s podcast, story engine podcast and everything. Story engine everything, kyle Gray we mentioned it at the beginning. It’ll be in the show notes. Everything that you need to connect with Kyle. 

And until we have a chance to get together next, please maximize the greatness that’s inside of you. There’s more there than you think, and my whole purpose in doing this show is just to expose you to people like Kyle, who can help you maximize your greatness, and then I encourage you to do it. So until next time, hey, everybody, thanks for listening to the show and before you go, I just have three requests for you. One if you like what I’m doing, please consider subscribing or following the podcast on whatever podcast platform you prefer. If you’re really into it, leave me a review, write something nice about me, give me five stars or whatever you feel is most appropriate. 

Number two I’ve got a book. It’s called owner shift how getting selfish got me unstuck. It’s an amazon bestseller and I’d love for you to read it or listen to it on audible or wherever else, barns and oval, amazon. You can get it everywhere if you’re looking for inspiration that will help you unlock your greatness and potential, order or download it today so that you can have your very own copy and if you get it, please let me know what you think. Number three my newsletter. I do a newsletter every thursday and I talk about things that are interesting to me and or I give more information about the podcast and the podcast guess that I’ve had and the experiences that I’ve had with them you can sign up for the podcast today at my website, which is my name, mike malatesta.com. 

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