See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 8 Mind Movies for Leaders: Persuade, Inspire, Connect | Show notes.
0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders. I’m delighted to introduce you to Melissa Reaves, the founder and CEO of Story Fruition, a public speaking and storytelling training company. She helps leaders in both large enterprises and startups apply her mind movie method, which is also described in the bestselling book and audiobook I’ve been listening to, to raise money and close new clients.
Melissa, welcome to the pod! So let’s dive in. We share a connection to the wonderful city of Bellevue, and I think one of the things that your method helps people with is connecting the stories of something meaningful—whether it’s something they experienced as kids, or where they went to high school—that helps them connect with really visceral human stories, which they can then bring into the workplace. Do you want to introduce us a bit to the method and maybe start illustrating with something our audience could take away from this amazing opportunity to connect with you today?
0:01:43 - Melissa Reaves
Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so I’m obsessed with helping people tell their stories in a variety of ways because human beings thrive on stories. But in business, we tend to think, "No, we thrive on charts and graphs." But here’s the thing—your charts and graphs are actually telling stories. Those stories could be about people, or animals—if you’re, say, in animal rescue, your charts might be telling that story—or if you’re in a climate tech company, maybe the stories are about the Earth.
And I will memorize them, and I will remember them, and I will think about that pie chart for a week. Why do we do that? So here’s the thing: I was in startups forever. From 2002 to 2019, I was in startups—advertising technology and marketing technology. I was always naturally good at sales because I was good at vision stories.
I was able to get early adopters to really see the technology. It was behavioral targeting at the time, and I was walking into ad agencies and teaching them, "Hey, we’ve got this thing called a cookie. We’re going to know where people have been on your site, and then you can serve them an ad that's relevant to them." And they’d say, “What? You know they’ve been on my site?” I’d say, "Yes, and then we’re going to call this retargeting." I started teaching them these terms, and everyone was like, “This is amazing,” and they started buying into it.
So, I was in the early, early days of showing people what this crazy computer could do that their TV couldn’t do, that their newspaper couldn’t do. I was in print forever, and I remember when I realized the power of this technology. I was reading a newspaper, looking at an ad, and I tried to click it. I thought, “Oh my goodness,” and that’s when I knew I had to move over to technology. It was almost like a living, breathing entity. That ad could track, could talk to marketers about what was going on. It was no longer some salesperson saying, “We’re in dentist’s offices, and the pass-along rate’s three, so really, your 100,000 magazines are reaching 300,000 people.” People would say, “Is it?” But then we’d come into data and digital, and we’d say, “This is how many impressions you hit, this is how many people clicked.”
It was a really powerful way for them to see where they were going, where they were, and where they could go from there.
And that was vision storytelling. I realized, "Why aren’t we doing more of this?" A lot of people were just saying, “Oh, the algorithm is going to organize the data,” and they’d start talking in science speak, and it wasn’t as captivating.
So when I started Story Fruition, I really started studying the neuroscience of what happens in storytelling. The brain is wired for a couple of things. When you’re flashing a chart or a graph, or you say a stat, and you start right there, what happens is our neocortex engages. It’s analyzing—it’s known as the left brain. It’s logical. “Does this make sense to me?” But it’s not emotional. Most of the clients I speak to are in life sciences, they’re engineers, they’re working in AI, and they work in that neocortex every day for their entire lives. It’s like a gym—they’re crunching numbers, they’re buff.
0:05:43 - Alex Shevelenko
They’ve got a six-pack in data!
Okay, so basically, what you're saying is, the smarter you are in terms of classical IQ strength, the more you're in your head, and the less likely you are to be connected with your "crocodile brain," which is totally reactive, and then maybe our emotional brain, which is a little bit younger than the crocodile brain, but is the one that helps us truly connect with people and ideas in a much more powerful way.
Is that kind of where you’re heading?
0:06:22 - Melissa Reaves
Yeah, so where we head to is the limbic system, which I’m not sure is the crocodile brain?
0:06:28 - Alex Shevelenko
I can see a little bit of it down there!
0:06:29 - Melissa Reaves
That's a mind movie. So yeah, and then what we want to do is honor the neocortex information because that's the science of our business, right? Like, we live for that, but that's not going to compel your audience. So what we want to do is cross over and start looking for the story. Who are you serving? Who is your audience? Right? And so, create a story that we can relate to, that the numbers are telling us, and create a person having the problem that you're solving. What happens is the audience doesn’t start off with a number, saying, "You know, 75% of all women, blah, blah, blah, blah." You might start your story by saying, "Meet Susan. She's a 42-year-old soccer mom, and she's stressed out because she is being pulled right and left, and right and left. She's going to work, she's picking up the kids, she's trying to keep it all together, but she just doesn't feel like she can." Okay, did you see Susan?
Yeah, did you see her? What kind of car was she driving when she was picking up her kids?
0:07:44 - Alex Shevelenko
Volvo station wagon. Volvo SUV, Volvo SUV. What car was she driving when she was picking up her kids? Volvo station wagon, Volvo SUV?
0:07:49 - Melissa Reaves
Because she was in Bellevue with her SUV. I've seen a few there.
0:07:55 - Alex Shevelenko
What was in it?
0:07:55 - Melissa Reaves
What was in it?
0:07:58 - Alex Shevelenko
A bunch of food wrappers in the backseat, McDonald's boxes, yeah, soccer bags. Did it?
0:08:08 - Melissa Reaves
Did you smell anything?
The leftover food? Yeah, so the car smells, it stinks. Yeah, all of that happened in your mind just by me saying a little bit. Me saying, "Meet Susan. She's a 42-year-old soccer mom, and she's exhausted," and then, "She's going back and forth, carting her kids around." And in your mind, as the audience listening to that, all of a sudden, you created a Subaru. You created McDonald's boxes and Happy Meals in the back, and it smelled, and there was probably soccer gear, and it probably smelled sweaty.
And what I did in just a few sentences is I got your mind to go into the limbic system and start to see it.
And so now you could say, "And Susan represents 75% of the women polled in our survey who say that they're at their wit's end." And then maybe your company—I'm totally making this up on the fly right now—but maybe the company is talking about retreats for women that can give them time, right? So then you'd start moving into the solution. So we start with the problem, using a character that the number was representing, so that we remember it, because we're not going to remember the chart. However, if you convince us enough to feel Susan, and then you move over to your solution, you can then show the chart: "Susan represents 75% of this chart." That's what we would call putting heart behind the chart. And if we could do more of that in business, I can tell you that you'll see your yeses come faster, and no one's going to be like, "Oh my God, that pie chart was amazing." They're going to be like, "Right."
0:09:49 - Alex Shevelenko
So if you're a founder and, like, for example, you're thinking of investors, right? Like, you're basically saying I could go and say, "Look at me, I have this huge market," and, "Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah," or I could tell Susan's story and then say, "By the way, Susan represents 50% of our national GDP." That's right. And then it's like—that's a very different way of getting to the same destination. One bores me to tears and doesn’t feel at all human, and the other one kind of combines the narrative. All of this imagination is activated, and then I still feel like it's a big market, but now it's visceral. I feel her pain. Am I getting it?
0:10:35 - Melissa Reaves
You're getting it, yes. And so what we're doing is, it takes iterations to find that story that you're going to tell, too. So your data scientists, they're the early story hunters, right? They're the ones gathering the data, pulling up the charts, making it happen.
But everyone seems to think like, "Here's our story," and it's like, "No, we got a little more work to do." And then we start to maybe put it into sentences and start to figure out what the story is telling us. And then the third level is, now we're going to make it a character. Now we're going to make it a story, we're going to make it real, so that people can see that character having that problem. And then throughout your entire presentation—if this is an investor deck—the entire presentation, you can bring Susan back in to additional charts, like when you start talking about your go-to-market strategy. You can say things like, "We're going to find Susan through," and then you start talking about these methods that you're going to use to seize her attention, right? So it all plays in. And what happens is, in a presentation like that—and I've seen it over and over and over again—it becomes an edutaining investor pitch or sales pitch. People are like, "Hmm," they're not going to say, "I remember the pie chart." They're going to be like, "Hmm, Susan. Okay."
0:11:56 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, let me ask you this. So, Susan—like, the Susan is, in some ways, easier to grasp for us because it's not a B2B, it's not deep science. Do you have an example, or maybe we could work through an example, where it's something that's very esoteric, right? And the audience, that is, maybe the customers, are deeply technical and they'll know the problem, but like, maybe your investors or other stakeholders, or future employees that you're trying to bring on board, they don’t understand it as well. So you kind of need to take this technical persona and bring her to life. You know, in a way that's harder for us to understand a soccer mom in her 40s.
0:12:46 - Melissa Reaves
Right. So what I'm hearing is you've got to make sure you know your audience. Okay.
So, if I were in a stage where someone is looking at my investment and they have just brought in all their technology experts to look this over, I would bring in Susan lightly, but I would probably focus more on the technology. However, I would still find ways to make sure that there are mind movies in there. Okay, so last night someone I was working with, who does project management, said, “Sometimes we just have to talk about bar charts. How do you make that a story?” And you know, we have to say, “Well, this one is going green; it's great. This one’s kind of in the middle, it’s yellow. And then these ones are red.” I’m like, “Everyone wants to know the red ones.”
So, what we did was we made the red ones the kids in high school who are skipping class, you know, smoking at the loading dock, saying, “Yeah, my old man’s not listening to me.” Those are your problem children. And I said, "This is the problem child who needs attention.” And you have this project manager say, “Oh my god, my meetings are no longer boring."
And then, you know, it’s just a little way, because even the most technical people are still human beings that can still be infused with mind movies. To make them feel like this is more than just a boring graph. Everyone loves stories. I believe we could be bringing this more into our business realm on a daily basis, all day long, in a variety of ways. So, investor pitches are one way, and know your audience. If you are speaking only to the tech people and you know that around that table you’ve got marketing people, you’ve got salespeople, you’ve got…
0:14:37 - Alex Shevelenko
You’ve got interns. It’s a complex sale. It’s a complex sale. It’s a complex sale. How do you keep them all engaged?
0:14:45 - Melissa Reaves
And that is coming to knowing your audience. So, we teach this too. There’s something I call the "Wonder Wander Effect." Okay, and the Wonder Wander Effect means that the speaker has either said something, like using an acronym, and they don’t define it. The audience is like, “What’s that mean? I don’t know what that means.” He keeps saying "EBITDA," and I don’t know what that means.
0:15:10 - Alex Shevelenko
Do you know what EBITDA means? I’m an idiot, I don’t know what EBITDA means.
0:15:12 - Melissa Reaves
Meanwhile, he’s still going, and what happens is maybe 30-40% of the room just lost it. They fell off the train tracks of communication, and they don’t know what he’s talking about.
So what I would say is, you always want to define a term. Say it, let everyone know, check in with your audience: “Does that all make sense?” Then you can start using that acronym. That’s polite, and that’s conscientious to your audience. It keeps people engaged. They’re like, “Oh, I’m being seen,” and, therefore, I will give the same courtesy back to the speaker because they are paying attention to how they’re interacting with us.
0:15:54 - Alex Shevelenko
So, Melissa, wearing my hat as also a technology provider that enables both much more interactive and engaging live conversations. But increasingly, we see the world kind of like what you described with advertising, where a lot of the selling, a lot of the engaging happens when you’re not in a room and not just in a Zoom. But it’s just, I land somewhere. It could be a sales proposal, it could be a custom site people develop for a large client, and I may have different people landing there, different audiences. How do you find companies are bringing the fact that you’re not there physically into the storytelling when you can’t control the sequence, and you don’t interact with them directly? What have you seen that’s interesting that we can bring from that interactive world?
0:16:53 - Melissa Reaves
What have you seen that’s interesting, that we can bring from that interactive world? I love that question. Here’s what I teach. There are lots of ways that we communicate with people. We communicate with our websites, we communicate with our PDFs, which is what you do. And a PDF…
So, there are three types of decks. The first is an internal deck, which is where your data scientists start. They’re gathering it all up. It doesn’t have to be that pretty. You can data dump on there a little bit. You can have a lot of stuff because no one’s around except for your team. You can text speak as much as you want because you're all talking the same language. Those slides should probably never see the light of day unless it’s in the appendix. These slides are deep in the weeds and almost like the personal stuff in the business, right?
The second deck, which you work with a lot, is the shared slide. This means the speaker's not there, and it needs to represent on behalf of you. Therefore, it can still have sentences. Like I have a data storytelling deck where I am teaching this, and I say, "Let’s begin. This is a shared deck, so expect more sentences, even paragraphs because I’m teaching you."
But the third deck, which I concentrate most on at Story Fruition, is the speaker’s deck. The speaker’s deck is completely different, and that’s where there’s very little information on the page. Let’s say you’re talking about a topic, like your technology, and you have five things you want to talk about. Most people I see put all five points, all sentences, up at once.
What happens in this speaker situation is the audience stops listening because now they’re supposed to read. They start reading the slides while the speaker’s talking, and they’re not saying the same thing that the slides say. So what happens is there’s disharmony. In fact, the speaker actually becomes annoying because they’ve subtly said to their audience, “Stop listening to me, start reading my slide.”
0:18:54 - Alex Shevelenko
Look at every slide.
0:18:55 - Melissa Reaves
Yeah, and they are usually showing a shared deck slide. Almost everyone shows shared decks during their presentations, so a conscientious speaker’s deck would be something where, let’s say you have five points, and you have an image representing what you’re talking about. It’s not going to be a sentence because you're speaking; it's going to be a bullet point. You’ll only see bullet point one, and you’ll talk about that bullet point. Then, you’ll click, and the second bullet point comes up. So, you have bullet point one, bullet point two, and you’re talking about that, holding everyone’s attention. Then, you click, and the third point comes up. You talk about that until you get to the fifth one. Then, on the last slide, you'll see all five points, but you haven’t overwhelmed them. You’ve given them the information in bite-sized pieces, and when you say, “I’m going to send you my deck,” you’ll only send the five slides.
0:19:46 - Alex Shevelenko
You don’t have to build anymore, yeah.
0:19:49 - Melissa Reaves
Exactly. You just put in the five slides.
0:19:51 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, or you just put in the five points. What’s interesting to me is this is one of the discussion points of how we could collaborate. I think the fundamental weakness of the average leave-behind, or self-guided deck, is that it loses its personality. It loses the richness and interaction of the stage where the greatest speakers and teachers use the Socratic method, engage with us, make little jokes, and change their presentation on the fly based on the audience’s interests. An average leave-behind or shared deck, as you describe, is still a monologue. It’s probably easier to follow, but the longer and more complex it gets, it starts to hit you like a brick.
The sender’s best intentions are for people to read it. The reader’s best intentions are to open the download and digest it, but then they’re competing with TikToks, YouTube, TED Talks, and other great storytelling. They’re digging into technical, important, and valuable material. I worry that our civilization is struggling with longer-form shared decks because they lack some of the best storytelling techniques you’ve shared with us. These slides look flat, and I don’t feel the emotion. There’s no speaker sharing, no nuggets of wisdom. If there were a speaker, maybe on the slide share, sharing that same story, it would feel different. What are you seeing in this? Can you imagine a marriage of these two types of communication? How do we solve for that?
0:22:01 - Melissa Reaves
I love what you’re doing. When I was looking at your samples, it was clear you had motion. You had movement coming through, almost as if the presentation was happening to me, but still in a shared deck environment. It was much more entertaining—and educational—than I’ve ever seen. I love that, and I think that’s the next step.
0:22:20 - Alex Shevelenko
You're welcome to come back to another episode of this podcast. Thank you very much.
0:22:25 - Melissa Reaves
Great! We should be demanding more from ourselves and our speakers to be better presenters, no matter what. I focus on the speaker’s deck the most, but every single one of my clients needs a shared deck. It makes sense to me that the shared deck should be dynamic, with the power of sound, video, and movement. Moving things in slowly… even as a reader, I was just sent something recently that felt like a data dump. Someone sent me five attachments, each with 500 to 700 words on a page. It was like reading a novel, and I didn’t even ask for it. Someone asked, “What do you think?” and I replied, “I’m going to need a vacation to read that!” Yeah, I’ll need to block out all distractions for the next month to get through it.
0:23:30 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, to talk about your learning style. Or you get those emails: “Let me write this email and send you five downloads, two links, etc.” On download number one, go to page 24, because that’s the stuff I’m trying to highlight. This person is trying, right? But by the time I get to the attachment, I don’t know which one is number one or number two.
But the irony, the sadness, the tragedy is that the important part is in that email with those attachments. That’s often where the substance of big initiatives and projects are. So, there’s a timing issue.
0:24:23 - Melissa Reaves
Sorry, there’s a timing to it. I was in enterprise sales, right? I was at Oracle, and we once had a master deck. It was probably 55 to 60 pages, with all your case studies, graphs, and numbers. But if you’re going to send it to someone, only send what they need. Don’t send them the whole master deck. We had a guy who literally sent the entire thing.
0:24:49 - Alex Shevelenko
That had “internal” stamped on half of it. Well, this brings me to one of the things I love that you talked about. I think we see this as well. The more sophisticated communicators do a version of what you’re describing with a story library.
They allow people to pick and choose. Sometimes you’re lucky, and you can assemble the content for the customer. But other times, you have no idea. Sometimes a customer is coming to your website or partner portal to buy complex products like Oracle. You don’t know exactly what they need, and increasingly, technical people don’t want to talk to salespeople.
They need to discover the information themselves. I think what you’re doing is great because you’re helping people create the story library. This is something we could display not just through a single document but through a library that looks alive, where you self-direct yourself like you would in a conversation: “I want to hear about this.” Then, you’re interacting even when you’re not in the room. Tell us about this notion of a story library. Why do you think it’s critical, and what are some of the best examples where it’s been a game-changer for your clients?
0:26:10 - Melissa Reaves
Oh yes, thank you. Well, having been in enterprise sales forever, I know I would. Being in ad tech, you’d sometimes be at a company for three years, five years, or two years; it just depends.
The shiny penny was always flirting with us, and you’d get to a company and just think, "Does anyone have any stories to tell me? Show me that this stuff works, okay?"
So, my team and I go into organizations, and every company has stories. They have vision stories, customer success stories, failure stories, acquisition stories, all these stories. What happens is that most people in the organization, especially new people, don’t know the stories.
The story library program is where we go in and first teach their teams personal storytelling. How do you even tell a story in a mind movie so that it’s interesting, and the audience is sucked in, seeing it like the meet-Susan woman?
Let me fly with you. How do you do that? We teach that, and I teach my whole method, the mind movie method, in my book. The second part is that we also teach data storytelling: How do you find the stories? And then, how do you control the slides, all of those stories that we? We go into masterminds, and what we do is we work with their people to find stories they haven’t even realized they should be telling, as well as stories that they are telling but they’re kind of flat. They’re all over the place. They’re not clear; they meander; they’re sloppy.
0:27:42 - Alex Shevelenko
They’re not tight; it takes you 10 minutes to get to some boring place, when you could get to one minute to some visceral place that unlocks, yeah?
0:28:01 - Melissa Reaves
Yeah, because when you’re telling the story in my method, I call it CROW. So, it's an acronym that stands for Characters, Relationships, Objective, and Where. And what that means is that in the story, you have to introduce your characters so we can see them, okay? And you have a relationship with that character, and we need to know that. Because you’re telling it, you can show us with your voice and the way you tell it. I’ll give an example in a second. The objective is the stakes—it’s like, what’s going on? Why are we telling this story?
The story is important, and then the “where” is as the storyteller: you’re painting the room. You’re letting us see the scene you’re in because we want to be like a fly on the wall.
Instead of this, let’s just use this one as a case story, and I want you to pay attention to how I’m using CROW. Most people would say this: "When we were working with Microsoft, they were very upset with us at first, but we turned it around and got them a 200 percent ROI."
0:29:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Neocortex, every case study ever.
0:29:06 - Melissa Reaves
Yeah, Microsoft. Okay, when I say we were working with Microsoft, what do you see?
0:29:13 - Alex Shevelenko
I’ve worked at Microsoft, so to me, it’s different, but I see some buildings, some teams. You see some buildings because you’ve been here, yeah? Maybe the logo—you might see the logo, right? But that’s all we’re seeing.
0:29:29 - Melissa Reaves Okay, um, and it's, oh yeah, and we gave them 200% ROI because we turned it around. There’s a story in there. What happened? How did you turn it around? That’s what I want to do — dig into the story. Let me rephrase that now, and I’ll do it in a mind movie way. I’m making all these characters up just for the sake of entertainment.
0:29:53 - Alex Shevelenko
I have a request. Before we run out of time, I want to do it for us, because this is perfect. I have a Microsoft story for you. Okay, good, alright, this is good.
0:30:03 - Melissa Reaves
I’m going to give a sample. So when we first met Susan Johnson, the Senior Vice President of Azure, we walked into her office and it was pristine. There was nothing on her desk. All you saw behind her were all her awards — no pictures of her family, just her awards. We walked in, and we said, "Hi, Susan, nice to meet you." She said, "Sit down." Oh, we’re in trouble. Yeah, we are not happy at all. You told us that you would be tying all the disparate information together, and we’re not seeing that. I want to know why. Okay, so we had to get to work. We had to come back to Susan and show her that maybe we had dropped the ball during the onboarding process. And when we told her that and figured it out, she said, "Well, I appreciate that. Okay, alright, now we’ve got everything in line." Great.
Two months later, our team was heavily involved to ensure that we turned things around for Susan. And sure enough, we did. I remember walking back into her office, and she said, "Hi, sit down." That’s when we knew that the relationship between our company, Azure, and Microsoft was absolutely back on track. In fact, we got them a 200% ROI. That’s because our team cares. Our team knows what we’re doing. We just had a rocky start, and sometimes that happens. But if you address it head-on, that’s when you turn it around. And that’s when you build a long-term relationship with a client.
0:31:41 - Alex Shevelenko
This is great, but, Melissa, honestly, I expected that you were going to name the baby that Susan just had after your company. It’s not quite there, right?
I wanted to keep it all this, but I couldn’t make her hurry up because I need to pick up my kids, and they need a Happy Meal.
Okay, yeah, well, let’s not jump ahead. But maybe you could help us. I actually put together a story because of our backstory in Bellevue, and kind of you’re there, you know. I spent a lot of time there, and I wrote something up. Maybe I could read it to you. It lacks that emotional touch, but I’ll try to tweak it a little bit on the way. Maybe we can work it out, and this is going to help — kind of a founder story. So this is maybe not like our customer story, but this is mine. You could tell me if it works or if it’s too lame. You know, just tell me if I should focus more on the customers.
0:32:47 - Melissa Reaves
I don’t say it like that, Alex.
0:32:49 - Alex Shevelenko
But yeah, you know, you’ll be nicer because you’re from Melbourne.
0:32:52 - Melissa Reaves
So we’re going to do a little live coaching. That’s what we’re going to do.
0:32:54 - Alex Shevelenko
Okay, but I think just like — alright, let me get a drink of water. I know you’re into improv. I have this written up, but generally, I tend to keep it a little shorter because it takes me a long time to tell the story.
0:33:07 - Melissa Reaves
By the way, I love that we’re doing this because this is what happens in a session.
0:33:13 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I want people to see how awesome you are.
0:33:16 - Melissa Reaves
It’s called story mining and crafting.
0:33:18 - Alex Shevelenko
Let’s go, yeah. So imagine my first job as a fresh undergrad intern on the Microsoft office team. I was supposed to bring PowerPoint and Word into the last mile to help people.
0:33:23 - Melissa Reaves
What does "last mile" mean?
0:33:25 - Alex Shevelenko
It means helping Word and PowerPoint actually be used in these shared communications. You’re supposed to deliver ideas clearly and confidently when you’re not in the room.
And then I saw that this "last mile," so to speak, got hijacked by PDFs. They took over. PDFs made it easier to send and download content because they would print well without issues. But it was impossible to feel the animation, the liveness of it — like what you were talking about with the movement of bullets. The great ideas started to land flat, or not land at all.
Later, in consulting at Salesforce and SuccessFactors, as well as running my own B2B agency for marketers, I saw the same failure. Especially in more regulated or complex industries, the "last mile" of the idea failed to engage the audience. And the more important the idea, the worse it got. Now, with Gen AI, there’s even more noise. The market is flooding the world with more content, more documents, more blah, blah.
At RELAYTO, we’re zagging away from the noise. We take these boring files, folders, and links and turn them into dynamic, intelligent experiences. We call it generative UX. It doesn’t just create more touch points; it actually learns what resonates so we can continue to improve how these ideas get delivered and get results.
This is something we call regenerative AI. We’re regenerating the ideas. This feels like my life’s work right now because, you know, I started at that internship, kind of failed dealing with PDFs. Now, all the words in PowerPoint are PDFs. But I think we can fix it. We can help humans rise with their important ideas above the AI noise, get the important stuff, act on it, and make it happen.
So, roughly, that’s my backstory. It’s a work in progress, and what’s in my head. Frankly, I find it motivating because of what it represents. But I would love to get it just right so it doesn’t take 20 minutes. I want it to entertain, and maybe bring Susan into it, you know, instead of just me.
0:36:32 - Melissa Reaves
I'm not really the hero. This is all you. All right, it's funny. So when I'm hearing a story and when I'm working on any deck, I kind of allow the images to start to come up. I think that might be my improv training, and you kept using the word "mile." You kept using the "mile" word, which would imply roads, speed, curves, bumps in the road, that kind of thing. So, I'm sort of picking up on that, but I kind of felt like I also got some cowboy imagery going on. So I'm going to try to play it back, but I want to ask you a couple of questions. I love that you said I was an undergrad intern.
So how old were you? 20? Okay, yeah, the reason that's important and the reason why it’s important to state your age is that your audience starts to remember being 20 as well. And what's going on when you're 20? You're kind of like faking it till you make it. You know you don't really know what you're doing, and some of your friends act like they know what they're doing, but they don't know what they're doing. Everyone’s only 20. You’re trying to figure out, wait, we have to pay rent every month? There’s a lot going on in a young adult’s life, but clearly, you were very talented because you've already landed an internship at one of the largest companies in the world, and you're working on something that is going to change the world. That is PowerPoint and Word. Okay? That was like the new sheriff in town, and PowerPoint was hot because you could do animations. You could bring things in, right? You could slide stuff in.
0:38:09 - Alex Shevelenko
There was motion, right? Yeah, yeah, I actually thought PowerPoint was cool back then. This was right, and it's... yeah.
0:38:17 - Melissa Reaves
So it was like the dream job, screwing everybody up, because Canva is amazing—it’s like the next level. But back then, PowerPoint was the sheriff. Okay? It was hot. It was a little intimidating, but if you concentrated, you could learn how to do those animations. You could put in graphics. It was a little limited, but it was better than just what we were using before, whiteboards. So now we have some imagery going, okay? And then the new sheriff comes into town, and it’s called the PDF. And the PDF... so you're riding in on your horse. Everyone’s like, “That’s a beautiful stallion.” But this new sheriff comes in, and it’s driving a car. It’s moving faster, not getting stuck in the mail. Okay, because PowerPoint did that. You’d be like, “I sent it six times.” And it’s like, "Did you get it?" “Nope.” “What do you mean? I sent it six times.” “Nope, didn’t get it.” “Did you check your spam?” “Nope, it’s not there.” Oh no, and it's stuck somewhere because the file is too big.
And then, the new sheriff, the PDF, comes in. It’s like, “Oh, I sent it to you.” “Did you get it?” “Yeah, I got it. Thank you so much. It’s really good.”
0:39:48 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. I can even print it without worrying.
0:39:56 - Melissa Reaves
You're creating a comical way, and people are seeing it, and we all remember it. So now we have the PDF guy. He's like the new sheriff, and he’s not riding a horse. He’s got a car, and now everyone’s panicking. And like I mentioned, Canva is coming in and bringing it to the next level. And now RELAYTO is coming in and bringing it to the next level. So does that help? Because that can help you be more playful. I could even see animations backing it up, you know, to make it silly and fun instead of... you know, but you had that road thing. So I was kind of playing off the road, but somehow I had a sheriff in there. So, take it or leave it. But what I’m doing is, did you see the sheriff?
0:40:47 - Alex Shevelenko
Did you see the salesperson? "I sent it to you six times." “Nope, I didn’t see it.” And then I think back to then, and then you have to say, okay, so you’re visualizing this. But then, how sizable is the problem? Right? Because the irony is that even in Canva, nine times out of ten, if you create something in Canva, you still save it as a PDF, and then you kind of have to put it into a branded portal or whatnot. Right? Much less PowerPoint or Adobe and design, which are destined for PDFs from the get-go.
So I like, I’m trying to paint this new tragedy that the ideas are dying at the moment of the highest interaction. So, one is deliverability, but the other is this flatness. The moment of the highest interaction, so you kind of... one is deliverability, but the other is this flatness. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re overloaded. Was it easier to create stuff with Canva? Right, but it's like the consumer journey hasn’t improved. You’re just asking them, like you were saying earlier, to consume more pages of stuff—not find the relevant materials. How would you bring that to life in a story way? Right, like, do you need to paint this new consumer? Right? Like, 20 years later, there’s a new consumer.
0:42:19 - Melissa Reaves
The same thing, the same problem, but a different type of thing. Well, technology is always evolving, right? But the bottom line is that we're always going to be communicating. The beauty is that our technologists are helping us communicate in so many ways. Right? And sometimes we just need a flat PDF. You know, we don't have to wrestle with every single situation, right?
0:42:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah.
0:42:43 - Melissa Reaves
Like, a lawyer's document might be happily living, happily ever after, in the PDF world, right? Yeah. But the salespeople, the founders, the ones who really want to make a new impact, they're pitching new ideas.
0:42:57 - Alex Shevelenko
This is where the new technology... this is where the new technology...
0:43:06 - Melissa Reaves
I actually was meeting with a company because I'm an author, and they are going to use AI so that someone could use my book and say, "Hey, Melissa, I want to talk a little bit more about the 'advance' and 'expand' part of your book." Okay, and it will be my voice. "What can I ask? What do you want to talk about?" "Well, let me run this story past you. Can you please let me know when I need to expand and when I need to advance?" "Sure, let me hear it." And then it's going to apply my movie method that's in my book.
0:43:33 - Alex Shevelenko
Here's my book. Yeah, by the way, everybody, everybody, I bought the audiobook. I'm loving it. Please pay attention. We've got it. Okay, it's going to be in the notes if you didn't catch it.
0:43:44 - Melissa Reaves
Thank you! All right, yes, shameless plug. But I mean, it makes sense to show the book, right? So, someone's in, because I want people to be engaged, right? So, this, to me, is the next level of what a book could be—a teaching book. This is a teaching book. This is great. Now, how does it get to people? I don't know technically yet. You know, I'm just in the early stages.
0:44:10 - Alex Shevelenko
But what if you applied that to your... we have elements of this already, right? Maybe we could be the delivery of that AI chat you just described, right? Like, so oftentimes, we are kind of one of the... and this is kind of fun to hear you describe this, right? Because you could be a customer. Right, this is your thought leadership platform, right? You want to basically clone yourself because you're popular.
I know it's hard to get a new schedule, and so if you could clone yourself through this book, then that kind of amplifies your impact. Right? You could be talking to people who could not afford your services but could afford this book. So, you're effectively reinventing the book to spread your great ideas on how other people could spread their ideas, which is a little meta, but a lot of fun, right? And that's magical.
0:45:01 - Melissa Reaves
Well, my goal is to create millions of better business storytellers. That's my goal. And how am I going to do that? I can't talk to a million people myself, right? So, I've created downloadable teaching decks that people can buy. I have the book, I have the companion journal, I have the audiobook, I have a course, I have video courses that you can do because everyone learns in a different way.
0:45:25 - Alex Shevelenko
But to have a talking book... well, this is one thing I want to build on. What I love is you're a great storyteller. You've got this! You got it. Like, everybody learns in a different way, and it's such a simple concept. Everyone who's taken any e-learning training, certification, knows this. It's well known. It's been there. There's no debate that we all have different learning styles. And for some reason, for some reason, this is the sort of tragedy we've been talking about. For some reason, this is the sort of tragedy we've been talking about. Like, when it comes to how we make knowledge accessible, we just assume we show up and throw up with a one-size-fits-all, you know, PDF, PowerPoint, whatever you name it. Right? Like, they're still typically one-size-fits-all. And you know, typically, I am typically textual at the end. And so, yeah. Like, what?
If I'm the type of learner that likes a little... I like text, I could read a few. It could help me remember, digest. But then I'd love to have a customer story that's like a human being talking in a talky way for five seconds, and I drill into that in the area that I'm interested in, not in the area where I have to watch a two-hour video to find the one snippet that matters to me. But I find the area that I'm interested in, and then I have a choice of learning styles. And I'm hoping for the world where we start doing this, not just for fluffy stuff, but important ideas, like what you're doing with your book, which is really like a lever that changes the world. I'm curious why people aren't doing it. Why aren't people doing it? Like, tell us what's blocking us because we've been taught not to.
0:47:19 - Melissa Reaves
We've been taught to data dump and show up and throw up. Analysis paralysis, whatever you want to say. But again, I'm going to come back to an actor only cares about the audience. So, it's always about the audience. How does that audience—who is in the audience, and how are you going to talk to them so that your ideas resonate? Is data dumping really the way to do it? And then you're sitting in college, and you're sitting in an MBA class, and your professor is data dumping on you. They're doing everything, and so we're trained to think this is how we do it, and I am rising up and saying, "No, it's not. No, it's not." We can be better. We can be conscientious to our audience in a multitude of ways.
So, even with my audiobook, it's not just me reading. There are 16 executives sharing stories in every sample that I have. Why? Because I wanted it to be edutaining. Okay? I mean, the very first story is the guy that this book is about—that's Caleb Carr's story. Caleb is the guy this book is about.
Because I've been raised as an actor, I've tried to do that, and that's why I think it's just important that we need to say, "I can be better." How can I leave every meeting or teach whatever I need to, whatever my message is? How can I do it so that I'm standing out, so that my audience feels like, "You saw me, thank you, I appreciate that." How can I be of service to you? Right? Not just, "Here comes another one, oh God, he's going to start," and they just start scrolling. Yeah, they start scrolling because they are destroyed.
0:48:56 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, Melissa, I hope. I hope everybody reaches out. Where can people find you so that they could enjoy your work and really grow from it?
0:49:09 - Melissa Reaves
I appreciate it. Well, the book is available. You can always go to Amazon and look up The Storyteller's Mind Movie. I'm on LinkedIn, and it's Melissa Reaves (R-E-A-V-E-S) with Story Fruition, and obviously my website, storyfruition.com. I also will have, very soon, melissareavesstoryteller.com because I actually walk my talk.
I go out on stages and, you know, I'm on NPR and PBS and all that stuff. So, I do this stuff, and then also the Audible. You can get it anywhere that they reach, Audible. So if you go to my website, you can even buy quite a few pieces of material that can teach you on your own. If you're a do-it-yourself learner, I'm there for you. I've got it. But if you are someone who's like, "Nope, I need someone to hold my hand," then reach out to me at storyfruition.com, and we can have a meeting and figure out what you're doing. So, you know, if you're like, "I want us to have a story library program," let's talk. You know, if you're a decision-maker, like the chief HR director, CEO, or CMO, let's talk. But if you're like, "You know what? I have a great message, and I want to stand on a red dot with a microphone and do a TED Talk," we can help you with that.
If someone says, "I want to create a webinar that I can use as a lead magnet, and I want it to be rich in storytelling. I want to find my founder's story so that I can tell it in a great way," call us. We will help you. It just depends on what you need. But we really are covering a lot of territory for people who are in public speaking. And if you're a public speaker and you hate it, storytelling can quell those nerves, so we work with that too.
It's like so many people hate public speaking, but they have to. That's why storytelling is fun. And then we focus in on you so much that you start to realize you're a walking storybook. You're a wisdom walker. You have so much to share, but you didn't know how to tell it, and so we help you find your stories—your stories of fortitude, resilience, failure that you rose up from the ashes. All of those gorgeous stories that are inside you. They need to come out. They need to come out. You're a leader now, and that's the private coaching that we can do for you.
0:51:27 - Alex Shevelenko
So, every person, that business person, is a storyteller. Brilliant, Melissa. Thank you so much for joining us.
0:51:34 - Melissa Reaves
Thank you, this was really fun.