Once upon a time there was this family, they were all healthy. They were all good looking and they all got along really well. And they live happily ever after. Kind of a story is that I'll tell you what kind it's the worst story ever. You'll never see a book about that subject. You'll never see a movie with that plotline.

Why? Because there's no conflict. There's no problem. When you're telling a story, you have to talk about some conflict, some problem that was overcome all of you face problems from day to day. How often do you just go to your office or go to your desk in your home office? And you don't get a single email, phone call or text all day long about any problems and just the end of the day?

Your boss or your biggest client just send you an email saying hope everything was great today. Why don't you go home early how How often does that happen? And pretty confident in thinking that never happens. All of us deal with problems sometimes not earth shattering but problems, conflicts, challenges every single day in our lives. So what stories do is they let us talk about those problems in interesting, compelling way. So if you're going to tell a story, you need to have some problem for the characters.

Ideally, again, most of the time, it's a problem you had or one of your clients or customers or a constituent had and how together you face those challenges how you face that problem, how you solved it and how it was resolved.