Three years ago, I had the biggest meeting of my life. I was meeting with a man who had been an advisor to the United Nations and advisor to the Gandhi family, adjunct faculty at Harvard and mentored by a Nobel laureates. And my mission was to convince him to hire me to design ethical leadership training for all the state government training institutes in the country. Just a small ask, and I had 45 minutes to do it. So what would you do? I got nervous.

I took the week off. I spent 40 hours watching every single video, every single article this person had ever written or put on YouTube, took notes. I was still nervous. But the day before the meeting, something in my spirit broke, and I told my wife, you know what, I'm just gonna be me. The way I talk to you at the dinner table every night and share my crazy ideas about democratizing world class leadership training. I'm going to share that with them.

So they're going to love me or they're going to hate me, but at least they're going to get me. In 45 minutes, I went there, I shared four stories, and I left. Four hours later, I got a call from this man. He said, Kevin, that was absolutely fantastic. We want to systemically involve you, in our operations. Can you start next month?

That day, I learned the power of storytelling again. I went from an unknown nobody to a trusted advisor with the most influential person I'd ever met. So let's say alternatively, I went and I worked on my PowerPoint all week prepared it then I get to the meeting, I whip out my PowerPoint, I say, Hey, here's my solution. I don't think it would have worked because the bill People don't need more information about you. They need emotions about you. They need to know why you're doing what you're doing, not what you're doing.

And the only way to do that is through a story. So storytelling is a hack, to building trust to teaching truth and to growing your brand. My guess is that it's the most powerful communication tool that you almost never use. We feel safe with PowerPoint with bullet points. We've been taught, you know, by our professors, by our peers, to persuade with reason, and grammatically perfect paragraphs. I mean, besides who's going to criticize you, if your website is logically perfect, but stories are risky, they're vulnerable.

They're subjective, they're emotional. They're their arch. Therefore, they're criticized. But they're also the most powerful communication tool. But you're not using and you're losing connection and credibility with people as a result. So today we're going to cover three uses of storytelling, building trust, teaching truth, and making profit.

And we'll finish with the simplest storytelling formula I've ever seen. It's called the one to one story formula.