Finding your Why Archives

Six Reasons Why Your Core Story is How We See and Hear you From Space – BLOG

March 22, 2017

Your Book and Message Will be Different.

Because Your Book will Make you Money and not just Cost Buckets of it.

You are smart. You are committed. You’ve done everything you’ve been told to do to ”level up” as they say. You have followed the lead generating system that everyone knows works and looks something like:

Build your network – Grow your audience
Offer a valuable optin – Grow your list
Have an irresistible offer – Convert your leads
Post two blogs per week – Drive traffic to your site
Write your book – Cultivate credibility

Am I right?

You’re doing it all.

You’re ticking off every box.

You’re a freakin’ rock star… but… nothing is happening right?

Or something is happening but it’s not enough and it’s certainly not what you thought.

Here’s why:

STORY.

Your CORE STORY.

and YOU.

When you paid big money for that marketing course, or the program with that proven formula to ‘write your book and be seen as an expert’, no one told you that the single most important ingredient in the whole darn this is your story, specifically your core story.

It’s not about:

a word count or reaching 90,000 words.
a compelling title.
ten key steps or five key steps to a great book (for those who like less as more).

It’s not the steps, it’s the story that lives within them.

It’s not writing your book, it’s telling the story.

Your client and audience only have three resources: time, money and energy. Whether you are a consultant, a coach, a thought leader or a CEO, when you put your book out into the market, you are asking your reader to spend all three of their precious resources with you. Write your book by a formula and I promise you you’ll get your book, but you’ll also lose your credibility and audience unless you write from your core.

Your core story is what connects you to your people. It’s what shakes you into their memory. It creates an imprint that they’re compelled to talk about. It’s what builds your ”tribe” as Seth and Simon say. Your story is the greatest vehicle of trust building that you have. Don’t waste it.

Here are the six parts to creating a Core Story of trust and impact. I’m going to help you because as the story teller you have a blindspot, and that is you. Your story is riddled with them and that’s why you need me and when I write, I need someone else. Our story deserves that level of love and respect.

Here are six ingredients to catapult your message and brand promise into the stratosphere. That’s my benchmark btw. I know we’ve hit gold when I can see and hear you from space. Until we get there, we’re not done.

Six Core Story Ingredients that will Catapult your Message and Promise into the Stratosphere

Your Innate Who
Your Urgent Why
Your Compelling How
Your Impactful Where
Your Profound What
Your Life Changing When

Pretty logical right? Sure, but I promise you, if you attack this list on your own, you’re going to get all clever about it and it will never work. Story is personal even if the details are not, the process always is.

I want your book, your message, your brand’s foundation to rest on these six solid pillars of a Core Story because:

I don’t want your book to collect dust in the closet, sitting in a box of hope.
I don’t want your marketing message to be thought of as shlock.
I don’t want your keynote to be forgotten and considered just one of one hundred other possibilities.
Most importantly, because this one really gets under my skin, I don’t want your book to cost you more money, than you’ll make from it.
I want your story to matter to the world in the same way it matters to you.

Here’s how I’m going to make sure this happens:

Here are TinaO’s Top Ten Core Story Principles to Being Seen and Heard from Space. Sounds silly right? But it’s not. Think local and act global right? It’s time to speak, write, work and share from the core of your story to create a lasting impression that people are willing to invest in. Enough already about making a difference… be the difference with your story.

Click here to receive TinaO’s Top Ten Core Story Principles.

It’s a PLAYBOOK.

I speak directly to you.

There is a workbook too.

I’m silly.

It’s direct.

It’s more than just a read, it’s an experience.

Let’s do this together.

You Matter, and so does your Story.

xxT

TinaO is a Core Story Specialist, a Program Director of PUBLISH with Meribeth Deen for The Leap Learning Lab, she’s a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub to Live, Give and Be Your Story, plus the deep listening weekend retreat Live Your Best Story. She’s been in the PR and Marketing world since she could put words together and has been a professional network marketer for over twelve years. She teaches: selling isn’t slimey, marketing isn’t make-believe and writing won’t give you an aneurysm (it’s not hard). You can be yourself in all that you do. In fact, that’s the world is waiting for.

Want my book? Get it here.

Identifying Your Core Story – an Excerpt – BLOG

December 29, 2016

Here’s an excerpt from the first draft of Chapter One of You Matter – Identifying your Core Story that will be complete by December 31st. Follow along if it speaks to you. Big love to Meribeth Deen for being my Story Doula through this process. She said to me once a few months ago: ‘I can see that my challenge with you is going to be when and how to reign you in to a specific focus.’ She was right. But as is true with all my core story work, the focus found me and all I had to do was follow the thread.

Here is an excerpt for you:

I begin every Core Story client with a complimentary inquiry call and while this may shift as my work carries on, here’s why I do it this way: I am creating the best place I know how to let the story tell us and not the other way around. It follows the same belief that we can never run faster than our story and by making the call free, both you and I can step into the ring of ‘what have I got to lose?’ and that’s where permission begins. It’s not a flippant, what have I got to lose? although it can start out that way, usually and very quickly with that kind of freedom between us, I can establish a sense of ‘it’s just you and me here’ so that the story that wants to be known by you can feel safe enough to emerge.

Is my time valuable? Yes, no more than yours. Is my experience worthy of payment, yes, no more than yours. Do I deserve to be paid for my work? Yes, and at this stage of our relationship, only if it’s of value to you. If we decide to move forward together we’re going to be doing some intimate work so we need to choose each other. I like to think of it like dating. Imagine if we charged for that. What would that do to our connectivity? What I’m saying is, we have to authentically decide for it to be real. We don’t kiss the guy or girl at the end of the first date simply because we’re supposed to, or because it’s deserved, we kiss them because we want to, because the desire to be together emerges out of us.

One of my favourite moments with my now husband happened at the end of our second date. We had gone to the movies or something (I totally don’t remember the details), and we both knew that the next day he was going on tour and wouldn’t be back for a week. He walked me up to my door and I let him inside. We had an awkward hug and a peck on the cheek followed by stilted small talk about when he’d be back and how he’d call me when he returned and then I let him out and closed the door. I took a few confused steps down my hallway towards the living room when I heard a gentle knock, and I smiled. I didn’t even have a thought yet, but I somehow knew this was honest. This felt true. I curiously walked back, turned the deadbolt and opened the door. He looked at me, hesitating briefly and trembling just a little and said “If I went on tour without kissing you, and I mean really kissing you I’d have to kick my own ass.” With that he planted one on me and left. His desire to kiss me emerged out of him. It behooved him not to leave without a real, risky, whole-hearted kiss. He could not run faster than the story of that kiss. As for me, I felt confused when he left the first time because I didn’t get it, but I didn’t know what the it was that I didn’t get yet. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t formulaic. It just didn’t feel right, him leaving like that. It wasn’t until he knocked the second time that I kind of understood, and then when he kissed me, I fell, and hard. That was the moment of our connection. Neither one of us needed to take charge of the end of the date, we simply had to follow the thread of the story and then show up and live it out fully.

And that’s why I don’t charge for my inquiry call, I am creating space for what is real to emerge so that the truth can happen without our own alpha-agendas of how things should be or my own story of self-worth getting in the way.

Don’t worry, I won’t be kissing you, but I may knock twice.

By December 31st 2016 the first draft of this book will be done. If you’d like a complimentary digital copy of TinaO’s Identifying your Core Story, pop your name in here and we’ll be sure to send it to you once it’s complete early 2017.

As well, if you are a Canadian woman with a story to tell and would like to be considered for PUBLISH, a book writing program launching in mid January 2017 through powHERhouse Media Group, you may want to consider becoming a Woman we Celebrate so TinaO and Meribeth Deen can support you to get your book written this year.

________________________________________________________

TinaO is a Core Story Specialist, a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub for all things worth living for, and the workshop Live Your Best Story. She’s also a professional network marketer with a decade in the industry and she teaches: selling isn’t slimey and marketing isn’t make-believe. You can be yourself and be successful in Direct Sales.

Identifying Your Core Story – BLOG

October 4, 2016

Yesterday I started writing my book and if you’ve heard that before from me it’s because I have a few books going – it has been equally as frustrating for me, but you know how I say, “Sometimes the story tells you, and sometimes you tell the story“? – well, this is one of those times. I’ve been looking for the legs to the title of this book for a year or so and every time I thought I found it, it would sink weeks later into the sand and vanish, that is until I stumbled on to this.

My Core Story.

I won’t go into it much because it’s something you kinda just gotta surrender to. To be brief it looks like this. You have two questions to answer, and as much as possible, you have to let yourself answer them as plainly, honestly, and without decoration as possible (which is hard for us mind-centered, or feeling based people because we think we’re so beyond that, ahem… as if we could be). The one thing we all have in common is a primal need to be seen, heard and most importantly known – or as some self-helpers call it: to belong, and we’ll do anything and everything in our power to protect that possibility, including lie to ourselves, or worse, sugar coat it all so that we bare absolutely no responsibility for the possibility that someone in our 360 degree global peripherie ever feels like they might…not…belong.

From my perspective, none of us ever truly belongs and only in allowing the incredibly daunting human truth of that to be so will we ever tumble into the sense of belonging that we’re all scrambling to find. We gotta let it go because there is no proof. We can make some up, throw some names around, some labels, some arrows, some bullet points, share some aha moments and more… but the reality is, the only belonging we can every truly ‘prove’ is our very own personal sense of it, and even then only we, individually, can ever really believe it to the level that it seems real….

How bleak right? Oh gawwwwwd we’re all alone….?

Yep and in that, it’s how we’re totally not. That’s humanity. That’s where our connectedness is. That’s how our sameness shows up. It’s in our fragility matched only by our magnitude that our beauty is realized. How frickin’ gorgeous is that? And damn confusing I might add.

So I have two questions to help us identify how we don’t belong so that we can belong. At this point I’m either making you nuts or you dig my message. Wanna stay for more?

Two questions – that’s it and trust me when I say, they’re ridiculously simple to answer and insanely challenging to be known. I’ve been offering inquiry sessions with people as I develop this work and I can tell you, out of the countless people that I’ve chatted with, only three have been truly willing to answer the questions with all masks down right away and those that did let their core story tell me before their mind could (an example of ‘when the story tells you’). For the rest of us, most of the time we can tickle out some clues over the hour, like breadcrumb words we’re following to get there. Sometimes our core story shows up as expressions first before we can nail the one phrase that gives us goosebumps, or knocks the wind out of us.

It’s truly amazing when it happens. It’s beautiful to witness for sure.

So… now I’m writing a book. Forty five years of this story chasing me and now it’s ready to be given to the world. It’s not an autobiography, though it will be peppered with personal stories.

Okay, but before I do that, you’re thinking: What are the dang questions???? Well here they are, and if you struggle to find an answer, drop me a message below and we can book a complimentary inquiry session okay? I just may be able to help you out with that. Anything you post in the comments below go directly to my email – I don’t publish them. Now, if your core story does reveal itself to you and you don’t know what to do with it, also let me know and we can book a call to follow the thread together.

Here are the questions:

Question #1: What is the one thing you always give people (and the world) no matter what?

Question #2: In your deepest, darkest moments, what is the sentence you have always said to yourself ?

Here’s a clue: They are usually the opposite of each other, but not always. For example, my answers are:

Tina’s Core Story:

Core Love: You matter

Core Pain: I don’t matter, nothing matters, this is stupid, why bother.

I’ll explain more later… but for today, here’s an excerpt from the opening of my book that is all about this work and how it arrived for me:

an excerpt from You Matter – Identifying your Core Story

…So there’s this thing that you run from right? I do. I have most of my life. Even in my forties when I think I’ve stopped running, I forget, Oh yeah, I’m human, I run from everything. I think we’re master escape artists which seems kinda strange doesn’t it? Why would we want to escape the very thing we’re here to live. I suppose none of us had a choice in the matter and somewhere deep down that bugs us. Because we showed up here kicking and screaming, well some of us did, others came into the world all wide eyed and peaceful – I’m sure that I wasn’t one of them. I bet I came into the world fast – like a blow torch afraid I’d lose my flame if someone wasn’t holding me. Foooooosh, scorching the doctor as I came out.

I was premature. My mom was only sixteen when I was born. I joke about it now, well, not really. I joked about it when I was a kid. Adoption is one of those things that isn’t weird or hard, or difficult, it just is. When you’re a kid, it’s just part of the clothing you forget on the bus because it’s truly so irrelevant. When you’re a kid you don’t care how you came into the world, you’re just so damn glad to be here. Wow, look at that tree! It’s HUGE! Holy smokes I think I could climb that! Hey! I got a lemon twist for Easter! Watch me! Wait a minute how come my hair is so twisty and tangled and hers so straight? I like music. I sing all the time. Like all the time. I’m still singing la la la la la… I live between three churches and nobody in my house prays. How come? My dad is French Canadian and he likes to make home-made wine underneath the stairs. Sometimes we have fruit flies… See? Who cares if you’re adopted, you have lots of other things on your mind, at least I did. I used to tell my friends in highschool that I was a ‘back seat baby’ – I mean, where else do you have sex when you’re 15 years old right? I thought nothing of it. Of course, now I’m a mom to three of my own children, and I’m really close to my mom (biological), we’re kinda like sisters and I never, ever, ever blamed, judged or was angry with her about giving me away even when my mom (adopted) died when I was eight… Truly. I actually always knew that I was chosen some how – but still… that’s the mind, not the body. And you know, I still don’t care if I was conceived in the back seat of a car, but I do care about the rest of stuff.

The adoption thing became a traceable pattern. It was the first mirror of how this human experience was giving me exactly what I needed for who I am to expand (but that’s a whole other conversation, we’ll get there later). It was the first time I was experiencing my core story that I don’t really matter. It was the very first time, on a cellular level, that my body wasn’t sure if this place was where I was supposed to be. It was the first time my eyes couldn’t make sense of a moment, of a missing hand, of a warm chest, as I searched for the eyes of my mom, and the scent of her body. Yes I was only six months old and I could totally be making this up, but I’m not. Because we know stuff we don’t want to know. On some level, that’s what was going on for me, I just didn’t have words yet, but I understood that I didn’t matter.

More to come…

xxT