Finding stories is hard, which doesn't make any sense at all because we are all having experiences all the time that could be story material.

When people tell me they aren't sure what their story is or they don't have a story to tell - it's because they don't know yet that everything is story material.

So, in preparation for crafting and telling your story, you record your story. You find the story in your every day life by journaling about it. Writing it down, making notes, taking pictures, all the little practices that create a record of your life. And those practices have a double benefit - because they will also be a record of your heroic transformation.

Crafting stories is not a game of hit and miss.

Story crafting starts with an easy to use, effective story structure. We can't even build IKEA chairs without seven pages of clear diagrams, what are we doing trying to build stories based on a feeling of what will work?

There is an art and a bit of science to story crafting. When you learn to work with story structure, creating stories that work becomes a pleasure, not a chore.

The world wants your stories.

They want your professional profiles and your presentations and your fiction and your nonfiction and that really interesting insight that woke you up at 7:30 on a weekend morning.

Telling your story is about mastering communication skills, whether that's picking the right words for an article or figuring out what to do with your hands during a presentation or learning how you can be more interesting than your presentation slides (um, you already are, so really this is a mindset shift).