Mike's Story

For the last 15 years of my professional life, I’ve been working with people trying to tell their stories better.

Whether that was an employee trying to get her manager to understand all she did, or an engineer trying to cut through all the technical detail to get to the root of the problem, or a salesperson getting a customer to not hear bullshit but to actually listen for value, the approach is very often the same.

Tell your story. People listen when you tell your story.

So here’s a little bit of mine.

This time last year, I was in a dark place.

On the surface, everything was as it should have been. My wife Shannon and I have three beautiful, healthy children; we live in a wonderful neighborhood, we have incredible friends and family support. I had just finally realized my dream of becoming owner of a company I had long worked for and mostly loved. Shannon’s work in the non-profit sector was the realization of her dream of true community building.

And in spite of it all, I was struggling mightily to hold at bay a depression and a feeling of emptiness that had been periodically rearing up since my early teen years.

As a child, I always imagined I’d be famous when I grew up. As an unhappy adolescent, I scaled my expectations to just imagine myself happy. As a frequently heartbroken twenty-something, I just wanted comfort. And somehow, as things got better and better externally, somehow approaching middle-age, I was still fanaticizing myself being not miserable.

What was eating at me most was a series of questions: “Is this who I am?” “What am I giving; what am adding to the world?” “Why have I been hiding from the creativity that so clearly drives my joy?” And the one that really kept poking me: “Is this life?” Is this my life?

When you ask yourself who you really are, don’t expect a short or easy answer.

At 42, I had very clearly found myself as a “businessman.” Which, considering my talents—and lack thereof—was fairly remarkable. All my training and interest had been in the arts and writing, but somehow I had carved out a consulting life for myself with Fortune 500 clients. This wasn’t new. It was, in short, my life. And it was a good life, a noble profession. All along though, there was something unsettling about it. Something not entirely me.

When my daughter was given the assignment at school to draw what her mom and dad did, and she drew a picture of me holding a briefcase in a suit—which was entirely accurate—it rocked me to my core.

I always told her I was a “teacher,” but she saw right through me.

Last February, I was working with a small group at a healthcare client on conference-speaking preparation. It was a great session, amazing really in the growth that the participants showed. But to be honest, we see that growth almost every session we do. We typically get people coming up to us and telling us how the session had changed them, will change them for the better. In fact, as bad as it sounds, that kind of response had actually become somewhat mundane—wrapped up, as it were, in my malaise.

But this day, a woman approached me at the end of the session in tears with how the crowd had so positively responded to her new set of skills.

She talked with a lump in her throat: “I can’t believe that after all this time, in my native country [China] and here, in two languages, I’ve been struggling to get people to pay attention to me, and all I ever had to do was tell them my story and they would start to listen.”

And, like her audience that day, I finally heard. I woke up that next morning to the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears. And it was glorious.

Our mission at 3-Minute Storyteller was immediate and clear. To seek out, question, and listen to wisdom from the most inspirational figures in our lives: people leading inspired lives, people putting their creativity and their humanity on full display, people living courageously and deliberately.

For me, I’ve always believed what Beethoven and Kurt Vonnegut said: music is the closest thing to God. Music is my happy place; my place of inspiration. So I wanted to hear first from musicians. How did you get to where you are? Isn’t that a crazy life choice? Where do the ideas come from?

My wife, with her international humanitarian background, loves talking with change-makers.

But as with most of life, we’ve found inspiration from so many different and surprising people.

A year ago, we recorded our first interview with a Native American storyteller in Tucson, AZ. It was proof positive of our concept. Though you’ll never see the footage (we had no idea what we were doing), our conversation brought all three of us to almost immediate tears. After he told us his story of regret and redemption, we all looked at each other and felt “this is how to live.”

Do you remember that famous ESPY’s speech by Jim Valvano, a version of which he gave for years? The one where he said “if you laugh, and you think, and you cry, that’s a good day. That’s a really good day”? Do you remember how intense that felt, how when he said it, it felt so raw because he was feeling the immediacy of his words at the end of his life?

That’s it. That’s the way to live. I’m so glad I heard and felt that one too, finally—before I had to wait for death-bed wisdom.

Without question, this past year was the best year of my life. Not because I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, although that was part of it, not because I had incredible experiences meeting some of my biggest artistic heroes, although that was thrilling, but because I had more moments of bliss thinking about and talking about vulnerability and humanity than all the rest of my life combined.

At the heart of almost every story we feature is the concept of vulnerability. We show people opening their heart to fear and change and coming out the other side.

I’ve learned that as a man, a provider, a leader, we are ingrained from very early on with certain limits, certain lines in the sand that we hesitate to cross.

I lead, so I direct people. I provide for my family, so I must keep focused on the end goal of making money. I’m paid to give my opinion, so I try to be very definitive and not waste people’s time.

I think like a lot of men, I say a lot but reveal very little.

Sadly, most of those constructs of male “strength” has very little to do with living life.

Much more importantly, I learned to listen just a little better. When you ask someone how they felt in a meaningful moment, how something influenced their choices, an incredible thing happens. If you give them the time to engage with the memory, the light comes on behind their eyes.

Watch for it in our videos. It happens almost every time—that look of inwardness. That self-realization of something deep and personal. And though you can’t see me on the other side of the camera, I have that look too.

What I thought in the beginning was that my favorite thing in the world is to tell stories. And my second favorite thing was to hear them. This year, that order has reversed.

Most of the time the talk ends when a click startles us and we realize a memory card is full. Our original intent of talking to people for five minutes and cutting to three was a bit of a pipe dream.

More typically, we’ll ask for 10 minutes of someone’s time and our conversations will last 30. And like normal conversations, I almost never ask the questions I intend to. Because what I find over and over is that I’m not all that interested in facts. I’m not a journalist. I want to talk about the feelings and the turns of the heart.

Even as write this, I’m 30,000 feet over middle America, on my way to NASA, where a man who just returned to Earth waits for me to ask him about courage. It’s all been fairly surreal. Beautifully surreal, in a way that life, in its very best moments, can be.

Strangely, I want to talk to him not about all the normal things that you’d want to talk to an astronaut about, but I want to talk to him about his heart.

So clearly, this amazing experience has given us a spark that’s rekindled our spirit and our humanity and our curiosity about the beauty that creative and passionate and brave people have.

But why three minutes—why not long-form? I mean, we are talking about some pretty deep stuff here. And the answer is, I’m going on instinct. I’m going on one cliché I know to be absolutely true: the best things come in small packages.

I love TED talks, but I rarely get 18 minutes to sit down with anything (or before this year, anybody). I love written stories, but to see someone tell a story is a whole different animal entirely.

And I think what we are beginning to realize is that 3-Minute Storyteller is about the intersection of inspiration and courage. Because you can’t really have one without the other.

You can change somebody in three minutes. You can tell a story that moves someone to do something different or inspiring or better with their life in three minutes.

So I figured, let’s give people a glimpse. A glimpse. A spark. And let our audience go find the rest of their story.

So back to our title here. What is it? What is 3-Minute Storyteller? I’ve been asked this question so much I’ve started to challenge myself to give a different answer each time and see just how many things it can be. I’ve led a professional life of setting limits, understanding margin, and defining best practices. It’s pretty clear to me that my laser focus has only gotten my heart so far.

So, a company? A PR vehicle? A non-profit? A community? The feeling that I have is simply, it’s a gift. When Shannon and I come back after an interview and talk about what happened, how it went, that’s the word that seems to come up the most. A gift.

What a gift. What a gift to talk to someone about their life. What a gift to see that flicker of memory in someone’s eyes. What a gift to watch a person’s face change and voice soften as they talk about their heart. And back to how it started, what a gift to share those stories, those little moments with people.

And so I settle on “gift.”

Everyone has a story. We just have to listen.

So who knows what it becomes? For me it already has.