Using Creative Restriction to Drive Success in Storytelling

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Today we are talking about an interesting topic how to reach more people by limiting yourself and we have the perfect guest to help us talk through that Heather welcome to the show.

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Eric, I'm so glad to be here.

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Thanks for having me.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, so my name is Heather Parody.

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I work with ambunctious, big hearted, big visionary creatives, folks who identify as more of a creative entrepreneur, and I love my work.

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What I do is I walk alongside them and link arms and help take their big vision and turn it into tactical strategy.

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I've been doing this for several years and these are my people through and through, and one thing I've noticed these folks is there's a lot of ideas and passion and it's really hard kind of bringing everything in and actually seeing traction, because it's kind of the shiny object thing which is actually a gift, but we have to learn how to use that as a gift as opposed to something that detours you.

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So that's what I do, I guess, as a day-to-day J-O-B.

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I'm also a content creator in my own right and absolutely love storytelling and figuring out how to connect with folks online through our humanity man.

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So that's a little bit about me.

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Awesome, and you've been doing podcasting for a long time, right.

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Correct.

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Yeah, we've done.

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Goodness, I think it's been about seven years in between all of them, over a thousand interviews.

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Amazing, amazing.

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Well, we're ready to be inspired.

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Can you tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of?

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Sure, so I love organic content.

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Now folks will say all day long like that's dead, we miss the boat, you got to put money behind it, you got to do the tricks and the hacks, and I just call complete BS on that.

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I think the way that things are set up now.

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Yes, it is harder to be found, but what it's requiring of us is to become better storytellers and to tap into our unique creativity.

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So I'm always advocating for folks to really become masters around storytelling.

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Now I personally just love online content.

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I love videos.

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It changed my life, and I don't say that lightly.

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I was someone who wasn't raised to understand that there are options out there and that things can change and that there's so much opportunity, and so being exposed to online content, it changed my life, and so helping folks do that now is just a gift.

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Now I felt myself at one point really frustrated because I knew the power of online content.

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I was listening to Gary Vee, I was doing all the stuff you're supposed to do, I was posting constantly and I was not getting traction, and I was so freaking frustrated because I'm thinking you know, if this is a consistency game, I'm freaking consistent.

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Why is this not working for me and I don't know if anyone out there has felt like that, where they're like okay, I'm posting, I'm sharing, I'm doing all this stuff.

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Why am I not getting traction?

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So one day I was actually sitting right here in the same spot.

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I was really frustrated.

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I had posted hundreds and hundreds of videos on Instagram and TikTok.

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I tried trends, I tried scripting, I tried all kinds of stuff and finally I got really, really frustrated and I said you know what?

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I'm going to take that chair in the corner of my room and I'm going to sit my ass on that chair and I'm not going to allow myself to make any content until I figure out what I'm trying to say.

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I'm going to sit there in that chair and make all of my content in that chair and not move.

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Now, this was really a punishment to myself, because I'm a quirky girl with a lot of ideas.

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Back to that creative piece.

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But sitting in that chair, I made my first storytelling video and I haven't got out of it.

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Since that content started to pop and started to work and the reason I mentioned to you earlier about limiting yourself to reach more people.

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I learned about this thing called creative restriction, which a lot of artists do in their work, because when we have the full canvas we kind of spray everywhere and we're not effective.

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But when we create intentional perimeters around our content, it forces us to think a little more creatively and to think about the story and the structure in it.

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So I tell folks now, if you're struggling with your content getting traction, go in very narrow and limit yourself, and you'll be surprised from that.

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Yeah, I think it's interesting.

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Some people would say you know, aim small, miss small in terms of you know focus is a good thing instead of spraying the entire canvas like you're saying.

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What did you learn when you made that pivot to telling a better story?

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What was some of the unlock there?

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Yeah, really getting a tight structure in place where I could make micro improvements to that structure I think was really important to me because you know story format in the sense of there needs to be a hook at the beginning and there needs to be a problem and there needs to be some kind of resolve.

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And unfortunately, a lot of marketers have a lot of CTAs in there, which I say unfortunately because I think it just like kills and hijacks your story and your connectivity to most people.

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And I can go on a rampage about.

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But it forced me into this box where I had to get very, very micro with understanding my style of content and with a mistake that I was making beforehand was I was trying all these different things and so I wasn't really becoming a master at one particular art form.

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So now I'm very, very particular about learning hook structure, micro hooks throughout the content to build retention, and then also ways to end the video to where I invoke some kind of comment or interaction with the audience.

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I'm getting really, really micro on some of that.

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This content style for me, particularly this past year, has really been transformative.

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People are really stuck on going viral and so forth, stuck on going viral and so forth.

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I've had stuff go viral and it doesn't mean anything but creating a body of work.

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I've gotten three, four speaking gigs.

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Last year I got to be on Russell Brunson's podcast to talk about storytelling.

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I've gotten, I think, four to five pretty good clients just this past year just from Instagram Reels learning this storytelling structure.

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So all that to say when people wonder about the ROI of it, it's worked for me.

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Yeah, I think that's great.

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I mean, telling a good story is a skill that'll never go out of style.

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I think there's so many creators.

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I think there's 51 million YouTube channels now.

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Yeah, many creators, I think there's 51 million YouTube channels now and 5 million podcasts, and I think a lot of people give up because they don't figure out this formula and a lot of them try for a decent amount of time, Like you're saying.

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They're consistent, they're trying and they just don't get the audience and a lot of people just are very frustrated Like what am I missing?

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And they don't come to an answer like you did there.

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So creative restriction, I will push that again if you feel like you're all over the place, and I don't mean it in a way of you know the marketee terms.

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It's like niche down till it hurts.

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I'm talking about a physical restriction in your content.

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So you're a great example of that.

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You do this in 15 minutes.

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That's a creative restriction.

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If you're doing videos, maybe you need to just show your hands writing on a page.

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Maybe you need to do it in just one location.

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Maybe there's one tiny little thing that you can do that puts some kind of restriction on it and that also helps you become recommendable.

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Because, if I can remember, oh, that's the girl in the chair.

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Oh, eric, he has that short marketing podcast.

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Oh, the person who wears the green hat.

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It's a branding anchor and helps people recommend your content.

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I like it a lot.

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I don't know that I would necessarily recommend long form content to a lot of people if there's a good nugget in it, because I don't know if I recommend, for example, an hour long podcast to one of my friends because there's a point or two in there that I think they'd be interested in.

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That feels like an awkward thing for me to do.

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So I think just sort of that focus is great for making it share, charitable and referable to other people too.

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What other advice do you have for leaders and creators who who want to be successful storytellers, beyond what you already shared?

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Learn the rules so you can break them.

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I relied way too much on my quirky personality and what I thought was charisma, which some people love and some people absolutely hate about me.

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I have a lot of energy and I thought like, oh man, if I go online I can just kind of be weird and connect with people and just spoil over the place, you know whatever.

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And there is a level of authenticity which people talk about which is really important.

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But I love what Seth Godin says is that people don't want you to be authentic.

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They want you to be consistent.

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They want to know what to expect of Eric.

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They want to know what to expect of Heather.

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So becoming a student of storytelling and structure and the psychology behind all of the stuff that we do on social media Once you really hone that in, then you can add your personality into it.

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So I have a lot of really crazy jokes and things that I say and little off the cuff stuff that I'll do, but I have a script.

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I'll use my script and then kind of flow from that a little bit and that's where the Heather piece comes in.

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So I think a lot of times people get resistant when I talk about like scripting stuff out and so forth, because like, oh, I want to be authentic, I'm like yo, you can still be authentic, but what you're doing is you're making sure that this is actually really valuable and you're becoming a student and have reverence towards storytelling, which people have been studying for freaking years.

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Why are we any better than that?

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We're not.

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I think storytelling is a really great skill.

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My brother is a dolphin trainer for SeaWorld.

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Cool is that.

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And he used to do the Whale and Dolphin show at SeaWorld of Orlando for like 5,000 people at a time oh my gosh.

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And he would do the same show seven times a day where he'd ride around the pool with one foot on each dolphin and then jump 20 feet in the air.

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But one of the coolest things about it was is that they had a story for the show that they only redid the show like twice a year or something, so they were doing the same story, you know, seven times a day for a crowd of 5,000 people.

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But it was a really good story and it had jokes in it and it was on point and they made the same jokes and the same sort of story every show and people always walked out of the shows going.

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Man, that was really great, not realizing that it was like the 700th time that year that they've told the same story.

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It probably got better every time because then they started understanding the micro nuances of it and the perfect timing and all that stuff.

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I love studying comedians and performers and actors and all of that and I really wish marketers would look more towards the entertainment industry and study that to learn marketing than traditional marketing, because traditional marketing is boring.

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Af, everybody is so sick of your CTAs and your all this stuff Like look at entertainment.

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They have been figuring out how to capture people's attention and hook people in because they understand the psychology and storytelling.

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If we can study that and bring that into marketing, how freaking powerful is that?

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And the performers they write out everything and they're looking at every freaking word.

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And they're looking at every freaking word and they're thinking about pauses and beats and all this stuff.

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And you want to talk about connecting to an audience and marketing your thing.

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If you can become a really honed in performer and understand the micro nuances, like entertainers do, dude, you won't have to freaking CTA anything.

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People are going to be crawling to you to figure out what you do.

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I like that advice.

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Well, I'm going to be crawling to you to figure out what you do.

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I like that advice.

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Well, I'm going to link to your website.

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Are there any other resources that you recommend people check out to become an expert storyteller, in addition to what you have on your site?

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I have an interview that I did with one of Pixar's writers.

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His name's Matthew Lunn and we did an interview around how to tell better stories and I'll tell you, this interview is just chocked full of tricks that Pixar uses to capture people's attention.

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We go through hooks, we go through retention, building empathy for a character.

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I mean he just like breaks it all down like 40 something minutes so we can link up to that and it's completely free.

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It's on YouTube, but a good interview to listen to.

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Awesome.

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Well, we really appreciate you being with us today sharing your insights and your stories.

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Thanks so much for being with us today.

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Appreciate you, Eric.