Episode 156 – Dave Bricker

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Automated Transcription

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Dave Bricker  0:00  

I’m a storytelling expert. And that boils down to what to say and how to say it. I work with entrepreneurs and executives, business leaders, organizations of all sizes, but primarily with the messaging side of things. So I help people figure out how to stop talking about themselves and start talking about their clients, or stop talking about themselves and start talking about their teams. That’s really a service mentality. And then on the other side of that is, once we get the words where they’re really right, how do you deliver those words, it’s the dynamics, it’s the pauses, it’s the way you deliver them because written prose is very different from spoken prose. And when you put the whole picture together, you get to influence, you get connection, you get persuasion, you get sales, you get connection between you and other people, which is really what business is all about.

 

Richard Matthews  1:04  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

Richard Matthews  2:00  

Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have live on the line. Mr. Dave Bricker, Dave, are you there?

 

Dave Bricker  2:06  

I’m here. Great to be here. Richard. Thanks for having me.

 

Richard Matthews  2:09  

Awesome. Glad to have you here. So, Dave, you’re calling in from Miami, Florida, which is cool. It’s nice and warm down there, I imagine at least, we’re up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for my audience who sort of follows us around in our travels. While we do this podcasting gig, we’re gonna go see the Capitol this next week in Annapolis and, and Washington. We’re going to try and see as much of the capitals that let us see despite our pandemic. But you know, we put it off. We’ve had two years where we’ve tried to get up the East Coast and haven’t been able to do it because we had a baby and then we had a pandemic. So we’re gonna try again this year. Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t.

 

Dave Bricker  2:47  

It’s a great place to visit. Yeah,

 

Richard Matthews  2:49  

That’s what I’m hoping anyway. So what I want to do real quick, Dave is I want to go through your introduction so people know who you are, and then we’ll get in and start talking through your story a little bit. So as a young man, Dave Bricker was inspired by the remarkable people he met in Miami’s secret floating village, which I’m really excited to hear more about. It’s a sailboat anchorage a quarter-mile off the shore of Miami City Hall, that attracted world travelers, squatters, and dreamers. They all have remarkable stories to tell by your senior year in college, you were living aboard your own tiny sailboat. Soon after graduation, he set sail for the Bahamas with a locker full of food and a dream and $40 in his pocket. His voyage took him up and down the Bahamas up the East Coast of the US to the Chesapeake Bay. We were there last week, actually, which is pretty cool. And across the Atlantic to Gibraltar, ran aground, dealt with mechanical breakdowns, got seasick, slept in a volcano, survived powerful storms, and returned to the land of clocks and calendars with what he got in search of stories of his own. So today, you are a speaker, a trainer, a coach, and you help remarkable people tell remarkable stories through writing, speaking graphic design videos, technology and music. So if you want to say it, share it, or sell it, bring him your story, and he’ll help you tell it. Love that introduction. Super cool. And I’ve mentioned before we got on and actually started recording, my family and I are looking at getting into the full-time sailing thing after our RV travels. So it’s kind of cool to have someone who’s had that experience on the show

 

Dave Bricker  4:14  

It will be the best and the worst times of your life.

 

Richard Matthews  4:17  

You know, that’s what I tell people about traveling in the RV. We’ve been traveling for four years now and people ask me like Oh, it’s so wonderful and magical. I’m like, it sounds like that. But honestly, traveling has been the highest points in my life and the lowest, and I have had points where I’m standing on the edge of the roadside screaming off into the desert wondering what the hell I’ve done with myself and my family. 

 

Dave Bricker  4:42  

It will magnify those two extremes. 

 

Richard Matthews  4:44  

Yeah, they just get a little bit worse because you’re out of the water.

 

Dave Bricker  4:48  

Because when you’re out in the middle of the ocean, screaming off into the end of the breakers you’re gonna be thinking boy, I sure wish I was standing by the side of the road in a desert. But when it’s good, it’s so good. You can imagine it.

 

Richard Matthews  5:01  

Yeah, one of my favorite experiences over the last couple of years, we were up in Yosemite with my kids. And we were sliding off of a waterfall into a pool 40 feet below with the kids. And it was magical. That kind of experience you only get when you take the time to explore our world a little bit. So, with that sort of fun introduction, why don’t you tell us what your business is like, now? Who do you serve? And what do you do for them?

 

Dave Bricker  5:30  

I’m a storytelling expert. And that boils down to what to say, and how to say it. So I work with entrepreneurs, executives, business leaders, organizations of all sizes, but primarily with the messaging side of things. So I help people figure out how to stop talking about themselves and start talking about their clients, or stop talking about themselves and start talking about their teams. It’s really a service mentality. And then on the other side of that is, once we get the words where they’re really right, how do you deliver those words, it’s the dynamics, it’s the pauses, it’s the way you deliver them because written prose is very different from spoken prose. And when you put the whole picture together, you get to influence, you get connection, you get persuasion, you get sales, you get connection between you and other people, which is really what business is all about. The money is the byproduct,

 

Richard Matthews  6:36  

One of the things I constantly tell my clients, and my kids and my staff, and myself, and everyone I work with is that human beings are story born people. And we judge our relationships, whether we know it or not, by the stories we know of each other. You can even take the sequence we have of like, an acquaintance is someone whose name you might know, but you don’t know much of their story. And a friend is someone who you know their name, and you know, several of their stories and a close friend is someone who, you know, their name, you know, so many of their stories that you have to create new stories together, right, and your best friends, maybe your wife, or your best friends they’re the people that, you know, all of the stories that you have to tell from each other. And the only way you’re going to get new stories is to go out and have new experiences together. And we judge the depth of our relationship on how much we know of each other’s stories. And I tell people all the time that if you want to hack building a relationship, learn how to tell good stories, and how to listen to other people’s stories and how to extract stories from people.

 

Dave Bricker  7:40  

Well, I don’t know what you need me to be here today for. You’re doing a great job for me.

 

Richard Matthews  7:47  

It’s one of my favorite things. So I’m super excited to have someone who’s like that’s your job is teaching people how to tell stories, I just do it because that’s my profession,  as a podcast host is getting stories from people and telling them so I love it. And It’s the first time I’ve had someone on whose profession is teaching people how to tell stories. So that’s an interesting place to be in because as far as I know, it’s something that you have to learn and develop that skill over years. So I’m curious to find out how you hack that process of teaching people how to become good storytellers?

 

Dave Bricker  8:23  

It’s really long story, but we don’t have time for the long version, and I’ll try to shorten it up. I was 18 years old home from my first year of college extremely disillusioned because I’d gone from a private prep school to a massive university with hundreds of people in some of the classes. I mean, being in a classroom, where you need binoculars to see the teachers. For me, it’s not a great educational experience. But I came home and I got a job on this big art project in Miami. You can look it up. It’s the Christo’s surrounded islands project and Christo is an artist he did Valley curtain, he did these huge fabric installations. But he’s surrounded, I think it was 13 Islands in Biscayne Bay with a 200-foot wide border of pink fabric. And my initial thought was, well, that’s stupid, but it’ll be a fun summer job. And it turned out to be a remarkable thing. I encourage you to look up, Christo’s surrounded islands on and there’s plenty of good pictures of it. But while I was doing my summer job, which involves sitting around on a boat all day guarding the installation, tough job, dream of that when you’re 18 years old, and I met these wackos who lived on sailboats in a coconut grove in Miami. And they all had stories of great adventures in faraway places. And I was mesmerized because I always thought, well, adventures are something you find in books and movies, you can actually live a life of adventure and they shattered that for me. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted stories of my own. So I took a year off of school to kind of get my bearings. But I went back and I finished up, I never did decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, I ended up majoring in liberal arts with a minor in jazz guitar. Not the most practical thing. But then toward the end, I got into graphic design and bought one of the early macintoshes. And so I’ve just fallen into the right things. And then that turned out to be visual storytelling. And as I went through life, I finished college. And then as you’ve already said, I bought myself as a sailboat during my senior year, and I moved onboard and started fixing it up. And about six months after graduating, I threw my keys in the bay, I didn’t need them anymore. And I took off for the Bahamas, I found myself alone in a foreign country with no money. But I do odd jobs my way around and play a little harp music here, we’ll get the time to pass and eventually jumped on a friend’s boat. And it was a wooden boat that he built. It was beautiful. This German guy, you know, live too far, convert to live, he went out of the forest and cut down the trees and milled the lumber, and built the boat. And it’s this sailing cuckoo clock of his and we sailed it from the Bahamas, through the Azores to Gibraltar 38 days at sea. And, again, just collecting stories. And at a certain point, it’s like, hey, I’ve, I’ve got some stories of my own. And okay, now what do I do, and people with big stories generally carry them around with them somewhat quietly, because you end up feeling like nobody else quite gets you because your life experience has been very different. I’m sure living on the RV, you probably experience a certain amount of like, oh, here’s that guy who lives on the RV. And it’s like, oh, there it goes this party. Right? You become like, it’s a freak show. So you end up anyway.

 

Richard Matthews  12:12  

Yeah, you’re the one who’s different. And I’ve decided, the most common question I get asked, or that gets told is, I wish I could do what you do. And I used to think and used to tell people that you could and now I realized that people don’t actually want to do what you do. They’re comfortable where they are. Otherwise, they do something different. It’s an interesting sort of place to be where people like that you have the adventure. But they don’t really want to have your adventures.

 

Dave Bricker  12:42  

Well, there’s a saying, wanting is everything. You look at something, you look at that fancy sports car, or whatever, Oh, I’d love to have that. But get the first bill for the first replacement part. And all of a sudden, you’re not so in love with that. Wanting is everything. And I think Yeah, but I mean, anybody who’s got a big story, it doesn’t have to be an adventure story. It could be, someone who got out of an abusive relationship or addiction, it could be somebody who spent three days hunkered down in a foxhole with two other people. And those two other people are going to be family to that person in a way that nobody else ever will be. Because there’s that shared experience that shared a story that binds them together. But I came back ultimately, to the land of clocks and calendars. I started a little graphic design company and web company. And I started working with all sorts of people with all sorts of messages. And then I started helping people with books. And people would send me books for typesetting. I do old-school type settings because if you go into a bookstore today, the books all look like crap because they’re tiny types and the lines are packed together. And the margins are narrow, go into an antique store and pick up a book and you open. It’s like, wow, I want to read this. I don’t care what it’s about. It’s beautiful. And so I did old-school typesetting. But I’d start finding all the problems and the errors and marking things up and sending them back. So you sure you want me to typeset this and people, No, no you edit it. Yeah, I’m not an editor. Well, I ended up at one point making about half my living editing. I got into that. Then I said, I can do that. And I wrote a bunch of books, got my butt kicked by a real editor. But on and on. It was just getting into different forms of storytelling. And then I started working with professional speakers initially on their books. I joined the National Speakers Association, originally as part of a practical joke, but that’s a whole other story. And I’ve been involved with the NSA. That’s the NSA that talks not the NSA that listens for eight years now. It took me a while to figure out what it is that I do for a living. And it’s graphic design, it’s programming, it’s music, it’s speaking, it’s writing, it’s all of these things under one roof. And they’re all different dialects of storytelling. And I was looking around thinking about Okay, so what is the story and how the stories work, I had to do a lot of reflecting on that. But watching hundreds of speeches and reading books, not just as a reader, but as an editor, I started just looking under the hood and figuring that out. And I ultimately developed, surprisingly enough, a nautical model for how stories are that’s called story sailing. 

 

Richard Matthews  15:46  

Yeah, it’s starting to see the structure under the stories.

 

Dave Bricker  15:51  

Yeah, and why they work and why they don’t what makes a message stick. What makes something attract attention? Well, other messages, they may be passionate and heartfelt. But after a while, people are starting to check their email. Why is that? What is the psychology of paying attention? What do we need to do to make a message stick?

 

Richard Matthews  16:17  

Yeah, there’s so much to it as well. It’s not just the story itself, but there’s also the delivery and how it’s delivered. Which details you include and which ones don’t. And there’s just a lot that goes into storytelling because it’s not just the story. And it’s not just the storytelling it’s also the person who’s receiving the story because it’s not really a complete story until the person who’s hearing it or consuming it makes it come alive in their head. 

 

Dave Bricker  16:46  

Some of its technique, but it’s kind of like playing music. I mean, you can teach people technique. But then there’s something that goes beyond technique and music theory, we just call it being musical. Let’s take a line. For example, I love this whole point of this is the How to say apart and take a line like the hardest thing to live with is regret. Great line, you could open a speech with that. But then you think about that. There are these words like the hardest thing. And then you want to leave people hanging for the answer. So I could write down on a piece of paper, the hardest thing to live with is regret. And you’ll think, Okay, that makes sense. But you could say the hardest thing to live with is regret. And it’s that long pause that makes the audience what is the hardest thing? What is it tell me and the inflection that you put on the word hardest? And then the inflection that you put on the word regret, that little breath at the end of it. And all of a sudden, it’s not just words, it’s a message. It’s the use of things.

 

Richard Matthews  18:02  

Yeah, you’ve imbued it with emotion. 

 

Dave Bricker  18:05  

It’s not just the, you know, you’ve got the sheet music on one hand, but then you get to the performance, you’ve got to interpret all those lines and dots on that page because otherwise, you can teach a computer to read that stuff. And it’s gonna sound like a computer’s playing the music.

 

Richard Matthews  18:24  

There’s something magical about that skill, too, to be able to deliver that. And you call it being musical a minute ago, but there’s a certain level of talent that comes into like learning how to deliver a message, whether that’s in a written story or on stage or on video, or, you know, sometimes even as a podcast host, but yeah, it’s something that I have learned personally, you can develop it over time, too. The more you practice it, the better you get at it.

 

Dave Bricker  18:55  

Yeah, Richard, I think you can certainly say that it’s talent. But I worry that some people just think, oh, I don’t have the talent for that. And I have met people who are just natural speakers, and not very uninhibited. But it’s interesting because when you’re coaching people on presentation skills, the biggest part of the job is not so much teaching them the skills is teaching them to be fully authentically themselves and to let out the energy the emotion because look, when we’re kids at some point we’re screaming around the playground and somebody says, Hey, cool, your jets, ex civilized time to use your inside voice. And the ladies get it earlier than we do. And we spend our lives trying to be chill, which is why there’s mythological mythology that any message that we try to send to a corporate has got to be boring and can’t be exciting. And corporate people are people. They go out drinking on Friday night. They listen to rock music. They’re people. They don’t want to be bored any more than anybody else does. So, I think that this idea that, yeah, it’s a talent, but it’s a talent that you can learn. Because most of it has to develop unlearning all of the inhibitions that you’ve been wearing for so long that you’ve been wearing those clothes for years and haven’t even taken off to wash them.

 

Richard Matthews  20:25  

Yeah, I tell people, you have to learn how to take your personality and turn it up to 11. And sort of free yourself a little bit like you have yourself, you have the distinctive parts of your personality when you learn to lean into that. That what sets you apart and allows people to pay attention to you.

 

Dave Bricker  20:46  

And look, I lived on a sailboat for almost 15 years, I invented introvert, and most of the professional speakers I know are introverts. But we’ve all learned how to get out of our own way. And let whatever and let our authentic selves shine through.

 

Richard Matthews  21:06  

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about your superpowers, your origin story is really cool. You’ve got all sorts of things that you’ve done over the length of your life here to get you where you are.

 

Dave Bricker  21:19  

And the volcano wasn’t erupting at the time I slept in it by the way. Just so you know.

 

Richard Matthews  21:24  

That’s probably a good call. Otherwise, you’d look a little different.

 

Dave Bricker  21:28  

Yes.

 

Richard Matthews  21:29  

A little more face melty, probably. 

 

Dave Bricker  21:32  

Right.

 

Richard Matthews  21:34  

So we say on the show all the time, every iconic hero has a superpower. That could be a fancy flying suit made by your genius intellect or the ability to call down Thunder from the sky or super strength. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, and that’s either a skill they were born with or a skill that they developed over time, that really energizes all of your other skills. I think we’ve already sort of hinted at a little bit, but the superpower is what sets you apart. It’s what allows you to help your people slay their villains and come out at the top in their journeys. And if you look at all the skills you’ve developed over your life, your superpower is sort of the one thing that ties all those together. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is?

 

Dave Bricker  22:13  

My superpower is certainly not something I was born with. It’s something I was cultivated, that I have cultivated over many years. But it’s the ability to look at a message, whether it’s a piece of Ad copy, or a headline, or a speech, or a piece of music, whatever it is, and figure out why it works or why it doesn’t work and articulate why. So that we can get down and figure out how to fix it.

 

Richard Matthews  22:45  

Yeah, so why it works for its intended audience or for?

 

Dave Bricker  22:51  

You’ll very often see, you’ll take something where somebody’s selling it. We’ve all heard this old adage, sell the benefits, not the features. I mean, I didn’t invent this. But people hear that principle, but they don’t necessarily know how to apply it. And somebody will say, Oh, my product does this. And it does that. And we worked five years at the research to make this product happen. And yada yada, and they don’t understand why people are falling asleep. And it’s because they haven’t really explained why it is that people should listen to this message about the product. And my golden rule of storytelling is that stories are always about people. They might be metaphorical people, they might be talking animals or aliens. But in principle, stories are always about people. And if you’re not talking about people, you’re not telling stories, if you’re not telling stories, you’re not connecting. And if you’re not connecting, you’re not selling. And for some people that have an aversion to the “S” word selling, anyone who’s tried to put a child to bed is selling anyone who’s asked someone for a raise is selling. Anyone who’s asked someone out on a date is selling. Selling is not about getting people to part with their money. That’s a byproduct of selling. So it’s really the art of engagement, the art of influence. If you’re talking about prices, processes, ingredients, or data, you’re not talking about people.

 

Richard Matthews  24:28  

So the whole learning how to speak in benefits, instead of speaking in features and advantages is a mentor of mine said this to me is like, think of things like the airbag in a car. So this car comes equipped with an airbag. That’s a feature, the advantages it deploys on impact, to cushion your blow. That’s where most people stop. He was like the benefit is it’ll save your life. If you don’t get to the How does this save your life? You’re missing the benefit.

 

Dave Bricker  25:06  

And Richard, you’re right on top of where you want to be because ultimately, we’re hunter-gatherers, we stepped out of the wilderness 20,000 years ago. I mean, there were still mammoths, and saber-toothed Tigers roaming the land. But in geological terms, it wasn’t that long ago that we were cave people. This is the dawn of human civilization. And look where we are now talking on Zoom, right? You’re talking about yachts and RVs. And I mean, what’s going on and in no time flat is tremendous. But we’re still hunter-gatherers at heart. And we spend our lifetimes our natural mode of being is scanning the world for threats and opportunities, and we’re looking around. So if you’re speaking to me, you better give me an opportunity or a threat pretty quickly, or I’m going to keep scanning, which is what people do when they get bored, they pick up their phones, and they start checking their email because there might be an opportunity there. And obviously, as speakers, as writers, as messengers, we don’t really want to deliver threats to people. But the value propositions got to be clear, upfront, that’s why they call it paying attention. Because somebody is deciding to invest in your message instead of in what they might miss, by not scanning. But the magic is when you pull someone into your story, and they’re out on the boat, or out in the desert with you standing beside the road with two flat tires, or whatever it may be. They’re in your story. And they’re scanning for threats and opportunities inside your narrative. And guess what, you’re the guide, they’re looking to you in that environment to get them out of it. And logically, they understand that they’re sitting on their computer screen, or they’re driving in their car, and they’re really a passive observer of your story. But on an instinctive level, on an amygdala level, they’re in your story, fighting for survival. We have a message, we want to reach people here.

 

Richard Matthews  27:25  

Absolutely. What I love about that metaphor, too, because I tell this all the time with teaching people how to do the selling, is that what you’re doing is you’re taking people on a journey. And the metaphor I always use for them is, for grounding sake is like anything you’re selling, you’re trying to take someone like hey, they’re in Los Angeles, and where they want to get to is New York, your job as the salesperson is to help them go on that journey. I’m gonna take you like, in the ad, you might take them from Los Angeles to Nevada and your course something like that you might take them from Nevada to St. Louis But anyways, you are the guide that takes them on the journey. And maybe your business only helps people get to St. Louis or something. But you should always help people on like, hey, the next part of your journey is going to be across this part of the country, and you have to go here, here’s what you’re going to look forward to, and the problems you’re gonna run along the way. And it’s always about the journey you’re taking someone on. And the best way to take someone on a journey is through storytelling,

 

Dave Bricker  28:28  

No question about it. And this whole concept of a journey is so important. And I’ll give you a couple of examples of where presenters and writers screw up. Because I always say vote yourself off the island and explore the world in a you vote. And what happens is someone gets up and they tell their story, like I can tell my story about crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a wooden boat. And for three, maybe four minutes, people are going to be really interested. And then subconsciously, they’re going to start thinking this is cool, but I got this stuff on Netflix, I need this to be about me. So I can tell a story about a storm at sea or an ocean passage or something. But I’ve got just a few minutes to say, Have you ever felt like that in your business where you’re out at sea in those rough seas, and nobody can see you? And there are these cruise ships and freighters out there that would run you over and not even feel it? How are you going to catch the attention of the big opportunities cruising right by you and your life and all of a sudden, the story of my journey is a metaphor for my listener’s journey. And once they’re there, and that mapping is done, then I have their full attention. But if you just talk about yourself and tell your story, people like the look, this is great, but I got to pick my kids up and in half an hour I got a story of my own.

 

Richard Matthews  29:57  

Yeah, and it’s interesting, one of the things I do when I help clients, like edit ad copy, for instance, or edit a direct mail sales letter that they’re sending out, the first thing that I do with them is taking a red pen, and I circle all the times they used the word I, and we, and us, and our and just circled them all in red. And then I take a blue pen and I circle all the times they use the word You. And I was like, if that word You is not at least three times larger in quantity, then the I, we, and our, you need to rewrite it.

 

Dave Bricker  30:35  

Yeah. It’s interesting, too, because there’s some psychology there. Because when we use the word we in a message, we all suffer from this, we’ve all had to deal with it. That’s when you’re down in the trenches with your audience, and you’re commiserating with them. So you’re not talking about yourself, you’re saying, hey, we’ve all struggled to do this. We’ve all bought business books and read two chapters and stuck them on the night table and then stuck another book on top and never finished them, whatever. And people yeah, he gets me that, right? That’s something you build. But then, you move to shift the focus to more of those you reference, get rid of those pieces of the copy, like our company offers, I believe, I think, we’re proud of we’re excited to announce. They don’t care about you. At least not until you’ve given them a reason to think that you care about them.

 

Richard Matthews  31:39  

And you have to learn how to take the service that you offer, and I call it living in the promised land. If they’re on one side, my whole metaphor for it is on, you’ve got the crocodile infested river, and they got the land of pain that they’re living in right now. And they got the promised land on the other side of the crocodile infested River. And your job as a storyteller is, and as a product developer, and someone who offers services, why not is to take someone from that land of pain and lack, and to get them across the crocodile infested river, which is their journey, they have to go on to live in the promised land, and you have to take them over to the other side of the Promised Land, and show them what life is like after they’ve solved their problem. After they’ve cleaned their pool, after they’ve bought your car, like what does their life look like now that their problem is gone? Because all the stuff before that they don’t care about.

 

Dave Bricker  32:38  

You’re wonderful. I think you’ll get a laugh out of this because my model is that the person, the client, the subject, whoever it is, the main character in the story is stuck out in a sailboat on the rocky stormy seas of conflict, which is the equivalent of your land of pain. And they need to get across the water to the safe port of transformation. And in order to do that, the water needs to be deep enough. And therefore, the problem you’re solving needs to be deep enough, it needs to be the authentic problem. The problem is not that they don’t have enough money. The problem is that they don’t have enough money to feed their children. There’s some survival level thing that’s really going to motivate them. That’s where the deep water is. And then finally, what moves that sailboat is wind an invisible, powerful force. And that individual person or organization, unique set of talents could be their team. It could be their leadership, it could be specialized equipment, whatever it is that makes them unique, and there’s no competition, how do they use their wind to blow from the stormy seas of conflict to the safe transport of transformation without running aground on those shallow rocks. So my model is similar to yours. And this is the beauty of storytelling because you’re talking about crossing a river, which is a very common metaphor for a journey. I’m talking about crossing a body of water and somebody else will come in and talk about climbing a mountain. And you know what, it’s all common metaphors to the journey. I always explained that we storytellers were journyists, not journalists.

 

Richard Matthews  34:38  

That’s a great way of putting that, I like that. I like your metaphor too. It’s very similar to mine. And I personally always use that in my storytelling stuff is looking at someone who’s, where are they now in that land of pain and lack and like there are levels of awareness like how close to the crocodile infested river they are right. Depending on how far away they are from that. At the edge of that precipice is it determines how you’re going to talk through the message. And when they’re actually going through the journey of crossing the crocodile infested river, that’s where they’re actually going to try and solve their problem and come out on the other side, there are so many pieces to hit in this story that you’re telling. And I find personally as a fellow storyteller, learning, having your own sort of metaphor that you work through in your head, is really, really helpful to sort of have those mental hooks, where you’re hanging the pieces of your story. So you know, you’re not missing things. And so you’re actually telling a story that’s going to engage your audience. And so it’s super cool to hear that you’re doing a similar thing and helping people the same way.

 

Dave Bricker  35:43  

Yeah, it’s fun, but I love how the language of the metaphor is different, but the essence of it is pretty much identical.

 

Richard Matthews  35:53  

Because human beings are the same.

 

Dave Bricker  35:56  

Yeah, exactly. We’re all different. But there’s this other sort of undertone, this stream underneath whatever words, we use this current, and your metaphor will work just as well as mine, which will work just as well as the mountain climbing one, which will work just as well as the training to run a marathon one. It’s interesting that the gap happens, and I think this is where some of our good work gets done, is very often the problem the conflict is not what the client thinks it is. And this is where coaching comes in. Because if you come in and prescribe, no, this is not your problem. Here’s what’s really wrong, they’re gonna send you packing. And that’s the difference between coaching and consulting because a consultant brings smart answers. But a coach asks wise questions. And that’s where you get with your client. And you ask them those questions that allow them to reveal the truth to themselves, then you can go forward, because very often, the problem is that they’re stuck in their own story, they don’t think something is possible, or they think someone else is holding them back. Things like that.

 

Richard Matthews  37:14  

I like that idea of being stuck in the wrong story, too, because the story you’re telling yourself is going to determine a lot of your actions. And if you’re telling yourself the wrong story, you’re gonna take the wrong actions ended up in the wrong spot.

 

Dave Bricker  37:28  

Yeah. You know, all roads, ultimately lead home. But sometimes that’s the long hard road that you don’t need to take.

 

Richard Matthews  37:39  

Yeah. So I had a thought when you were talking about the metaphors all being common, and human beings being the same. you’ve traveled the world a bit. One of the things I’ve noticed as a traveler is that as we go places, and you meet people, and you meet kids, and you meet families, and you meet people in all sorts of different walks of life, from different cultures and whatnot, is ultimately the biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that human beings are incredibly consistent. We’re consistent in what we’d like to do and how we talk, and how we communicate, even if you don’t speak the same language or have the same culture. Or just from a biological standpoint, it all comes back to learning how to tell stories, and learning how to tell stories to, like watching kids play, they’re all telling stories to each other doesn’t matter whether or not they speak English or whatever. They’re all doing the same kind of thing. I’m just curious if you’ve sort of experienced the same thing?

 

Dave Bricker  38:36  

Yeah, I have, stories are just the language of the human soul. And I can recall back in the Azores on my Atlantic crossing, I was in a marina, and a bunch of boaters got together for a spontaneous party. And I think there were 12 different nationalities present. And probably about a fourth of the people spoke English. And we were bound together as a community by our common love of boats and our lifestyle. And the fact that we were all in the middle of this transatlantic voyage that we were somewhere coming from Europe and going back somewhere coming from North America across. But we were all out in the middle, we’re 1000 miles from the nearest mainland. And so this bound us together. When I started playing music, when I pulled my guitar out and started playing, there was one group of people with one language. Everybody was tapping their feet to the same beat. Everybody loved it. And I became so aware of what an incredible bond form just because, yeah, maybe we couldn’t exchange words, but we could, we could all dig the same melodies.

 

Richard Matthews  39:51  

Yeah, that’s really cool. And it just speaks that heart that human beings are, ultimately, we’re the same. We haven’t changed, all the way back from that hunter gatherer stage to today. You know, psychology is psychology. I tell people all the time if you want to pick up some good marketing stuff, pick up some of the stuff from 100 years ago from Peter Drucker, stuff like that because it hasn’t changed. It’s good stuff. And you know, when people say, Oh, you know, social media is newfangled, you got to learn how to tell stories this way and whatnot. No, you don’t, storytelling hasn’t changed. The mediums might change and the methods you might use to tell stories don’t change or might change. But the act of telling a story to take someone on a journey and help them connect your stories and education to get them to what I call the promised land, it doesn’t change. It’s the same no matter what you’re doing.

 

Dave Bricker  40:39  

Absolutely. You what you beat on a drum, people are gonna dance, it doesn’t matter if they’re a bunch of computer technicians on the 50th floor of an office tower. Or if it’s some primitive tribe out in the middle of a jungle somewhere, that’s never seen civilization, you bang on that drum, and we’re all gonna dance, and you do something funny, and people are gonna smile. It’s just universal. We all use the same facial expressions. There’s something hardwired about being human.

 

Richard Matthews  41:11  

I think I’m going to write that as one of our quotes for this show. If you beat on the drum, everyone will dance. That’s very poetic. So I want to move on a little bit with the conversation, talk a little bit about the flip side of your superpower which is your fatal flaw. Every Superman has his kryptonite, or Wonder Woman has her bracelets of victory she can’t remove without going mad, you probably have something you’ve struggled with something that’s held you back, right. For me, it was a couple of things like perfectionism, I struggled with perfectionism for years, where it kept me from actually shipping stuff because I could tweak it a little bit more. Or one of the things I struggled with was a lack of self-care. I didn’t have good boundaries while my clients walked all over me. And those helped my business back for a long time. So I think more important, though, than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to rectify it and overcome it. So our audience might learn a little bit from your experience?

 

Dave Bricker  42:01  

Well, it’s always been an ongoing journey, and I relate to some of the things, excellence really is rewarding. And mediocrity hurts and the more aware you become of the mediocrity in the world, everything from bad kerning I mean, how much signage has horrible Letter Spacing or bad grammar things that don’t bother normal people that just, for me, they’re like being bitten to death by ducks, it just drives me nuts when I look around. So the more discerning you become about the message in the world, the way people express them, it’s oh, my God, it’s like, you become aware of all of this pollution around you. And then, the other one you’re talking about is I try to be, serving other people. That’s rewarding to me. And I’ve had to learn to just say no to never saying no, I got full of them that they just flow. But collect them, I think of them. Sorry about that. Enjoy them, whatever, steal them. But language is fun. But as you get out in the world, and in front of more people, and you serve more people, especially as a speaker, and all of a sudden, you’re in front of audiences of hundreds of people. And all of a sudden, you don’t have that hour to spend with every stranger who calls you try. But you have to set those limits and boundaries because you serve people as you can. But there are some people who are insatiably hungry and they’ll just drain you dry. Like, I’m still at that point, I’ll take a phone call and talk to just about anybody but I keep an eye on the clock and set some boundaries on it. And it may not always be that I’m able to do that, and I’ll miss what I’m not. But ultimately, if you can’t move forward, you’re not going to be able to move anybody else forward. And if you get lost in that world of service to the point where you can’t sustain your own strength and grow, then you’re in a negative feedback loop, and you’re not going to do any good for anybody.

 

Richard Matthews  44:23  

The self-care thing is such an interesting thing for entrepreneurs to learn, especially when we’re in the business of serving other people. And learning how to take time for yourself and how to set good boundaries for yourself and for your clients. There’s so much that goes into that everything from making sure that you’re healthy, making sure that you’re rested, making sure that you have good boundaries with your clients, and like all those things lead to you being able to deliver better, or whatever it is that you do. And so it’s an interesting thing to learn. And I tell people on this show all the time, we talked about giving yourself permission to play, because I’m not sure It’s an American thing for some reason, but we have this whole idea that recreation is a reward for a job well done, and not a requirement to do good work. 

 

Dave Bricker  45:10  

That has not been my problem.

 

Richard Matthews  45:16  

And you have to become intentional about taking time for yourself and taking time for your family and taking the time to create stories.

 

Dave Bricker  45:26  

Thank you.

 

Richard Matthews  45:28  

You have to put the effort into creating stories, otherwise, who’s gonna read your book when you die, that kind of thing. And if you take the time to live this life and not just work, then you have those stories that allow you to grow your business and to grow your influence, and to grow the work that you do.

 

Dave Bricker  45:52  

Yeah, and surround yourself with positive, powerful people and create stories with them. That’s where your superhero stories really come from. I mean, there are solo superheroes, but sooner or later, they end up in the Avengers, or the Justice League, or whatever it is. Let’s put a bunch of good guys together. And really, all of a sudden, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And I think as we find the superheroic aspects of ourselves, superheroes are just a metaphor for human potential. And they’re just the modern day Greek gods, they’re just modern day myths. And you surround yourself with other people with superpowers, and you’ll find that for brilliant, people are wonderful, but they’re like strings and Christmas lights, where there are some really bright lights. And then you’ve got somewhere there aren’t even bulbs in the sockets to make up for the bright ones. That’s how people are nobody’s got all bright lights, everybody’s got their blind spots, everybody’s got their kryptonite. We’re talking about this superhero mythology. And it’s in us, you get people with super strength, and they’ve got super vulnerabilities. And that’s one of the reasons we connect with people, and there are plenty of people, you plug the lights in, and they just kind of flash and do what they’re supposed to do. And that’s fine. Show me someone who’s got two or three or four really bright lights, and stay away from those other ones, they’re gonna electrocute you. That’s why that’s so fun, though.

 

Richard Matthews  47:35  

I love the idea of getting the superheroes together to create the Avengers, because essentially, in the business world, we talk all the time about networking, and your network is your net worth. And that’s the boring way of saying the same thing. That’s getting the people together and learning how to connect with other superheroes. And create stories together, because that’s how the big changes are made in the world.

 

Dave Bricker  48:06  

Yeah. And one thing I’d like to add to that because we’re talking about superheroes, and we’re talking about brilliant people and stuff like that, but I’ll tell you. I mean, look you’re criss crossing the world in an RV, and I did my sailing trip. And I know there are people listening who are thinking, well, gee, I don’t have a story like that. And the old adage, size doesn’t matter really comes into play. And anyone has owned a pet, anyone has been in a relationship, anyone who has started a business, we all have stories, and they don’t need to be worthy of a National Geographic special or Netflix documentary, to merit story hood. And one of my favorite examples is you show me a company where you’ve got four people working in a cluster of cubicles if you can be a fly on the wall, and listen to the messages that go over and under those walls and around and the jokes that happened and stuff, the little tiny community that forms in that group of four people working in an insurance company, you can write a sitcom about that we all have stories, but sometimes we don’t think our stories are meaningful or big enough or valuable. And people can create stories in solitary confinement people can create stories anywhere, and they all matter.

 

Richard Matthews  49:34  

Yeah, it’s one of those things that I haven’t yet figured out how to help other people understand that their story matters, on a consistent basis. If there’s some magic to that, I would love to know but the idea that your story matters and the reason it matters is because it’s unique. It’s unique to you, to go back to my metaphor of crossing the crocodile infested river, I always tell People, when someone’s standing on the edge of the precipice and they want to cross the crocodile infested river, the one who’s going to help them is you. You have your boat and your boat has crocodile disintegrating lasers and GPS navigation and whatever. And the most important part of that boat is this you got to be the captain. And as the captain, you have perspective, you’ve been across the river before you have a story and that perspective is such an important part of the value you bring to the world.

 

Dave Bricker  50:30  

But our role is to be the guide in the story, they have to be the hero of the story. So if they just pay us to ferry them across, they don’t grow, they don’t learn from the journey. They’re a few dollars shorter, and they go on their way. And there’s a place for that, we talk about stuff that people, I bet you’re in the same place living the way you do you get stuck in a do it yourself loop and hours later, you think, I could have paid somebody to do this. And I could have been out of here three days earlier for a lot less money. But we want to take charge of things. But it’s so important to encourage the people we work with, to become a captain to become a navigator. And sometimes they lose a leg or something to a crocodile. But you know what ultimately a better journey for them than if we just picked them up in our balloon and buried them gently across.

 

Richard Matthews  51:33  

Yeah, absolutely. And my favorite part about the whole thing with teaching people that their story is valuable is once people sort of realize it, once they realize that their story is valuable. It’s sort of like a magical moment when people realize that, hey, my story actually can help someone else. And one of my favorite quotes, I can’t remember the guy who says it. But you need to find what makes you come alive and go do that because the world needs more people who’ve come alive. And it’s all sort of in that space of learning how to tell your story. And when you find out how to tell your story, it helps someone else. That’s sort of a magical moment, that’s when at least I’ve found makes you feel like the most alive.

 

Dave Bricker  52:24  

Yeah, growing up as a pretty shy and introverted person who really thought that my story didn’t matter very much. Maybe that’s one of the things that actually drove me to go out and find bigger stories, because I didn’t think that my pretty much mainstream American life, that wasn’t a very satisfying story to me. And so I went out and did some things. But what I’ve come to realize, especially working with executives, and people like that, is we create this story in our head that executives and celebrities and people in power are so confident and they have everything together. And they’re so in control. Another aspect of the human condition is that we all battle the demons of self-doubt. We all are subject to self doubt, to imposter syndrome, and all of this. And this is the universal human condition. And when we allow ourselves to get stuck in that quicksand, I think that’s what’s preventing us from having that big story. Now people say, Oh, you sailed across the ocean, I could never do that. That’s just terrifying. Weren’t you afraid? I don’t have the guts to do that. I’ll say well, how many hours a day do you expect you spend on the expressway and say, well, an hour to an hour from work? Okay, that’s 10 hours a day. So you’re spending 500 hours a year on the expressway, and you think crossing the Atlantic Ocean is dangerous. Maybe you’re stuck in your story. Because of the statistical odds of survival between sailing across the ocean, which hundreds of people do every year, or spending 500 hours driving on the expressway, forget it, there’s no comparison. If the stories that we tell ourselves that begin with the words What if? And we use our imaginations to hold us back instead of propel ourselves forward. Notice the clever use of we.

 

Richard Matthews  54:33  

I tell people all the time that what if is one of the most important questions you’ll ever ask yourself. And if you ask it right, and you start thinking about it correctly, you know, what if there was a school for Witchcraft and Wizardry, maybe you might create the first billion dollar author? And it’s such a powerful question to ask yourself. What if we change this? What if we change that? That’s how I tell people to develop products too as you look at, what’s a common problem people are having? How are they teaching it? What if you change something? What if you brought your perspective to bear on that problem?

 

Dave Bricker  55:13  

But the dark side of the force, which is, what if we fail? What if we die? What if we get hurt? What if we spend years trying to achieve this? And we don’t make it? What if, you know, Oh, I love to ask her out and have a relationship. But what if she breaks up with me and breaks my heart? It’s like, what if, what if? So what if is a powerful question, but you have to be careful. It’s a double edged sword.

 

Richard Matthews  55:46  

I love the dark side of it, too. So I tell people that because the dark side of the what if question is just as powerful. Because it’s in that future pacing, because what you’re doing is your future pacing yourself. What if we change this? What if we move something? And if you’re going on to the dark side of it, what if I do this, and we end up on the side of the road? And I can’t take care of my family, we don’t have a house? And like all those things happen? What if those things happen? Then you have to ask yourself the next question, what do I do next? And you realize because your brain wants to take it to the extremes. And when you go to the extremes with them, you realize, hey, even if we get to the extremes, I have an idea, at least of how I can take it to the next step and the bad side of the what if’s become less scary, because you’ve acknowledged them. And then you’re probably not gonna end up on the best side of the what if’s, but you’re probably not gonna end up on the worst side of the what if’s, either. So you’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle. And it gives you the inspiration to move forward and actually take the next step in your own story.

 

Dave Bricker  56:46  

My friend and mentor, Brewster Keller gave me a wonderful lesson when I was really getting started in the speaking business. And I was saying, Well, what am I going to do if I blow one of my lines? And what am I going to do if I’m speaking and the projector bulb goes out, or there’s a power failure or, and he stopped me said, guess what, all of those things are going to happen to you at some point, it’s not if they’re going to happen, they’re going to happen, expect them to happen, be cool when they do and celebrate them as rites of passage, none of those things are going to kill you. And you know what, it’s come to pass, I’ve had all sorts of stuff. And I can actually be in two places in my head, like, Okay, I’m on the platform giving a presentation. And my remote control stops working, or the slides don’t work, or something glitches, and you know what it’s like? Yes. It’s like, here it is, I’ve got an awkward situation. And I’m just gonna work it out, figure out a way to muddle through. And there we go. Because the audience doesn’t care about your technology. But if they see you being cool under pressure, they understand they’re all terrified to be doing what you’re doing. And they see you coming through it. That’s sometimes a bigger and more powerful lesson than whatever you happen to be blabbering about at that particular moment.

 

Richard Matthews  58:09  

Yeah, and one of the common questions we get all the time is like, what about all the things that go wrong when you’re traveling and you realize that like, we tell people now even travel for years, like literally because people are like, oh, we’re considering traveling full time, as you guys do? What’s your advice? My advice always is, everything that you think is going to go wrong is going to go wrong, and more so than you think. Yeah, embrace it. Embrace it, like literally, everything’s gonna break.

 

Dave Bricker  58:35  

Nobody ever had an adventure where everything went, right.

 

Richard Matthews  58:40  

That’s a good way to put it too. It’s not an adventure if everything went right.

 

Dave Bricker  58:44  

Exactly.

 

Richard Matthews  58:46  

We just did the thing. And everything went well. We came back and it was all hunky dory. That’s not a story. 

 

Dave Bricker  58:50  

What’s the best story is Oh, we went camping. And it was a beautiful day, we got the tent set up, and then the clouds rolled in, and it rained and it rained and it rained and it got cold at night. And then, we heard growling around the tent and the mosquitoes showed up. And I mean, what’s funnier than the disaster camping trip story. Nobody wants to hear the one where you set up your tent, set by the lake and went fishing and had a nice meal and went home? Who cares?

 

Richard Matthews  59:19  

The adversity that makes life I call it the texture and contrast of life.

 

Dave Bricker  59:23  

Yeah, go and find the trouble and get out of it.

 

Richard Matthews  59:29  

So I want to talk a little bit about your common enemy. Speaking of things that go wrong, every superhero has an arch nemesis. It’s the thing they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business. It takes a lot of forms, but generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients. Someone hires you and says, Hey, I want to help with my storytelling. What is a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly having to fight against to overcome so that you can actually get them the results that you promised in the first place? If you had your magic wand and you could take your client as soon as they hired you and bop them on the head and not have to deal with That anymore. What is that common enemy, that arch nemesis that you have to deal with?

 

Dave Bricker  1:00:05  

I find that there are some people who want to tell everybody it’s like a badge of honor, oh, I have a personal trainer. But they’re not really working hard at their workout. And for people who want a presentation coach or a messaging coach, sometimes they want to be able to tell somebody that they have this person attached to them, but they’re not willing to listen to them. They’re not willing to fight with them. And it’s sort of like clients who hire you to be a designer and tell you what colors to use and what fonts to use. Essentially, I have no patience for people who hire professionals, and then tell them what to do. And it’s not that you have to accept everything that we say as gospel challenge it. But some people just aren’t coachable. Because no, I’ve always done it this way. Thanks for the input, Dave. But this is the way I want to do it. And you’re thinking of 10 reasons why did you hire me? Yeah. I mean, I’ve got people who value my input. So just to have me, I mean, the money is nice, but I won’t keep a client like that for very long. Look, it’s a collaboration, whether we’re working on a book or a speech, it’s all about tough love going in both directions. And we put on our softest gloves, and we hit each other as hard as we can. And it’s fighting for the high ground where no, no, no, I really, I need to say this in some way. And then we find another way, we can spend an hour talking about a sentence, and then other times the pages just flow by. But in the end, everybody feels like yeah, this is good. feel good about this. We’ve got the message. Yeah. So it’s ultimately, I think that the people I’m fighting with are the people who say they want a teacher, but they’re not willing to learn. They’re not willing to participate in the process, their egos are too fragile to withstand feedback and input. And if the story they’re stuck in is that they’re already perfect, I have no reason to dissuade them from that belief, life will do that for me.

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:29  

And then they’ll come back at some point. So it’s an interesting thing. I know, I’ve dealt with that myself. And we’re in the coaching space, I don’t do a lot of coaching anymore. But the one that has always bothered me is in the graphic design space, which you mentioned, we did that in the past with a lot of website building, and he put things together, and then they come back and they’d be like, I don’t like that. I want it to be this way. And you’d be like, but you see like I do this for a living. And if you do it that way things are going to break. Yeah. Like it’s not going to get you on, and they want to fight you on it.

 

Dave Bricker  1:03:06  

Yeah. Or I know your global organization, but globes and swooshes are the two most cliche elements you could possibly put in a logo. And do you want to look distinct and unique? Or do you want to look like you put $5 in the logo Matic and got what it sent you? You know, it’s like you don’t hire a designer and then art direct. And you know what, you don’t even really, ideally you will but what if you don’t like how the thing works, how it looks? It’s okay, as long as your clients and customers do. It’s a business instrument. We’re not decorating your bedroom.

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:42  

Yeah, it’s not about you.

 

Dave Bricker  1:03:46  

Yeah, it’s about serving your clients. And I worked with a big pharma company once and worked with this vice president who was the one who brought me on, and he was great. And I showed him a design for something I’ll never forget. He said, Dave, I can’t say I love this. And it’s certainly not what I would have thought of. They said I trust you. If you think this is a design that’s going to work, then I say we go with it. And I thought that was just wonderful leadership. Here’s a guy who’s vice president of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company, but his attitude is, we brought talent and expertise on board. We’re paying good money for that talent. The stupidest thing we could do is second guess that talent.

 

Richard Matthews  1:04:33  

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Richard Matthews  1:06:06  

I want to move on a little bit and talk about your driving force. So if your common enemy is the arch nemesis is what you fight against, your driving force is what you fight for. So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you fight for with the story sailing?

 

Dave Bricker  1:06:27  

Interesting question, what do I fight for at story sailing? There is ultimately when you get rid of all of these veneers of expectations and self doubt, you arrive at a certain undeniable authenticity. And I think above all, what I find more rewarding than the money or any of it is watching somebody discover that and become that larger version of themselves that they were always afraid to be. And I’ve done that as an editor. But as a presentation coach, I can do in hours what it takes me months to do, working with probes and getting somebody to that next level. And I love watching somebody come in at their feet and give you a limp noodle handshake because they’re so pathologically shy, and three months later, they’re up on the platform, and they’re gesturing in there that it’s like something comes out of them that they were always afraid to let out. And helping people find that light within themselves is the most rewarding thing in the world. To me, I think it’s an experience that too few people have. And some people will find it through presentation and some people find it through dancing and some people will find it through playing the cello. It’s not that people have to work with me on presentation skills but find some way to express yourself and work with some mentor who will help you rediscover your big.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:05  

Yeah, your authentic self. I love the idea of something that’s undeniably authentic, which is what you said a minute ago. And the thing that strikes me about it is that I was just I was on a podcast last night I was on Addressing Gettysburg, which is a cool podcast about history and whatnot, because we were saying in Gettysburg and I got to go on their podcast, but one of the things that we were talking about is people have a finely tuned bullshit meter. Where if the story details for whatever it is don’t line up, we don’t trust the story. So we know when something is not authentic when the story doesn’t make sense. And when you are not living your authentic self and not living, you know, being undeniably authentic, that shows other people see it. And so it’s hard to connect with them and hard to have that sort of next level.

 

Dave Bricker  1:09:05  

I’m interrupting you, but I remember being a little kid and my father took me to the movie theater to see 2001 A Space Odyssey and at some point in the movie says why is there sound in space? He messed me up for life.

 

Richard Matthews  1:09:20  

That’s accurate, right? The bullshit meter is hard to fool. And so better than trying to fool it is to learn how to be authentic. So yeah, I love that idea that what you’re fighting for is to help people become undeniably authentic with themselves.

 

Dave Bricker  1:09:42  

That makes the world a better place.

 

Richard Matthews  1:09:46  

So I’m going to skip forward to talk a little bit about your guiding principles. One of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies he only ever takes them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview on Talk about the top one or two principles you use regularly in your life, maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

 

Dave Bricker  1:10:08  

But one of my principles is it’s easier to humor a fool than it is to argue with him. It doesn’t need a lot of explanation. But sometimes people just get caught up in meaningless rules and grids and things like that. And you just have to say yes and not necessarily engage them, because that’s the story they’re stuck in, and you’re not going to get them unstuck because they’re going to cling to that story no matter what. And so it’s easier to humor a fool than it is to argue with him. And of course, it’s easier to beg forgiveness than it is to ask permission. Now, I’m not saying ignore all the rules, but hey, you got one life to live right. As far as we know, maybe we’ll find out different at some point. But I’m counting on this one, because I’ve got it and I’m experiencing it, and I’m pretty sure it’s real.

 

Richard Matthews  1:11:02  

It might be a simulation, you never know.

 

Dave Bricker  1:11:04  

You know, they’re. again, all of these people who will say you can’t do that. Don’t do that. You’re gonna I mean, how many people you’re going to take off in an RV with your family, you’re throwing your life away, people say all sorts of things to you, right? Try it while sailing, oh, how can you do this? Whatever it is, it just challenges people’s reality. And you know what? Sometimes you just have to go live life and do what you’re going to do and make your own rules. So I find those two Maxim’s work pretty well together. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:11:37  

One of the things I found with that second rule is that most of the time, when someone tells you, you can’t do that, or you shouldn’t do that. They’re not talking to you. Right? They’re trying to defend their own life choices.

 

Dave Bricker  1:11:50  

Exactly.

 

Richard Matthews  1:11:51  

And so they’re projecting something on you that’s in themselves. And that realization was something that was really helpful to give myself permission to break rules. Because there’s a lot of things about, you know, you’re 35 years old, and you have four children, you should have a corner house in a suburban lot with your basement like that, you know, those are expectations. But they’re not hard and fast rules for how you can live your life. You can choose to live your life the way that you want. 

 

Dave Bricker  1:12:22  

And you ultimately have to.

 

Richard Matthews  1:12:25  

Yeah, people who tell you, you can’t are talking to themselves, not you.

 

Dave Bricker  1:12:31  

And the third maxim, it’s interesting, I find usually to apply to a friend of mine who gave me this one many years ago is that a mule will wait 20 years to kick you once. And it isn’t to say that you should necessarily hold grudges and wait for your chance to kick people. But sometimes you’re best, watching the situation, watching the stories that people are stuck in, watching the narrative that swirls around you, and just wait for your opportunity. Because if you’re reactive, if you just engage with whatever is causing the flashing yellow light to appear on your bullshitometer, then you’re going to get caught up in that scenario. And sometimes it’s like, you know what, just keep hauling that heavy pack, just keep walking down the trail, you’re going to get your chance, be patient, don’t get sucked into the Malstrom of BS that’s going on around you.

 

Richard Matthews  1:13:34  

I like that. The whole reactive thing when my sort of metaphor for the same thing is the between stimulus and response. There’s a choice. And most people when they have received a stimulus, they just respond. And if you learn to separate those things, that’s where you have the patients. You can choose your responses. And I think your life is more fun to live when you learn how to separate those two.

 

Dave Bricker  1:13:58  

Unquestionably.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:00  

Awesome. So that is basically a wrap on our interview. But I do finish all of my interviews with a simple challenge I call the Hero’s challenge. I do this basically to get access to stories I might not be able to find on my own because not everyone is out looking to be hosted on podcasts. So they questions simple Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they, first names are fine? Why do you think they should come to share their story with us on the hero show?

 

Dave Bricker  1:14:28  

Well, I’m sorry I’m limited to only one because I have been very good at surrounding myself with some fellow superheroes to keep your metaphor going. But a dear friend of mine has been Dr. Margarita Gurri the Red Shoe Doctor. She’s at Dr. Red Shoe.com. She is a Ph.D. psychologist. She speaks on a number of topics including ethics. She’s very funny. She has a wonderful story. of coming to the US long ago with her family as a Cuban exile, sneaking out of Castro’s Cuba, arriving in the US not speaking in English, she speaks perfect English now. She’s just funny and upbeat and full of humor and good messages and one of my girlfriends in life and I think she floats very close to the top of the list of people who would be a wonderful guest on your show.

 

Richard Matthews  1:15:31  

Awesome. We’ll reach out afterward, see if we can get connected to her. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering on the acts of heroism for the hero, so are analogous to that, as we close is where can people find you? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and say, Hey, you know what, Dave, I would really like to get your help learning to tell stories. I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to reach out and ask for your help.

 

Dave Bricker  1:15:58  

First of all, I have a website at story sailing.com, that’s SAILING story sailing.com. That’s my main website. And then I also have subscription content about presentation skills. And you can find that at 52speakingblunders.com. And that’s a video in your inbox every week. It’s extremely affordable, available for subscription content, for three to five minutes every week. And I’ve had a lot of fun putting those together. So those are my principal contact points. And as far as who should contact me, I work with business leaders a lot with entrepreneurs, occasionally with politicians, I work with people who want to polish a TED talk message, things like that. I’ve done well, with some people climbing the ladder in the World Championship of public speaking, one of my protegees hit the semi-finals, top 35 out of 30,000 last year, and we’re working to see if we can get a little closer to that trophy this year. But that’s for coaching, things like that. And then when it comes to organizations, managers, sales teams, customer service teams, anybody who is a professional speaker, and by that I mean, who speaks to other people as part of their profession, not that they’re necessarily up on a platform in front of a stadium, but they’re facing clients. So it could be a realtor who drives people around all day, it could be a CEO, who’s terrified because they’ve got to give an address to their 500 employees at the company meeting that’s going to be live and in person again, coming up. And that’s exciting. But now they get to get back on the platform. And people make fun of them every year because they’re the big boss, but they can’t speak their way out of a wet paper bag with the instructions written on the inside, and they know it. So whatever it is, people who want to build that leadership credibility, or people who want to teach their teams, the art of engagement.

 

Richard Matthews  1:18:16  

It’s a wide swath of people. So if you’re in that space, and you need help telling your stories definitely take the time to reach out to Dave. I know personally, learning to become a better storyteller has been one of the best decisions I ever made in my business. So I’d recommend if you know, that’s the struggle yours reach out to Dave and take the time to hire someone who’s trained to teach you how to tell better stories. And then my last question for you, Dave, do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before we hit this stop record button?

 

Dave Bricker  1:18:46  

Yeah, whatever your message is, start with the transformation. Don’t start with what you want to say. Start with how you want them to be. Work your way backward from the transformation. And you will pass from your introduction to your conclusion.

 

Richard Matthews  1:19:06  

That’s the escape and arrival. That’s what I call it, so you get someone from one side to the other. For whatever your transformation is, so again, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Dave, I really enjoyed our conversation, and we will talk to you soon.

 

Dave Bricker  1:19:20  

 

Richard, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to be here.