Winning Attention: Dale vs. The Hero
We are living in the attention economy and many people are now being led to believe that we have to share stories of heroic characters to break through the noise and connect to a larger audience.
Is this true?
If so, what happens to the millions of everyday people and marginalized voices who have important stories to share? What happens when we are always looking up at heroes and not paying attention to the challenges that exist for those of us who do not find ourselves represented in the spotlight?
Do you have to make heroes or villains the center of the story to be seen and heard?
THE HERO’S JOURNEY
The Hero’s Journey has garnered an almost mythic place in the imaginations of storytellers around the world. This story structure itself has taken on a degree of magical realism.
Tellers think if I can just tell my story using the Hero’s Journey I’ll find an audience who will buy my product or adopt my ideas.
It feels epic. The story structure itself has taken on a myth of necessary. If I don’t tell my story in a heroic way my voice will be lost. I’ll fail.
YOUR AUDIENCE AS THE HERO
In recent years the hero has had a twist, now marketers make their audience the hero of the story.
The sentiment behind this advice has some truth. It is true that many small businesses and tech companies focus their marketing on the product itself rather than the benefits to the end customer.
But this way of marketing doesn’t speak to the customer who needs to know what is in it for them. They buy to satisfy a need. You have to let them know how you are going to satisfy this need.
So I get it, talk from their perspective.
But putting your audience in the place of the hero? That goes beyond framing your message in terms they can understand. That puts the audience in a place of seeing themselves as winning only when they buy your product.
The Hero’s Journey is based on black and white thinking, and on the us versus them mindset where you are led to only one result. And if get the product, use the service, the story shows you living a life of happy ever after. It is fiction. A false narrative.
The story structure itself is based on mechanisms of fear. These black and white options trigger our human flight, flight, freeze nervous system and when these systems are online, our thinking brain is offline.
REALITY, AS USUAL, IS MORE COMPLICATED
Or course, as with most things in life, there is almost always more than one available solution.
When we are in flight, fright, freeze, however, we don’t see it.
We are not in school where if we fill in the wrong bubble, make the wrong choice, we fail and suffer a string of never-ending negative consequences.
Life is full of alternative bubbles that work.
This is why decision making is so tough. It is not that we get it wrong and we fail and fall into oblivion. It is that we have so many choices that might work but we want to find the one choice that works the best for us not and in the future.
GENUINE ATTENTION: DALE
As of late, I’ve been spending my free time watching YouTubers talk about their favorite books.
Recently I heard multiple YouTubers mention the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Growing up I saw this book on my family bookshelf and for some reason, even before high school I thought to myself, this book seems ingenuine. The title seemed like false advertising, like clickbait of its time (before the web). It was a book I avoided then forgot about.
The fact that years later lots of young people were mentioning this book, well, it made me decide to check it out.
To my surprise, the book was written in the 1930s. To my even bigger surprise, the information in the book was quite applicable to our times today.
Here is one piece of advice,
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
This is so strange, my work is about taking time to understand your intention as well as the intention of your audience, along with both your and your audience’s influence. I feel a connection between what I’m trying to say and what Carnegie said so many decades ago.
MARKETING IN THE 1930s
That quote is saying, put yourself in your audience’s shoes.
I think this is what some of the storytellers selling the idea of the Hero’s Journey aim to convey but then they are upping the emotional ante by making them heroes.
Emotional manipulation is not a new tactic. It’s something that was implemented at a mass scale in the 1920s by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmond Freud. I first learned of Bernays from Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary, Century of the Self. Part of the four-part series opens with this reflection.
“Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.”
Bernays was advocating public relations-based psychological manipulation. He called his technique, engineering of consent.
Carnegie, writing at the same time, was advocating honesty and respect.
In the Hero’s Journey, there is a right way and a wrong way to do something. There are enemies. There is one solution.
The storytelling that Carnegie advocates has no simple framework. Instead, it is based on 30 principles. Including principles like: Be a good listener; become genuinely interested in people; show respect for the other person’s opinions; try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
THERE IS ALWAYS MORE THAN ONE SOLUTION
Hero’s Journey touted as THE SOLUTION for capturing the hearts and minds of your audience.
In researching some of the most powerful talks on the TED platform I came to a different understanding.
In spite of claims to the contrary, none of these talks employed the Hero’s Journey.
They employ what I’ve come to call the Empowered Journey. And this is a journey that is quite the opposite of the Hero’s Journey.
It is a journey based on finding common ground and sharing a common goal.
The empowered journey is based on a deep understanding of the audience, their assumptions, their influences, their objection. The journey is about looking at a problem and examining the causes and solutions. It is a journey to a common view of what is possible moving forward.
The objective is to present a starting point from which you and your audience can imagine forward and take action towards a better possible future.
The hero’s journey lands you with one solution. You get to The End. Buy this product and you’ll find love. Join this program and you’ll make the money of your dreams. This is fantasy.
Dale Carnegie emphasizes ways we can connect with our fellow humans based on respect. These are the actions that help establish empathy, understanding and sharing of the feelings of others.
When you have empathy, you can find that common ground.
How can you find empathy? By asking questions.
Ask the right question, the question others are asking and you have a place to start your story. Share a specific experience and you have a way of grounding your ideas in the imaginations of your audience, letting them feel and experience the question you have and giving them access to that understanding from their own, unique perspective.
TOP 25 TED TALKS & THE EMPOWERED JOURNEY
Questions have the potential to spark our imagination. Questions are a place to establish common ground, given that both parties are curious about the question asked.
Of the top 25 TED Talks as of January 2021, eleven of those talks start with a question. The other 14 establish common ground through a specific experience and feeling that led to a question.
Audiences connect with human experiences. They connect with questions.
We are all trying to make sense of the world, to build meanings, and questions are an amazing entry point into a discussion of what is working.
The scientists, academics, thinkers who share their talks on the TED stage are building common ground and sharing a common wish and common goal. They are employing the Empowered Journey.
Like the format of Dale Carnegie’s book itself, which is built upon the question, How to Win Friends and Influence People and is answered through a series of short stories that exemplify what is working and what is not working, the speakers on the TED stage give examples of what worked and what didn’t work as they searched for a deeper understanding of the question that captured their attention for years if not decades of their lives as they worked to understand the solution to the question that haunted them. These speakers share the context behind what they learned. Rather than elevating and evading different realities, they reveal the nuances of what they’ve discovered.
The Hero’s Journey leaves us with one answer and feelings of inadequacy if we are not living up to that one solution, one way, one result.
The Empowered Journey is about inclusion and possibility. It is based on inspiring us to think bigger, explore new ways of seeing the world, and of being in the world.
I think as a collective society it can be worthwhile if more of us visit the principals in Carnegie’s book and implement them in our marketing and storytelling, moving away from the singularity of the Hero’s Journey.
There are many ways to capture someone’s attention. Starting on common ground can be a powerful way to captivate your audience and feel good about doing so.
MORE IN THE SERIES
Why the Hero’s Journey Isn’t for Everyone
What if Our Stories are Dividing Our World