26 Jun Illuminate Your Story with the World

If you were to ask Nancy Duarte what her story was and how it was going, she’d most likely answer, “There has so much that has happened that I think it’s kind of exciting” and she has chronicled the journey of leadership through a new book she’s co-authored called Illuminate.

Nancy will also tell you that, as a leader herself, she didn’t always know where her firm was going. 

It’s with this in mind she has advice for new entrepreneurs and organizations just starting out.

It All Starts With a Dream

And doesn’t it always feel that way? That’s what the first phase of venture scape is. You have this dream, and I think that the dream has to be coupled with passion because it takes a lot of determination to be an entrepreneur. Just because you have the dream doesn’t mean it’s going to come into existence.

You Declare the Dream

Once you declare it, that starts a whole lot of things into motion, the venture scape that we created, which is the five-stage story process for any initiative. You can use it for the launch of a startup.

The Five Stages

The five stages are…

If you have a dream, the next step is the leap, which means getting people to commit and jump into it with you, but then it’s a fight. It’s a bloody battle, and then after you’re bloodied and battled and bruised and you can’t even know if you can keep going with this thing that was dreamed. But now your dream is fading because the monsters were bigger than you thought, you finish the fight phase, then you have to climb out of this great big pit, and you’re wounded.

You say to yourself, “What the heck just happened?”

It’s like that middle of the story, you know then you arrive, but it’s the middle of the story in the movies. That’s where the car chases happen, that you get shot, you’re limping back to your car and then your car crashes and you almost die. That’s the best part of any movie.

Yet, when we’re going through it ourselves as entrepreneurs, it is not the most exciting thing ever.

It’s hard.

So for Nancy, storytelling became a coping mechanism for life, where sometimes she’s jarred and feel like that’s right in the middle of the story and the story will resolve.

You could actually use that model as a coping mechanism for endurance and bravery, which every entrepreneur needs.

The struggle is real and and can be the hardest to get through, but it’s also what people want to hear. They want to resonate with your struggle to understand their own struggle.

Motivating others to embrace big dreams and drive them forward isn’t easy. But when you understand how people experience change and empathize with how it feels to them, you can connect with and communicate to them more effectively.

Get a sneak peek at the five stages of every transformation, the communication toolkit, and how a few of history’s greatest communicators transformed the world.

Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Huffington Post, LA Times and on CNN. She is the CEO of Duarte, Inc., and her firm is the global leader behind some of the most influential presentations in business and culture, and has created more than a quarter of a million presentations. Nancy has spoken at numerous conferences including TEDx, South by Southwest, Inbound, and World Domination Summit. She speaks at business schools and lectures at Stanford University several times a year.

She is the author of three award-winning books: Slide:ology, Resonate, the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, and co-author of Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols.