Tag Archives: story

Why One Central Truth is vital for your key message

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One Central Truth is the crux of good storytelling
No matter what the medium, we can only tell a single story at a time. Find your One Central Truth of your message. Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

The goal of any story is to have a reader, view or listener get the point…quickly and easily.

It doesn’t matter whether the story is the reason why we’re late for a meeting or the moral behind an Aesop Fable. Someone is telling someone else what happened.

The core idea of your said or read words needs to be self-evident.

It is no different for our business story – the first item read on a website, the take home message from a speech.

But too often businesses try to cram in two, three, four or more points – to no avail. In these cases we struggle to remember one key idea, let alone many.

Telling one story, well, is the key to having customers remember enough to repeat it.

Unearthing the One Central Truth (OCT) of your business purpose is the secret to creating you first, most important story.

Trying to brainstorm your way to your company’s OCT is a false methodology. All brainstorming does is create a fictitious story.

Only questioning, deep questioning, can reveal the single key idea on which your story can hang.

Look, deeply, at and for your One Central Truth, and your business storytelling will in turn come quickly and easily.

Keywords according to Google do not a story make

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Trying to tell a story with key words according to Google is inauthentic. Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

Google’s pretty useful. It is difficult to imagine the internet without its all-pervasive presence.

But trying to overly appeal to its search algorithm is an ugly way to craft your first story.

Indeed, if one of the ultimate truth tests of your primary message is to respond to “what do you do?”, then attempting to seed your answer with what appeals to Google is a doomed strategy.

This is because our brains are wired for story, and we delight in understanding such expressions – as short as our first one must be.

Sure, part of the first statement read on your website might include your ‘what’, which may be a keyword.

But, just as importantly, you’re also providing a ‘why’ for a potential customer. And this is not necessarily a term the world’s largest search engine is on the hunt for.

The other danger in chasing keywords for your H1 statement, is such a story will look and sound inauthentic.

You’re better off telling your true story, succinctly and poetically, and appeal to real people’s sensibilities.

Then you can use other parts of your copy to appeal to Google’s process.

A business is invariably many stories…but you can tell only one

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A business can only tell one story as its first story Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Any business could create its narrative from many different objective viewpoints

We all, as a business have different stories, different parts of our whole.

But we can tell only one.

Deconstructing your business to find your One Central Truth is necessary to unearth who you are.

A Million Dollar Message emerges from a structured chaos to reveal a ‘what and a why’ story, fit for purpose.

All a business’s other stories can be developed with its first, most important story acting as a North Star.

These 2-10 words as the basis for the escalator (going in different directions) answer to ‘what do you do’, as well as being an encapsulating story on a business card.

This one story is a lodestone for all internal and external message – one story, told very well.