Pete Mockaitis
Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Sharma
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat storytelling. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and story over the course of the last 20 years.

Anjali Sharma
I think the most wonderful thing about storytelling is that, no matter where you go, there is room for storytelling everywhere, whether you go into someone’s life, whether you go into someone’s work, whether you go into relationships with your family, but the most effective storytelling is the one that actually really deep dives into a particular domain.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that what I used to think, roughly about 12 years ago about storytelling is, storytelling is everything, it’s everywhere, and that was the beauty of it, but it was also the disadvantage of it, because you could start telling stories to people who work in corporations, which is where I largely kind of played the work that I do, and they would be like, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but how does it matter to me?”

So, I think the hyper-target-ness of the story is what makes it resonate, where people listen to it, and go, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly what happens to me.” That thing that people say can only come when you really target the story to the audience that you’re telling the story to. Stories are great, but the best storytellers know how to flex their narrative according to who they’re telling the story to. So, I think my biggest discovery was that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us a really quick example of what’s a generic story that’s not really going to “wow” someone versus what is that same story sound like in a micro-targeted way?

Anjali Sharma
Okay. So, I think I’d like to sort of make a little correction to that because, even though the story can go “wow,” we don’t tell just for them to be like, “Wow.” We want people to get up and take an action, and it is not necessary that whatever I will say “wow” to, I will actually act upon. I’ll demonstrate this to you.

So, say I want people to challenge the status quo for better innovation, and I say, “You know, we must challenge the status quo,” and I tell them the story of the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and Anita Roddick tells this story. She’s no more, but when she was around, she told this story to a magazine interview in which she says that, “When I was all of 12 years old, I remember the day when my father passed away, and my mother, in the house, was cleaning the floor, and there was this bucket of dirty water next to her.”

“And she looked quite sort of anxious and stressed, but a large part of her anxiety and stress was coming from the fact that my parents didn’t get along with the local priest, and she wasn’t sure that my father was going to get a Catholic funeral or not. And a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and my mother opened the door, and the priest was standing there. And the priest looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re very lucky. We’ve decided to give your husband a Catholic funeral.’”

“And my mother picked up the dirty water and splashed it onto the priest. Now when you’re brought up with a mother like that, you would challenge status quo.” Because for her, as a Catholic, it was right to get her father to get that funeral. It wasn’t a favor that the priest was doing.

Now, a lot of people get moved by that story, and they go, “Wow,” and “Amazing.” But as soon as you walk out of that place where I have told you the story, you’re walking out with a colleague of yours, you would say, “It’s a lovely story, but if I did that to my boss, I just, you know, I don’t think I’ll have my job. I’ll lose my job,” right?

So, a lot of the stories get, like, “Amazing,” but they don’t get an action in the right direction. Therefore, you have to choose the story very, very correctly because a job of a corporate professional is to remember that, more important than the re-marketability of the story, that this is an amazing story, is the resonance of the story. Resonance of the story will drive an action. Remarkability will give you claps.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That’s a really handy distinction, and I think it’s possible to go a whole lifetime without making that distinction because the claps feel good, you say, “I’m a master storyteller. People, they cry, they applaud, they tell me I’m amazing.” If you’re a speaker, they keep telling their friends, “And I keep getting booked.” But in terms of, if you’re being after a specific activity or action from your audience, that’s not adequate.

Anjali Sharma
Certainly. So, my success in a corporate world is not determined by the amount of claps and tears I get in a boardroom. It’s determined by how I moved people to take the action in the right direction and how much innovation we get, how we enhance the productivity, how we motivate people to come up with the best possible campaign next. So, I think that’s a very important distinction. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I guess, specifically that context, in terms of if you’re just looking to make phenomenal content that gets a lot of podcast downloads or even if it’s like a full-blown movie or something, then a wow can be fine. But if we’re after a particular action on the part of the people we’re telling it to, then, yes, that’s one key thing to look out for, is, “Can they receive that? Is it relatable?”

So, lay it on us, how do we go through a process by which we can craft stories that are effective at bringing about the action-taking we’d like from the people we’re telling the stories to?

Anjali Sharma
So, we’ve kind of, over the last 12 years or so, tried to make this approach extremely practical, simply because of the reason that, if I walked into a corporate boardroom and I asked people, or into any workspace and asked people, it’s like, “What is it that is your biggest challenge?” almost everyone will say time, right? 

The really traditional format of story and the creative format of story that actually relies on high character, high emotions, kind of built over time, you write, you go away, you let your creative juices flow. In corporations and workplaces, we don’t have time. So, the way I look at it is like this. Before even you tell a story, I say to people, the audience that you’re talking to, first determine, “Are you influencing them or you are inspiring them?” Those are two very different things. I mean, if I’m going to be speaking to the board or I’m going to be speaking to the senior leadership team. I need to influence them. But if I’m speaking in a town hall and getting 450 staff members to join an AI-upskilling program, then I need to inspire them.

So, the key way to differentiate whether I’m inspiring or influencing is, “Am I asking these people to take an action that affects many people? Or am I asking them to take an action that just affects them?” If it is affecting many people, like, “Let’s adopt that, buy that new technology,” it’s going to affect many people. That’s an influence decision.

But if I’m asking people to go and join this one-week upskilling AI hackathon that we’ve got, then that’s an individual’s decision that I’m going to go and join it, right? It’s a little bit like getting people to be fit, getting people to read more. These are individual decisions. I’m not disrupting an ecosystem. It’s my individual decision. Those are primarily inspirational messages.

So, very simply, “How do I target the story right?” You first think, “Am I influencing? Am I inspiring?” If I’m influencing, I’m asking people to take an action, make a decision around things that sort of influences, has an effect on many people. But if it’s an inspirational message, it’s likely to be an individual who’s going to have to take that action.

Okay, once I’ve determined that, very simply, I go, “If it is inspiration, then I have to give them a nudge to a new identity.” Because what we often do is we give people goals, but I learned this from James Clear in his book, the Atomic Habits, and then I’ve brought that learning into storytelling.

When we talk about goals, for example. Writing a book is a goal. But why do people write a book? Because they want to be called authors. That’s a new identity they want for themselves. Running a marathon is a goal, but being called a marathoner is an identity. People want to be known like that.

So, when you are developing an inspirational message, you have to give nudge to a new identity. If I bring it down to the corporate world, I’ll give you another example. When I bring it down to the corporate world, we worked on a program back in 2016 where we were asked to build a story around a factory that was going to become a smart factory with automation, robotics, etc.

And the whole proposition of that story was productivity, and I was like, “This is not going to work for people on the ground. This is not inspirational for them,” right? So, we built a new identity for them – supervisors of robots. Because somebody’s got to program them, somebody’s got to charge them, somebody’s got to roster them, and “Do you want to be the supervisors of robots?” And that was inspirational for them.

So, that’s how you kind of look at an inspirational message. And then when you come towards the influence style of messaging, I think your hyper-target-ness comes from, really, looking at three areas. Most messages that are influential have a story that anchors on time, which is efficiency. So, can you make a proposition for being more efficient? Or, they come to an image or a reputation, which is, “Can this story help build better image or a reputation?”

And then, lastly, if you’re working for a profit-making company, which most people are, “Am I able to, through this story, save money or make money?” So, I often joke around and say, “What is the TIM you’re angling?” T-I-M, you know, time, image, money. So, if you want influential stories, story that influences, then time, image, money are my anchors. But if I’m building an inspirational story, then a nudge to a new identity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is a fantastic distinction between inspiring or influencing. And I’m reminded of, I think in my early days, I was doing consulting for a strategy consulting firm, Bain, and we would make these slides that were so dense with numbers, numbers, data, charts, all this stuff, and effectively we were influencing corporate executives and boards in terms of, “Take this course of action and you will see tremendous profit.”

Like, that was always, we talked a lot about our story, “What’s our story?” And, basically, that was always the story, like, “Hey, do this thing we say and you’re going to make a lot of money, if you boil it down.” And so, those slides had a whole lot of data, a whole lot of charts to paint a compelling picture that was, “Hey, here’s the proof, here’s the evidence, here’s the argumentation like a debate, that this is, in fact, the optimal pathway relative to your alternatives.”

But then, at the same time, on my downtime, I’d be watching TED Talks, and I think, “Man, their slides look so much cooler and more beautiful and inspiring than what we do.” I felt like we were sort of we spent all the time with these slides, and I thought they don’t feel as awesome as the TED Talker slides, “What’s up?”

And I think this is a really handy way to think about it. It’s like, we are attempting to accomplish completely different objectives. If you trot out 20 fancy data charts to your TED audience, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. That wasn’t very much fun for us. Thanks.” And vice versa, if I just showed a picture of a seed in a hand to a board, it’s like, “All right, I hope you’ve got some data coming because this isn’t going to cut it for long.”

Anjali Sharma
Exactly. Oh, my God, you sort of distilled it beautifully. And I love the fact that I have taken you back to some time in your career because that is exactly what resonance is. I’m reminding you of an experience you have already had. And when that happens, you know that what I’m saying is resonating with you. So, you’re absolutely right, the objectives are very, very different, and that’s where the hyper-target-ness works really well.

I’ll add one little piece of information. There’s always this sort of war between the technicality of what we do and the emotions that are embedded in the way we communicate. And what I have learned is that time, image, and money, although seems like a sort of a very transactional way of influencing. In fact, rooted in it is an emotional thing.

Look at that boardroom and see all those people who are seated there. Their next career move depends on whether they are making that company efficient, whether they’re making that company profitable, which is money, and whether they are protecting the reputation of the organization or not, or they’re building the reputation of the organization or not.

So, I used to think, “Why is it so transactional and so dry and distilled in influence area?” But then when I started looking at the people sitting there, I was like, “No, this is also emotional because their next career step is dependent on those three things. So, their connection comes from that.

Leaning upon the definition of connection from Dr. Brene Brown, the exchange of energy that happens when people feel seen, heard, and valued.

When those people sit in that boardroom and you tell them a story that anchors itself on time, image, and money, they feel seen, heard, and valued, because that is what their job is all day in and out, to make more profit for the company, to enhance the reputation image of the company, and to make sure they’re efficient all the time. An inspiration, a nudge to the identity, new identity, is what’s the connection for the person who’s listening to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonant. And it’s funny, like if you apply the same sort of debater, data-driven argumentation approach to be very compelling about a thing they don’t care about, and I’m not making value judgments either way, but if a board doesn’t care a hoot about climate change or whatever, and you have just fantastic statistics about the carbon emissions of a thing and how this pathway will be so much better, you may have proven that point excellently in terms of that’s a rock-solid, logical approach, but you haven’t hit upon a thing that they’re emotionally invested in, you’re not going to be successful in your attempt to influence.

Anjali Sharma
Hundred, hundred, hundred percent. You know, Pete, you’ve taken me back to 2018, when I went to Hiroshima, Japan for 18 months to make another semiconductor factory have increased level of diversity. So, Japan, obviously had a huge amount of skill shortage, I mean, still does, but that was becoming a huge issue at that time. And this factory was originally owned by Japanese owners, but an American company took over.

And they soon realized that, “If we don’t get more foreigners working here, if we don’t get more women working here, and if we don’t get younger people working in here, so it’s diversity of three different lenses, we’re not going to have any people, and the factory will have to shut down.” So, there was this whole proposition, imagine, that homogeneous culture of Japan, this proposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and everyone used to just kind of roll their eyes and they were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

And I had this vivid memory of one conversation between two senior leaders that I just happened to hear, who said, “Great, now we can make a compelling case of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we still don’t get what is its connection to the performance?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, like, what they really care about is the performance of the factory,” and then we have to find a way to connect the DEI proposition to the performance of the company.

And when we started to kind of figure how diversity, equity, and inclusion will help the performance of the company, every boardroom eye was curious, eager, willing, because it connected with them, and there was a direct correlation. We just needed to surface that and anchor the story in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I’ve learned that lesson a few times in terms of, “No, this is what you should care about. This is what is right and good and proper.” Like, that really falls flat, it’s like, “Okay, well, now I feel judged and I guess I don’t, so I am bad,” and I’m thinking about another manufacturing situation.

I was once doing a Myers-Briggs training for some executives. I was very excited because, like, we had these executives. There was their big meeting where they had flown in from multiple continents, and I was a part of it, like, “Oh, wow, I feel like I’m big-time now,” kind of early on when I was independent in my career.

And they had this situation, they manufactured like sausage casings. And, apparently, one of their major production facilities was having a real big problem at the moment, where there were sausages exploding left and right, which I thought was sort of a funny thing to imagine, “Oh, another exploding hotdog!” you know.

And so, they were all kind of consumed with this mentally, and I was like, “You know, isn’t that kind of a manufacturing issue. You should just kind of let them handle it. This is, like, your big executive meeting. This seems weird. And I feel inconvenienced because I’ve trucked it out here and I’m ready. I’m fired up and ready to go.”

And I thought it was so brilliant the way their VP of Human Resources reframed it for me, she says, “You know, this stuff here that we’re doing is important, and I really want to make sure that the whole team has all of their attention and focus on this, as opposed to this manufacturing issue. So, it’d be great if you could come back in two hours and then we’ll have it as sorted as it can be, and we’ll be able to give you all of our attention.”

I thought, “This woman is a master, because I’m annoyed, I’m frustrated, I don’t like rescheduling the thing. I’m fired up, energized, perfectly caffeinated, raring to go.” But then she turned it around to the thing that I cared about was having a productive, engaged, transformational session, and, “How, in fact, if you just do this thing that we want, then you’ll get that.”

And I heard a quote, which I love, which it said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, she just did that to me.” And we had a great session and the sausage factory, I guess, got sorted out, all is well. And so, you nailed it. Like, if you are making a super airtight logical case about a thing they don’t care about, you’re not going to get very far.

Anjali Sharma
And the tricky part is to really figure out “What do they care about?” Because, in your head you can think, “Oh, of course, everybody should care about DEI and climate change, and it affects our planet.” Yeah, sure, everybody should, but tomorrow morning when they get a call from their boss, nobody’s going to ask them about the diversity level. They’re going to ask about, “Where are we sitting in terms of performance?”

Like, even with the whole ESG bit, I have to be very honest. Every time I work on a narrative, and we come to the S part, which is the social impact part, the reason why the teams are really motivated is when they recognize that they’re not going to get investors if they don’t work on this. So, in some ways, it is an institutionalized forced change. So, how good it is that we have to think about diversity under social impact of ESG, the S part, because now, if we don’t have a good ESG report, we’re not going to get investors?

So, it’s like, there’s this term I heard many years ago, intrusion of inclusion, like you really make sure that it happens by systematically creating things that are institutionalized. You cannot escape those. So, I think more and more that I do this work, the more and more I realize that, yes, we all want to be good, but what we’re worried about is just getting through today. And if we want to get through today, in the way the ecosystem is built, then we have to really find the right framing and the right positioning and the right target of the story, or else it would fall on deaf ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood. And so, we have a huge distinction about “Are we trying to inspire or influence?” And we got to really get after a thing that they care about. So, can you walk us through sort of step-by-step or what are the key actions or processes we go through in order to do just that?

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, so I’ll pick it up from before. So, you sort of think influence, inspire, you think, “Okay, I need a story that I can anchor on time, image, money, or I need a story that can actually invite them to being, have a nudge to the new identity.” Now, here’s one thing I want people to remember is that, for a very long time, what we have understood for storytelling to be is either a marketer’s take, or a very big sort of stage sort of style of storytelling.

But when you are standing in the boardroom, the kind of storytelling that works in corporation has to have a little bit of a journalistic take into it. So, my invitation to all people who work within, who are actually trying to use stories in day-to-day work is to have a slightly journalistic take of storytelling. Now let me elaborate this for you, and then I will demonstrate for you.

So, what do journalists do? They go into the ground, they find the stories, and then they bring them out, and then they tell you, and then they make a point, or whatever is happening, they bring that out into the open, they bring it out to the surface. Now, a lot of people will try to find stories on the internet, from TED Talks, and try to tell all these really big types of stories which will never work.

Journalistic storytelling requires for you to actually get your hands dirty, go in, into the grounds, the coalface, and actually find stories that can actually help you make a point that you want to make, or sometimes they even change the point you want to make. You think that’s the point you want to make, and when you start having those conversations with people on the ground, you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was all along wrong.”

So, here’s an example of a journalistic story. So, once I’ve said that my audience are inspirational, so I will say, “You are the workers in this factory that are going to become a smart factory. I invite you to become the supervisors of robots.” Now at this stage, they’ll be like, “Hmm,” so it’s relevant for them, but it’s not yet resonant for them. It’s, “Okay, here’s something for me. You’ve opened with that positioning. I like it, but tell me more.” It’s not going to stop at that. A nudge to the new identity is the beginning of it.

Then, when you tell the story, here’s the story I found from the ground, and I built it for a CEO president, and he told: “Now, what do I mean by being supervisors of robots? Now, many of you in the audience today actually work within the factory, helping with taking things from one end of the factory to the other end of the factory.”

“Let’s take Maria, for example. Maria has been with our company for about eight years now, and Maria is in the audience. And when she joined us eight years ago, her job was to take a trolley, put in the semiconductor chips, and move them from one area to the other area.”

“Now, this may sound simple, but we all know this is a highly sensitive product, and it has to be done very, very carefully. So, it takes time and she moves the products carefully to the other side and downloads them for whatever other activity that needs to be done with them before they’re ready.”

“Now when she joined us eight years ago, she would on an average do eight rounds in an eight-hour shift. She’d go from here to there, here to there about eight rounds or so. Now, today, it’s the same Maria, it’s the same factory, but she’s having to do many more ups and downs, close to 24 ups and downs in a day. That’s three times more. Why is that? Because the demand for semiconductor chips has increased.”

“Semiconductor chips are everywhere. In our passports, there’s a semiconductor chip. When there is a finger scan somewhere, there’s a semiconductor chip everywhere. They’re everywhere. So, the demand increases, our workload increases.”

“Our workload increases, we are not allowed to have a bigger factory, we are not allowed to hire more people. Within the same factory size, within the same number of people, Maria is now being asked to do a lot more. And this trend of more and more and more and more will not stop. So, what are we going to do? What we are going to do is we are going to tell Maria to stop doing this work of picking up products from one end and moving them to the other end.”

“Instead, we’re going to get an AGV vehicle, which is like a robot, to do that, and Maria’s job is going to be the supervisor of that vehicle and make sure that it is rostered, it’s charged, it does the work that it does.” Now, this is a journalistic style of storytelling, because I’ve gone and found it on the ground, and when people are listening to the story, they’re going, “Yeah, exactly. That happens to me all the time. I have to move things so many more number of times. Like, I’m a human. How much more can I do?”

It reminds them of their own experience, so the resonance starts to happen here. The positioning and the anchoring of supervisor of robots brings relevance. It does not bring resonance. It’s when the combination of relevance and resonance happens, influence takes place. So, what is journalistic about it? Journalistic is that I didn’t get that story by just sitting in the boardroom and having a conversation. I got the story because I went on the ground, I chatted to people, “Talk to me about your day-to-day work.”

I can’t even tell these people, “Tell me a story,” because if you ask people, “Tell me a story,” then people think that I’m asking them to be Clint Eastwood. So, you have to have a very specific style of getting moments out of them and then be able to sense-make and put them into a structured way and give people who work in these organizations, who need to inspire or influence people, a language which will move people into the right direction.

Now, this is not a story which will make people go, “Wow, what a story!” What this would definitely do, it’ll remind many of those people who are sitting in the audience going, “That’s exactly what happens to me. That is so true.” That is so true doesn’t mean it’s factual. What it means is, “It resonates with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I like that journalistic frame, because that helps a lot with regard to, we’re not trying to blow minds, necessarily, by making like a James Cameron epic film situation, so it’s not the Hollywood style, nor is it are we trying to be sort of the great American novel style but we’re being journalistic. And just the same way that we have a fascinating, riveting, impactful sort of news article or documentary, that’s kind of what we’re going for here with regard to our actions, our discovery, our presentation.

And we can feel great about the success if they are nudged toward that identity, as opposed to they are telling everybody they have to check out your YouTube channel.

So that’s a great lens, the journalistic lens. Tell us, do you have any top do’s or don’ts in terms of executing this in practice?

Anjali Sharma
I think the first thing is that, whenever you stand in front of your audience and you start speaking, you have to have earned the right to be there. This is not, “I’ll get GPT to come up with something for me.” I mean, of course, you can take GPT’s help to refine it, but the moment I start speaking about Maria’s story, straight away, the audience know that I have done the due diligence of going to them, at the coalface, chatting to people, and finding out what’s going on.

So, I always say to people that, “Don’t sit in the boardroom and just don’t chat there. Don’t think you know what it is. Get down, and talk to people and figure out.” I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing I would say to you is that please relieve yourself from the pressure of trying to come across as an amazing storyteller, because people are not interested. In fact, if you get told that you’re an amazing storyteller, then that’s the wrong outcome of your communication. What you have to be able to hear from people is, “You made a very relevant point. I’m going to do what you said. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Moving people in the right direction to take an action is a better judge of how effective you were versus the claps that you get and versus how you get. If you get complimented on your being an amazing storyteller, that means the focus was you and your flamboyancy, not the point you made. So, if someone says to you, “What an amazing storyteller you were,” like, “Thank you. What did you get out of that? Like, do you think you’re going to take the action I was asking for?” Figure that out. So don’t feel that pressure.

And I think the third thing I would say to you is. When looking for a story, yes, you have to be journalistic, but also remember the kind of story that works in a corporate space is a story that happens all the time. In other words, a high-frequency story, not a low-frequency story. So, a pilot lands a plane in the Hudson River has happened. But if I told that story in a corporate boardroom, then people would be like, “That’s great. Never going to happen to me.”

But if I told a story about us not using a tool that we have to update our learning and development plan, and then not getting the promotion that we wanted because, on the dashboard, it didn’t seem like you were updating that so people didn’t know you’ve done all these things, all these courses and workshops etc., then a lot of people will go, “Oh, my God, that happens to me all the time.” So, high-frequency.

The founder of Google said this, “If you can find a problem that people face multiple times a day, you have a billion-dollar business.” Now when you take that saying and put it into the world of storytelling, if you can find a story, the problem that you talk about in that story, people experience many times, you  have a story that will resonate a lot.

So, resonance is more important than remarkability of a story. So, don’t pressurize yourself at trying to find a story that is amazing because, most likely, that will get you claps but will not get you the action. So, look for a story that happens all the time. So, I think those three are probably practical ones to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really doing the trick. And you’ve finally put to words why I get a little bit skeptical and I don’t tend to dig presentations or stories that lean a lot on legends of business, like, “Here’s what they do at Amazon and at Disney and Netflix. And Steve Jobs said and did this.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Sure, these people are genius, high performers, and they did a cool thing, and maybe there are some things we can learn from that. But it doesn’t resonate with me much,” and I think it’s for these exact reasons.

One, they haven’t journalistically done the work to see, “What are we actually struggling with here?” And secondly, they’re low frequency matters, like, “Yes, introducing the iPhone was really cool. That was a historic technological moment, and that happened, and now it doesn’t happen that often.”

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think it’s just, you know, resonance only happens with things that happen all the time, because those are our daily experiences, things that kind of resonate with us. Yeah, I mean, like, we love Steve Jobs, and we love his ability to orate, but, you know, it’s available, but it’s not accessible. His style is available for us to view, but it’s not accessible for us, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally, “Just be like Steve Jobs, guys. That’s all it takes. Come on!”

Anjali Sharma
“What’s wrong with you?” Yeah, so that’s the hyper-target-ness. So, everything we’ve spoken about is about that really, that hyper-target-ness of a story, really looking at it from that lens of critically thinking it through and really trying to understand that it’s so easy to become a victim to this big style storytelling, “When I was born or when I started my career, oh, my gosh, you know, it’s like…” nobody really cares about that. Only your mom is really interested in listening to what happened to you, but we don’t really care about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anjali Sharma
I can never say the full thing because it’s really long, but I’ll tell you which one it is, and you’ll be able to find it very easily. I think there’s this quote, where it sort of says, “When you lose the grip, you slip into a masterpiece,” which I really, really like. But the reason why I love that quote so much is because, after working in this space for more than a decade, my style in the beginning of working was very systematic, it was very structured, and it was very effort-filled. And then came a point somewhere, three, four years ago, where that system, that structure was like that intentional approach was so embedded in me that if I sort of knew the direction.

I could kind of maneuver within that, but that’s the only part. To become effortless, you have to put in the effort first. And telling someone who’s just, like, a couple of years into a certain domain, a specific domain, to just lose that grip is not the right thing.

But I think there comes a point where you start experiencing the magic of all that is in your subconscious, all that is embedded. So, I think that’s one of my favorite quotes, to put in so much effort into what you do, that it becomes so effortless. 

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anjali Sharma
So, if you are interested in storytelling, learning how to be better at it in a corporate space, the thing that helped me gain mastery in that, more than reading, writing was actually the fact that a system, a system for success that actually forced me to do the necessary work in this space.

If you want to gain mastery, then make a decision on what are you going to not just do, which is within you, but how are you going to put yourself out in the world in that domain. When you do that, you actually start becoming really, really good at it, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog every week, whether it’s a little thing you’ll come up with. If mastery in this domain is your aspiration, then a promise to the world that I will show up in this manner every week is what you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Anjali, this is wonderful. I wish you many beautiful stories.

Anjali Sharma
Thank you for having me and having this wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed how quickly you grasped everything I talked about, distilled it, and repeated it back to me, which was really nice.