Can a Clear Message Win a War?

I will preach this until I die. Repeatable phrases create movements. If people can't repeat your message, they can't spread it. Another lesson paint the future. Not just the crisis, be the candle. Give people something to fight for. Not just something to fight against. [Music] If you have ever struggled to explain what your business does or you felt like your marketing should be converting better than it is, this might be the most valuable two days you spend this year. Story brand your business live. It's a two day in-person workshop, happening May 7th and 8th in Nashville. That's not a conference. It's a working session. Where you will build clear messaging for your business, create five survival soundbites that you can use immediately and get direct feedback from story brand certified guides who are in the room with you until your message actually makes sense to customers. So far, all of this year's workshops have sold out so don't miss your chance to attend this May. If you want marketing and messaging that is simpler, clearer and more effective, just go to storybrand.com/live and join us in Nashville this May. [Music] You're listening to the Story brand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a Story brand. The Story brand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller. [Music] Have you seen John Mulaney's stand-up routine about what's wrong with our fathers? It's one of the funniest things in the world. Sadly, I think he's talking about me, not my dad. He says about our fathers, I think they think there's going to be a quiz about World War II and they're all studying. [Laughter] Doesn't that feel accurate? When my wife leaves town with our daughter, Emeline, I get out of bottle of whiskey and I start watching World War II, documentaries, and when she returns, I stop. That's what it's got to have, works. I have no idea what the subsession is. I think it's the clear, binary, good guy versus bad guy. It's the death, the stakes that took place. It's the strategy. Everything masculine rolled into one sort of narrative, and I've studied World War II. Of course, I'm not alone. Today I want to talk about Winston Churchill and I want to talk specifically about the words that he used to win the war. By the way, it was the words. It was the words that he used. It was a word strategy before it became a military strategy. They had to work in tandem. I don't know that there's any better example with the exception of maybe Jesus of a person uniting a movement against evil, using words and stories to do it. A succinct kind of messaging strategy. Churchill had written dozens of books before he ever became Prime Minister. He was prolific. He and G.K. Chesterton, I don't know how they did, how they wrote that many words, a couple of British writers. He ended up winning a Nobel Prize in literature, not a peace prize, a literature prize, because he was that prolific and that good with words. I want to us all on this podcast episode today to learn some lessons from him. How did one man's words save a nation? By the end of the podcast, you're probably going to learn some lessons. One of them is you got to tell the truth. No matter how bad the situation is, you have to speak it. But it's only going to work if you're authentic and honest because that creates trust. And also how to turn your message into repeatable sound bites in order to disseminate your message. You need two things. You need to tell the truth about how bad it is and you need to paint a vision of hope. And when you do that, you are gaining trust with human beings. And they believe that you're not full of spin because nobody would share the bad news if they were spinning things. And they will borrow your confidence in your belief that we can do this if we do it together. But the only way to get that message in are short repeatable sound bites. And I want to talk about the sound bites that, you know, I want to look at the sound bites that Churchill repeated in order to inspire a nation, inspire the allies, and defeat Adolf Hitler. The nation, by the way, was in trouble when Churchill became Prime Minister. As you know, France had fallen, Europe was conquered. The British army had barely escaped annihilation. And now they stood completely alone. There was nobody else on that island to help them. And Hitler's war machine was ramping up. It was a perfect storm of absolute impossible. And I think anybody would be asking, how are they going to survive this? How in the world are they going to survive this? Post-World War One, America was not interested in entering the fight. Nobody else was interested. Nobody else could. They had been conquered. How are they going to survive this? So enter one man who had the answer. And I don't even think he had the answer. He didn't have the answer. It was just, be honest. He did not have a strategic plan in order to defeat Hitler. He had the resolve. And that resolve, he had two things. Resolve and an ability with words. He was not a popular choice. He was not universally trusted. He was 65 years old. He had been a warrior. He had made strategic mistakes. In previous battles. But he had one thing. He had always told the truth about Hitler. He had always seen what Hitler was doing. And even though it was a very unpopular message, because nobody wants a warmonger, even though it was a very unpopular message, it turned out to be true. So a couple of leadership lessons there that we can all learn. One is, tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. I don't care how unpopular you've become. If you see it as the truth, tell the truth. Speak it clearly. Even if they don't agree with you or want you to lead, they will have respect for you. We know how that guy feels. He's not a weak politician. A spine was politician. He was a former soldier himself. He was a war correspondent. He was an author. He used to ride in battle on a white horse. And people would say, "Why are you riding a white horse?" "You're going to be. " "You're going to stand out. They're going to kill you." And he would say, "Well, I want them to be able to see me." That's the sort of personality Churchill had. And he was just great with the words. Like I said, later he won the Nobel Prize in literature. Decades of political experience in Parliament. His dad was a politician. He did have a chip on his shoulder. He had a father wound. His dad didn't think he was going to mount too much. And that father wound. I think a lot of. I have a friend who only invests in companies. If they meet the dynamics that the company needs to be, meet in order to succeed. And one more thing, the CEO of the founder had the father wound. I was like, "You've been serious." I said, "He said yes." And by the way, he has a hit rate better than any other private equity Burring that I know about. He looks for the father wound. He looks for the chip on the shoulder. I'm going to prove my daddy wrong. I'm going to create a billion dollar company doing it. Churchill had that. A perfect storm also. A perfect storm to combat a perfect storm is one way you can see about it. And he also had a failure in World War I. He had a failure in some strategically bad moves that I think also contributed to the chip on his shoulder and the desire to prove himself competent. So those things all combined created a perfect storm to oppose a perfect storm. Listen, Britain didn't have a military problem. It had a belief problem. And Churchill was going to have to get the people to believe as Prime Minister that this was possible and it was the right thing to do. It would have been so easy to sign a peace treaty. It would have been so easy to give over Britain to the Nazis and save their families, save their lives, save their children. That's what everybody else is doing. So France is doing so Poland did. So why not do it? So to get them to say, no, we are going to fight at the cost of our homes and our lives, bombs dropping. I think was a significant accomplishment. Four simple, powerful principles that I saw, plenty, but let's go through them. Tell the hard truth before anyone else does. Use short, homely words of common language. If you know me and you know this podcast, I believe in messages with zero cognitive load. You've got to, you can't make people think. You can't introduce nuance and complication into a narrative if you want to lead people. It just won't work. The other thing that Churchill had that is worth talking about is a literary rhythm. You know, he understood how words should go together and how they should feel in the mouth and what they should do in the mind as you're reading them and how they should feel in the mouth as you say them. And how people were going to hear them. He created a rhythm and a repetition that stuck in the memory of the people that he was talking to. You know, words are ideas. And everybody thinks, okay, well, if I share my ideas, they're going into the brain of the person that I'm talking to. That's not true. If you create them in high cognitive load, every idea is like a bowling ball. And somebody's going to be able to handle two, three very uncomfortably, but they will not be able to handle four. You're presenting 27. So none of those ideas are going to go into the mind of the people that you're talking to. So Churchill understood a principle very few leaders understand. If I have a cognitive load of 100 that I need to communicate in order to get us to win this war, it is impossible for me to do that. So I'm going to have to create 100 speeches and I'm going to have to introduce my ideas with a cognitive load of 0 to 5 and I'm going to have to repeat those 100 times in order to get them in somebody's mind so that I can execute my plan behind closed doors. I cannot explain the plan. I cannot explain the entire strategy. It just won't work. It's not that people won't buy into it or believe me or follow me. They won't listen to me. They won't actually engage my ideas. I will be forgotten. I will be wallpaper. I will be invisible. And somebody else will lead this fight this country or we'll just lose. So very few leaders understand that. I always say to people, I just said it to a business class at Belmont University yesterday. The job of a messenger is not to tell the truth. It is to slowly roll out the truth. Because the truth, you know, Jack Nicholson is right. You can't handle the truth. But you can handle it if I slowly roll it out in memorable rhythmic phrases that get inside bumper sticker kind of logic that I can get into your brain. That doesn't mean that is my logic. It means it's the part that I'm communicating. The other thing that he did was he painted a picture of a future worth fighting for. So told the truth about the darkness of the moment, united everybody to take a stand against it and fight and painted a picture of a beautiful future that we could live. That's called inviting the public into a story. That's what he did. All right. The first move radical, painful, honesty. Churchill didn't hide from the disaster. He described it in full detail to parliament, to the public. And he did it indirectly to the nation. He laid out exactly how bad things were. And then he talked about why they had to fight them anyway. I mean, essentially to some degree, Churchill was willing to die himself and have the nation be obliterated. That was the resolve that he had. I'm willing to die and all of these women and children in Britain will have to die too because we're not going to capitulate to this evil man. Now we're not committing suicide. We're going to fight fight fight fight, but that's how we're going to die. We're going to die on the beaches, right? Of course, he said fight on the beaches. He didn't say die on the beaches, but what he meant was die. Well, that's what he meant. He was radically honest. He did this. He disseminated this message of radical honesty, a challenge to stand up to it in a brighter future. Those three elements of the message were disseminated strategically in a speech on May 13th. Well, through May 13th and June 18th, he delivered three speeches. And they were strategic. And there were some quotes that you remember, blood, toil, tears, and sweat. There's that rhythmic poetry, that memorable rhythmic poetry. That was his first speech as prime minister. June 4th, less than a month later, we shall fight on the beaches. I mean, one of the great, just one of the great speeches of all time. That was that again, think about it. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We shall fight on the beaches three weeks later. May 13th, blood, toil, tears, and sweat. June 4th, we shall fight on the beaches. It's the same speech, which the same idea repeated over and over and over. We will take a stand. We will fight. We will fight. And then after the fall of France, their finest hour, that speech, their finest hour. And that was about two weeks later. So May 13th, two weeks after that, two weeks after that, he is repeating this idea. And he is building an identity into the British consciousness. He is changing their identity. We are the identity of fighters. Of course, if you change the people's identity, that is the way they see themselves into the identity of a fighter of evil, then they will act out their identity and they will fight evil. And he was using words to do this. So he created something of a sound bite campaign. Now I am shoe horning, shoe horning his, his sound bite strategy, if you will, into my own vernacular, into my own system, my own story brand framework. But what I found is that the sound bites that I think are important to create a movement that is problem, empathy, answer, change, in result. Those sound bites, problem, empathy, answer, change, in result. Those sound bites exist in every successful campaign in history. So yes, I'm shoe horning what happened in the past into a framework that wasn't invented until 10 years ago. But what my point is every great leader understands it intuitively. And those sound bites problem, empathy, answer, change, in result. Invite people into a story. Every story starts with a problem. A guide enters the story to help the hero win and they do that with empathy, usually empathy and competency. So problem, the story starts, empathy, you position yourself as a guide, answer is your solution, the plan that you want to be to be installed into this whole framework. Here's what we're going to do. Here's the answer. The change is the aspirational identity that you will achieve if you follow my plan. And the end result is the happy ever after obligatory climactic scene that will take place in your life. If you do what I say to do and if you use my product or you follow my leadership. All right, what's the problem sound bite the church you'll use? We are in a terrible hour of danger. The negative. Now, I was just asked at Belmont University yesterday by student, I don't like being negative. Do I have to go negative? Does it always have to be negative? Can't we just be optimistic and positive? And my answer to him was no. You have to go negative. But here was my my consolation for him. The darker you make reality, the darker you paint the world, the more honest you are about how dark the world is, the brighter your product solution leadership is. The darker the room, the more the candle stands out. And so nobody walks into a a dark room and doesn't notice the candle. Now, how many times have you walked into your kitchen and your wife has lit a candle and it took you five minutes to realize there was a candle lit? That's because the lights are on and it's daylight. You don't notice optimism and brightness and cheer in a light room. You just don't see it. So my point to the young student was, yes, you have to paint a picture of the darkness and if you talk 95% about how awful this is and 5% about how you have a plan to change it, people think of you as positive, not negative. But if everything is positive, people don't notice you at all. Churchill understood this. You listen to his speech. It was darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, our plan is bright. And so people saw him as an optimist. If you say what was Churchill a pessimist or an optimist? He was not this. It was 95% of his talk negative or positive. Negative. You see how that dynamic works? So as a leader, you've got to be saying we're against this, we're against this, we're against this, it's awful. Here's an example in modern day business, Dave Ramsey, Dave is a friend, amazing leader, very, very generous man. And to me personally, just as a friend, 75% of the time on his radio show, he's talking about how terrible credit card that is and he's talking to people out there, negative situation and their horrible debt and their horrible money management schemes and he's talking about stupid people are with their money. It's negative, negative, negative, negative. Do you think of Dave as a negative person? No, I mean, people who follow him don't. They think of him as a source of hope because he is. He's helped a lot of people out of debt. So there's a lesson in there for you. Maybe you aren't bringing negativity into the equation as much. Churchill knew it. We are in a terrible hour of danger was his problem, sound bite among, among thousands of others. That's probably the one that he repeated most often, especially early as Prime Minister. So you got to go negative. All right, empathy positioning yourself as the guy, the empathy sound bite is the one where you say, I care about you and your problem. And when you do that, you create a bond with the person that you're talking to. This is not the place where you position yourself as a guide. This is one of the places. The answer sound bite is the other place that you do it. But he said, we understand your fear and we share it. So we are one. This is the reason. Mandani got elected mayor of New York City. We are one. I am your leader is not we are one. I am your leader messages. Don't work. We are in this together triggers in the mind a survival mechanism and recognizes somebody who shares my fear shares my concern and will fight not just for me will fight as me. And Churchill understood this. So his empathetic sound bite was we understand your fear and we share it. The answer sound bite, we shall fight everywhere always. It's a philosophy. It's an identity. So between the empathy sound bite and the answer sound bite, we shall fight everywhere always. He is positioning self in the subconscious of the hero who is the voter, who is the body politic. He is positioning self as the guide. Very, very important that he does that. to change. This will be our finest hour. He presents an aspirational identity to the public about who they are and People tend to act out that identity once they metabolize it once they internalize it the end result Listen to this beautiful quote all Europe may be free and move forward into broad Sunlit uplands he was a poet and And I mean that is cinematic isn't it? Those are cinematic words you can All of us can picture the painting An aspirational future for all of us that we must believe in and move toward Anybody who says Churchill didn't use words to win world war two has no idea what they're talking about No idea what they're talking about We are in a terrible hour of danger, but we understand your fear and we share it In the face of this darkness we shall fight everywhere Always and we will win this will be our finest hour and together all of Europe Will be free and move forward into broad Sunlit uplands do you see how those five soundbites flow together to invite the hero into a story Which they win this is literary leadership and it worked immediately The Battle of Britain Chappen in October of 1940 Was Germany's first major military defeat 3000 royal air force pilots Called the few Hold off the Luftwaffe Hitler postponed and eventually abandoned invasion plans The words got them there Imagine the words hearing your leader talk while you're working on an airplane engine while you're working on an assembly line Putting together the weapons that would win this war. I mean, that's powerful stuff powerful stuff Also Churchill's words crossed the Atlantic Roosevelt's uh past the Lindley sacked first signed an Atlantic charter With with Churchill and then of course post-World War II enters the war And Churchill exclaimed now we're gonna win now we're gonna win And in May of eight May eight of 1945 defeated Hitler and the uh the war was one We're the lessons that we can learn Let me just summarize them you cannot inspire people with spin truth always always builds more trust than polish I will preach this until I die repeatable phrases create movements if people can't repeat your message They can't uh they can't spread it Another lesson among the many paint the future not just the crisis be the candle give people something to fight for Not just something to fight against I hope this was a helpful episode for you if you're a leader if you own a company If you manage a company if you're the CEO if you're the COO if you're the marketing director Or if you want to aspire to be a leader Churchill is worth studying. Churchill's worth studying You can change the world with words, but you can't change the world with confusing words You need to sound by strategy it's a great place to start Problem empathy answer change End result There's anyway we can help you create a message in campaign We'd love to go to storybrand.com and see them anyways You can come to one of our workshops they cap at a hundred people They're two days long I'm at I'm at them there the whole time. I'd love to talk to you about the Campaign that you're trying to create help you come up with your words and help you figure out what to do with those words Where do you put them on websites lead generators emails text message campaigns you have to disseminate those words and speeches youtube videos podcast You gotta get your words right Thanks for listening to the storybrand podcast no matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey Get the tools the training and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com And don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts So you never miss an episode and if you're watching on youtube hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can impact to help your business grow in a future episode Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week