The Right Stories To Write for a Keynote

Let me start by saying that I've been personally connecting with people who are subscribed to this newsletter and it's been a fun and enlightening experience so far. I’ve had some wonderful conversations and connections, set up a few calls to see if I could help some people out, given away some free resources, and received a few more sceptical responses, too. It’s fine and to be expected; we’re all a little suspicious of what might be marketing/sales spam by now.

The whole outreach experience brings up so many things for us. Even when we’re not selling something, we don’t know how people will react. We worry we’re bothering or annoying people. We don’t love putting ourselves in the way of rejection or uncertainty, so we find ways to avoid doing THE THING. I’m getting better all the time at making myself uncomfortable for the right reasons, and it’s been worth it for the ways I've been able to help some people and the great suggestions for topics people would like to see here. I hope to get to them all.

I’ll drop in here to say I have an episode coming up fairly soon with Anthony Stears, the telephone assassin, where we address some of this further. Well worth it if you have any hesitancy about calls or outreach.

This week’s episode was featured on Amazon Podcasts, which was an unexpected surprise. It seems to have pulled in a handful of new listeners, so I’m grateful for that, and I loved seeing the show featured. It felt like a positive sign and gave me some much-needed encouragement. The episode is question is about what AI can and can’t do for us with keynote talks, and the bits we really should not ask it to do. I wanted to offer you a little more on the topic…

For clarity, a personal story is something that happened to you. A personalised story is something that happened to you, chosen and shaped because it does a specific job for a specific audience. Most speakers treat those as the same thing, and that mistake is the difference between a keynote that gets a warm response and one that gets someone in the audience turning to their colleague afterwards to say, "Did you hear the bit about ______?"

Why "it happened to you" isn't enough

The word doing all the work in that definition is chosen. Most speakers don't choose their stories; they default to them. You've probably got two or three that you always reach for, comfortable ones, where you know exactly where the laugh lands or where the room goes quiet, and so you tell them regardless of who's actually sat in front of you that day.

That's the trap, because the story itself isn't bad. It's that nobody ever asked whether it was the right story for this room, this argument, this audience. A story earns its place by doing a job. If it's just there because it's yours and it's comfortable, it's personal, and personal on its own isn't enough.

The four-question filter

Stakes – Did it cost you something real? Not a vague inconvenience. Embarrassment, money, a relationship, your standing. If you come out the other side of the story looking basically fine the whole way through, it isn't doing its job. Audiences can tell, almost without fail, when a story had nothing genuinely at stake for the person telling it.

Evidence – Does it have a direct line to the specific argument you're making? This is the one that catches people out most often. You've got a story about resilience; you're giving a talk broadly on resilience, so it goes in. But does it actually prove the specific point you're making in that specific section, or is it just vaguely in the right neighbourhood? Thematically adjacent is not the same as structurally load-bearing.

Relevance – Can this particular audience map it onto their own situation? A story that lands brilliantly with one industry can fall completely flat with another, even when the underlying point is sound. This one requires you to actually think about the room you're walking into, not the room you were in when the story happened. Has the story been told 1000 times by other speakers? If it is unique, is it relatable?

Personal – Could literally nobody else on a stage tell this story? If the honest answer is that any competent speaker in your niche could tell a version of it, it's more of an industry anecdote, parable or mundane commonality. That's your clearest signal that something is personal but not personalised.

A working example

I worked as a flight attendant for twelve years, and one of the stories I still use is from the flight I was working on September the 11th, 2001, heading to San Diego. The flight crew made a decision early on to withhold what was unfolding in New York and elsewhere from the passengers. Once it became obvious we were turning back, and that information was being kept from them, it created an entirely new set of problems, to the point of my being aggressively pinned against the bulkhead by a man demanding to know what we weren’t telling them.

Run that through the filter. It cost me something to be part of a decision I wasn't fully comfortable with, in a situation with real consequences. It has a direct line to a specific argument, about what happens when decisions made at the top get cut off from the people who have to live with them and communicate them. It maps onto almost any audience that's ever experienced information being managed rather than shared honestly by leadership. And no other speaker can tell that particular story, because no other speaker was on that flight.

That's what a personalised story looks like once you actually test it, rather than just tell it.

Why AI can't do this part

AI has no access to which parts of your real life carry stakes. None, beyond whatever you hand it. Ask it to help with your stories, and it does one of two things. It either genericises whatever you give it, smoothing out the specific, awkward, human detail because that detail doesn't pattern-match to what a story is supposed to sound like. Or it invents one entirely, a plausible-sounding anecdote with a beginning, middle and end that means nothing, because nobody lived it.

Its role in this part of the process starts after you've supplied the real material. It can help you shape a story once you've handed it something true. It cannot go into your life and find that story for you, because it doesn't have one of its own to draw from.

The actual stakes

This isn't really about one talk going well or badly. A speaker who tells personal stories can get booked once. A speaker who tells personalised ones gets talked about afterwards, gets referred, gets asked back. That's the entire difference the four questions are checking for, and it's a much bigger cost to get wrong than a single flat response in one room. Run your stories through the filter before you build around them, not after.

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If getting your stories, positioning, and pricing actually right rather than AI-validated is something you want real pushback on,

the Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint founding cohort is currently open at 50% off. Link's below if you want to take a look.

4 spots are still available.

​https://presentinfluence.com/kbpb