Crafting Your Narrative: Why Every Story Matters

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:01:38

You know, welcome to the podcast.

Neal Foard: 00:01:40

Thank you. Thank you, Keith. I appreciate that. It's really cool to be here. And I.

One of the most favorite things I do in my life is conversations like this where you meet somebody who's a stranger, and then by the time the show is over, you feel like, well, there's a new friend.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:01:54

There you go. I like that, too, because we could always use more friends in the world.

Neal Foard: 00:01:59

You could have a worse ambition for the day.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:02:01

You could, right?

Neal Foard: 00:02:03

Yeah.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:02:04

So I'm going to ask you my favorite question, Neil. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Neal Foard: 00:02:10

That when you find somebody whose talents you admire, try to figure out some way to do something together. And I don't mean go on vacation, but I mean some kind of initiative in your career, whatever it may be, in whatever category.

You're going to run into people who you respect for a variety of reasons. Some people are very articulate. Some people have a lot of energy. Some people are just very kind. They're good to be around. They restore your energy.

And when you find these people, don't act as though there isn't an asset, you know, something to gain from just being in their company. I've had bosses who, just by their presence, they lifted you up.

And I've had the opposite, too, where by their presence, they're sort of energy vampires.

And so what I really wish I'd known in my early 20s is be on the lookout for these people who you would like to spend more time with, who you'd like to be in business with. And you can build something. You just never know what you might wind up doing. Can I give you an example? So on the English subway, the underground.

One day, Keith Richards is riding the underground, and he notices a guy who turned out to be Mick Jagger carrying a shopping bag. And in the bag is an album of blues, of American blues music. It was that single chance observation that led to the Rolling Stones.

Just the fact that they had that in common. You don't know where the next most important influence on your life's trajectory might happen. You have to be open to it, and you have to be.

You kind of have to be a little bit outgoing on your own behalf to be willing to be the first mover.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:03:50

I love that story. And that's a really cool story. Did not know that. Did not know the history of that. So that's good. Neat.

I thought you were going to say you had to be like Magneto. And when you see someone with gifts, you can somehow suck the gifts out of them and take them for yourself. But that was a different take altogether.

Neal Foard: 00:04:07

Well, in a kind of perverse way, a little bit. Because it's always good to look at other people and think, what could I learn from their skill set and model their behavior.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:04:20

Yeah, good.

Neal Foard: 00:04:21

Maybe a little bit.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:04:21

Yours was much more positive than mine was.

Neal Foard: 00:04:23

Yes.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:04:27

So you talk about. Let's talk about story Fire. First of all, what is it, and why does it matter today so much in today's world?

Neal Foard: 00:04:35

The story fire is a. It's a course that helps people master the art of storytelling. And why storytelling?

Well, human beings, their default factory setting is to take in information and understand their world through stories. The Bible is filled with. Filled with parables, and it's those stories that are the ones that stick.

You know, you can have long lists of who begat whom, but it never really registers the way the Sermon on the Mount does or the story. I wonder, when was the last time you officially sort of read the story of the Good Samaritan?

But it's one of those stories where you hear it once and you don't actually need to hear it again to be able to repeat it and to repeat its meaning. Think about how powerful that is that you've really only needed to hear something once before you've grasped the arc of it.

You can repeat it, basically, and then you can discern its meaning, and you can pass that meaning on. This is human beings. Human beings. The reason I call it story fire, by the way, is because we're all sitting around the campfire exchanging stories.

You know, why are there volcanoes? Why are there seasons? Why, you know, why do people die? And so on. And we bring meaning to our lives by sharing our own feelings about things.

And storytelling is more memorable. It's more emotionally resonant. It makes you feel like somebody else is going through a similar experience to you, so you feel bonded to them.

And think about you and I. We're neither of us as women, so we don't really have the experience of what it's like to be a woman.

What we understand of what it's like to be a woman is because of the stories we've been told by women.

And the better we are at listening to those and in my case, trying to help people to tell those stories, the more we have empathy and compassion for other people, because we understand, oh, their experience is different from mine.

But truthfully, the impetus for starting storyfire was my experience in business was this is an underappreciated skill that the ability For a CFO to explain what the numbers mean, not just tell you what they add up to, but explain what they mean for a CEO to explain. This is where we are now. This is where we would like to go. I need you to either embrace that or.

Or not be part of this mission, because we're going to have to make sacrifices to get there. Now let me tell you a story about where I hope we'll wind up. When you have a picture in your mind, it's that much easier to stay on course.

And once people understand what your values are as a leader now, they're inclined to be able to predict what your behavior is going to be, what your decisions would be in your absence, what things you would never do. And that's very valuable for an executive to have predictable behavior inside an organization.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:07:40

Two things from that, because two things stood in my mind from just listening to you talk. Number one, I run across people who tell me, well, my story's not all that important. I don't really have a story.

And first of all, I'd love to hear your response to people who think that their story is irrelevant or not as important as, say, the Mick Jaggers, Keith Richards story.

Neal Foard: 00:08:00

Well, yeah, yeah. So I, I.

That sort of infuriates me a little bit when somebody says that, because everybody's life experience is meaningful and they're not giving themselves enough credit as an observer of events. So one of the things I counsel people on whenever they're telling stories is never make yourself the hero of your story.

To portray yourself as the hero is to be unbelievable. Because there's a quote from George R. Webel. He says, no autobiography is to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful.

Since anyone who gives a good account of themselves is probably lying. Since when you look at any life from the inside, it's really just a series of defeats.

And when you have a life where you are an observer, there is a worthwhile story to tell. Who inspires you? What did you see that you thought was admirable in somebody else? What small moment made you change the way you felt about something?

Who do you try to imitate? What books have you read that you found changed the course of the way you think about something?

You know, a really fabulous story for all of us is, what did you change your mind about? And why?

And those stories I find particularly interesting and inspirational because this is where we need, as a country, as a globe, as a species, as brothers and sisters, what we need to do with each other is understand the fastest way to persuade Someone else of something is to be willing to change your own mind about something.

And the reason I put it that way is everything about the way you phrase everything, your body language, the tone of your voice, and everything changes when you yourself are willing to change. Because you come at this more gently, you're not trying to force. Persuasion is not boxing. Persuasion is much more like gardening.

A little bit at a time. Slow. Sunlight, water. Right. This is how you persuade people. It's not by pummeling them into submission.

You persuade them through a gradual process of mutual understanding. So when somebody says, I don't have an interesting story. No, that's not true. Tell me what inspires you?

There's a story there, also something that I recommend that people do, which is I keep a notebook every day. I have hundreds of these things on the walls, and they will record, you know, the little thoughts that I had for the day, the thing.

The interesting things that happened to me.

And you will often be able to, if you're looking for a story to tell, say, in social media, or because you have to persuade a client to do something or you want to change somebody's mind about something. It's funny how often you can go through those books and go, oh, yeah, I remember that experience I had in London.

There was this Greek woman who gave me a tour of the city completely unasked for. And I wouldn't have remembered that, but that I wrote it down. I shouldn't say I wouldn't have remembered it. It's.

I needed to write it down to remind myself of that. But I. There's another part of that that infuriates me a little bit, you know, that I don't. I don't have an interesting story.

Or it's, oh, no, come on, you're traveling along in this journey just like anybody else. And I'm going to guess that there are probably really supremely nice things you've done for other people.

And just because it didn't result in the Rolling Stones doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile experience.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:11:43

Right.

Neal Foard: 00:11:46

You know, I look back at jobs that I've had that I desperately disliked, that I couldn't wait to leave. And yet, Keith, those jobs are the ones that have informed most of my decisions moving ahead. You have to have these bad experiences to grow and to.

And the more I could have, if I.

If I were able to go back and relive those bad experiences, I really would have a completely different attitude about them because I would have been able to go, oh, I'm going to learn something from this. Oh, I'm going to laugh about this years from now.

I'm going to be a lot easier on somebody who repeats what I just did because of the humility of knowing that, you know, you're no saint or no genius either. You did the same thing. That's there.

There is one thing that I think everybody would be very interesting for people, particularly now in the age of AI, which is any legitimately human experience is valuable.

In an age of AI slop and machines talking to each other, you've got to cling to the idea that no, your, your experience, because it's genuinely human, is valuable and has dignity and is worth sharing. If, if for no other reason, to just let other people know that you're kind of experiencing the same thing.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:13:04

They are something else that hit me as you were talking. I know people who, for me, stories are powerful because I can picture the stories that are being told.

There are people who don't process information that way. They don't. They can't picture it in their head. Two sides of that coin.

For those people who can't, like, give you a beautiful picture of their story, what advice do you have for them telling their story, being a storyteller?

And for those who are hearing and receiving that, who can't picture it, you have any advice for their thoughts that maybe storytelling isn't as impactful for them, because I disagree, but maybe they don't process it with pictures in their head, but those stories can still be powerful. Does that make sense?

Neal Foard: 00:13:49

You know, that phenomenon is new to me. I only recently heard about that and it sort of took me by surprise because I found it difficult to grasp.

Well, if you're not picturing these things in your head, what's going on?

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:14:02

Right, exactly.

Neal Foard: 00:14:04

Because in the absence of the visuals, you know, they say that radio is theater of the mind. And when you listen to a radio drama, you are populating those characters and everything with images of what's going on.

You hear a voice and automatically you establish in your brain a certain height and weight and ethnicity and so on. So I can't speak with any great expertise about that particular problem, or if it's to be called a problem.

What I will say is that a great storyteller does not come out of the womb that way. Chances are like, they'll say the Welsh are particularly good storytellers, and certainly the Irish and so on.

And the African continent has a magnificent tradition of oral history. And you go back into any tribal culture and you will find this is who we believe we are. Based on the things that have happened in ancient times.

We've established nobody gets good at it unless they practice. So if you were, for example, the historian of your tribe, that took a lot of effort.

You had to memorize all of these stories that the previous generation had handed over to you. It was real effort.

And when you think about even a journeyman, just average, everyday standup comedian, night after night after night, they're sharpening that ax. The road teaches them what's funny. They know when a joke lands because they've seen a thousand times where the variance is.

And truly great stand up comedians, they don't get enough credit for working at it. People don't think stand up comedy is a job the way other jobs are a job, and they're wrong.

Do you really think that Dave Chappelle got to where he is without refining and refining and thinking and writing? And I don't think he grinds the way that, say, a Jerry Seinfeld just grinds. And they're working on it all the time.

But in true answer to your question, I would say there's no substitute for experience. And that means you have to practice. And we have the benefit of a tool now that other people didn't in previous generations is we can film ourselves.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:16:22

Yes.

Neal Foard: 00:16:23

And when you can watch yourself back without the embarrassment of other people watching it, it's super helpful. But there's another thing which is it's kind of a funny circumstance, but people cringe when they watch themselves.

They can't actually watch it back because they're too embarrassed. To which I respond, nobody can see it except you. So you've got to get over the cringe, relax, watch yourself, watch yourself.

And if you see something you don't want to repeat, then don't do that anymore. It's a terrific. It's a little bit like playing a video game and just respawning over and over until you get it.

But when it comes to somebody who is thinking, well, since I don't have images in my head when I'm thinking about events, it's difficult for me to remember exactly what happened. Well, then in that case, I would recommend writing it down, which is, that's what I do.

I literally write it word for word, the way I intend to tell it. And I've been doing that since the early 90s, writing word for word what I intend to tell a client or what I intend to say in a video.

Because what that will do for you is it gives you very precise Language that can be more colorful. You'll use a word like, say, vivid in the place of colorful.

Or you'll say, you know, instead of just saying he was loud, you will say, words exploded out of him like a percussion. You get what I'm saying? You can make a story more interesting just through the choice of vocabulary. It doesn't slow you down any.

But you would only really do that if you prepare ahead of time and sort of look for synonyms. I may be getting a little in the weeds.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:18:01

No, that's good. So you talked about a little bit about your job. You've worked with some of the biggest brands in the world.

When did you first realize that storytelling wasn't just a skill, but kind of your superpower?

Neal Foard: 00:18:13

Yeah, that's a. That's a really great question. That's. That's the most important question. I think in my case, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency.

I didn't start out that way. I was in the lumber business and left that and almost by accident wound up in advertising.

Well, because it was sort of accidental, I discovered pretty quickly that I was not the most talented person in the room. And it's very disappointing to your self image when you realize it's a. You know, you join a baseball team and you.

You realize, oh, I'm not going to be the starting shortstop here. There's a guy with much more talent, hits better, fields better.

So scrambling around for some kind of way to compensate for my lack of great creative talent, I just tried to sell harder. And so I wouldn't just describe an idea. I would create a sense of tension and anticipation. And I would. No kidding, Keith.

I would study how great orators would tell a story, like the pause that they would do at the beginning in the UK in front of their parliament. The two sides face off and everybody, you better be a really brilliant speaker because you're going to take on people who are gifted.

It's a murderer's row of orators with enormous private school vocabularies.

So if you waltz in there and think you're going to be persuasive, saying a lot of likes and ums, you know, you're going to be laughed out of the room.

So if you study these people who are literally professionals, and you study standup comedians, which I was doing to compensate for my lack of talent, you can create such an air of mystery and anticipation around an idea, and it gets a more fair verdict. It gets an unfair advantage over better ideas.

And at first, that was so that I could Just stay in the game, like fouling off pitches, just, just trying to stay it in the plate. But then eventually you would learn that, oh, there's more to people buying an idea than the idea. They have to like you.

They have to want to buy the idea. If you can make them like you, you have an enormous advantage. And it turns out that was the whole reason for advertising to begin with.

Creating an irrational brand preference based not on the product's attributes, but on the brand's magnetism and its personality and its pull.

And in fact, a really good idea, whether it's Toyota or Goodyear or Kraft Foods or Target, as a store, a really good idea is to try to make sure that you are likable, that people enjoy your company. They feel good when they walk in the store or when they see the brand on their clothes. And to do that, you have to talk about uplifting things.

So much of advertising is just blunt force drama. It's buy this product because it's on sale for a limited time, hurry in, you know, all of that trigger language, limited supply.

Or they'll just say 30% more absorbent or 20% better mileage. You know, they'll use statistics like this. Not realizing that this is not really how people make decisions.

People make decisions emotionally, and that comes from our history with one another as a species, as fellow human beings. You had to gauge whether you can trust somebody. And it was easier to do it off of your intuition than off of listing the attributes.

Something about that guy doesn't seem right. I don't trust that guy. That woman, I don't like the way she treats people that she has a hand over.

You know, the typical date test is, especially for women, is they observe how their date behaves with the waiter or the waitress because they want to see, oh, when, when the person can't punch back, how are they with them? And this is how it is with brands. You have to establish, I'm interested in you, the customer. I want to help you.

Let's make the story about you and how I fit into your life.

And the chairman of Proctor and Gramble, this guy used to have this phrase, he would say of the ads that we would do for him, he would say, I want you to write me a love letter to my customers.

And why that is really quite so brilliant is that when you communicate that to the creative people, they understand perfectly what's off the table and what's on the table. Now, what's off the table is that the ad is about us. It's not about us, it's about you.

I want you, the person who buys this product, to feel seen and appreciated. And I want you to feel like I'm there to solve a problem for you. I'm not here to be more of a problem for you.

And I'm not here to take your money and. Except to pay for this product, which I think you're going to want to keep using. So I turned this corner of understanding.

Oh, the game we play in the marketplace is the same game we're playing inside the building. You've got to be likable. You have to make them want to buy from you before they even hear the idea.

You have to make the meeting so much fun that if they say no, they. They feel like they owe you one. And on top of that, there are magical ways to make an idea come to life. And it's.

It's usually paradoxical with a story about something else, you know. And again, to go back to, like, the parables. Parables are so useful because they're not about you, but they're about somebody very much like you.

And so you get the ability not to feel like you're to blame for some bad behavior, but you're close enough in proximity to go, well, I won't do that exactly. Or I will do this example. Science fiction is a little bit like that.

When you think about why science fiction is so effective, is it's kind of about what's happening now, but it's once removed so you don't take sides. You know, And Star Trek used to be really good at bringing up social issues in a way that were, you know, they wouldn't let it go on in a sitcom.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:24:36

Right. Which is why I loved it.

Neal Foard: 00:24:40

Yeah, me too.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:24:42

It's funny you mentioned that, because I was just thinking about, as you were talking, my most recent purchase of a new car. And I got rid of one brand and moved to actually the brand that kind of matches your name. Ford.

I've always loved Ford, but I was driving for the last couple years at Toyota. But I really wanted to get back to my favorite brand. Cause I lived in Detroit for a while, so I came to appreciate it.

And I remember getting in both cars. They're both very fine cars, but the Ford made me feel a certain way, and it brought up certain memories that the other brand didn't. And it was.

It was like.

I don't know if it's true or not, but it's like they had these little touches that they added to this new car that really kind of Said, this is made for me. So it's kind of like, like you talk about it like it was like a love letter to me. It was like, come back, come back home.

Neal Foard: 00:25:38

Well, Ford does have a reputation for being very creative about their features and, and that I particularly like their color choices. But, but I'm also quite a partisan for Toyota.

I did advertising for Toyota years and, and people are not, they, I don't think they're fully aware of how much of the Toyota lineup is actually built here. You know, all their trucks are built here.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:25:59

Yeah.

Neal Foard: 00:26:00

Down in San Antonio and some of them in Indiana. And they've got factories just all over the place.

They've got them in Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, and they've got parts plants just everywhere.

And as I would tour those factories, the thing that really I found persuasive about the brand was how much the people that worked in the factories believed in was really impressive. How almost religious they were about the quality of the products and how they were, how they believed in each other.

And all of the best dealers were ferociously good to their staffs.

They, the dealers understood that we're on the direct, you know, because a car company doesn't sell cars directly to the public, it sells to its dealer network. And so the dealers are the ones that are really establishing how you feel about a brand on a street level.

And the best I ever saw were the ones that completely absorbed the values of the manufacturer and tried never to betray. In the case of Toyota, it was trust was the word. You can never violate people's trust because you do it once, they will never return.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:27:19

That's so true.

Neal Foard: 00:27:20

Don't sell somebody one car, sell them another car.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:27:22

That's exactly some of legacy, right?

Neal Foard: 00:27:24

Yeah.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:27:26

So your storytelling really highlights, I think, human kindness, which I think is so important in today's culture. Why do those simple, real moments resonate so deeply with people, this idea of kindness?

Neal Foard: 00:27:39

Well, I think that what we're all suffering from is the attack of the algorithms, where the science behind what gets sent to you over things like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Blue sky, you know, I mean, it's almost limitless, the number of ways that you can consume what is called content. The algorithms don't really care about what it is. They're just looking for engagement. And engagement is often the result of a fury.

Like they've rage baited you or they've created division or they've created the, they've given you their fear mongering. Because in the same spirit of like late night News. It was always about, Here are the 15 things that can kill you when you rent a hotel room.

You know, if it bleeds, it leads. Was the. That's the slogan inside those things. They, they want. They want an auto accident, they want, you know, a highway chase, et cetera.

Well, those things are, are grinding us down. And that's not really how most people are. Most people are pretty cool. And I have a bunch of examples of it.

What I am trying to do is be at least a kind of one man antidote to the rage baiting and the deliberate division and the constant drumbeat of negativity.

Now, I'm not going to personally overcome all of that, but it is astonishing the really nice notes I get from people saying, I really needed this just now. Like when I came across your video, it really got to me at just the right time.

And that's really music to my ears to hear that, because for at least one person, you know, I was able to restore their.

And by the way, when you start to go out there in the world and you're looking for examples of people being nice to each other, it really isn't very hard. You don't have to look very hard. I'll give you a small example. Have you heard of these things called little free libraries?

Okay, so a little free library is just. It resembles a kind of very large post box on a street.

And somebody has decided to build this thing with a clear door and you can just open it up and take a book and leave a book. And these things survive miraculously with very little molestation in neighborhoods.

And people will walk their dogs and then they'll find a mystery that they haven't read. And they'll say, well, now I know where to bring all the old books that I already have read.

And so there is this whole community of people all across the country that they don't just leave, you know, little free libraries, they do a beautiful job. They'll make them look like little fire stations or a little whale or something like that.

And when you see that, I would not have normally taken much notice of it, but when I started to look at it, I went, oh, this is a really good example of somebody putting a lot of energy into something that they don't get paid for, that they really. No one will ever know their name. No, they don't put their names on it. And it's just a gesture to say, you know what?

We're all human beings, we're in this together. I'm not here to make your day Harder. I'm here to make it better. And I'll give you another example from my own personal life.

I love telling this story. Marcus and I, a friend of mine, Marcus was a. Marcus was an improv actor, and we were at LAX and we were flying United.

United has a hub in Chicago as well as a hub in Los Angeles. So if you've got a weather event in Chicago which does happen, it often will result in cancellations and delayed flights in Los Angeles.

Now we've got a beautiful sunny day outside on the streets of la and people cannot believe the number of flights that are delayed and. Or canceled. They don't connect, bro. It's not like this everywhere, okay?

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:31:28

Right.

Neal Foard: 00:31:30

So the LAX gate, you know, where we're all checking our bags. It's a long line and everybody's furious. It's a simmering zoo. And. And the poor two gals behind the counter just.

They're suffering the abuse of people that think they have some kind of switch they can flick and everything's gonna be fine.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:31:45

It's.

Neal Foard: 00:31:46

Oh, yeah, it's all up to them. So they're the ones that are taking all this abuse. Well, Marcus and I got up, we were next in line, and the couple in front of us were just awful.

They were. I described them as swamp donkeys. They were just a couple of insufferable, entitled divas. And they were taking it out on these service people.

Well, we get up to the front and the. The woman who's just about to ask us for our bags, she's got the thousand yard stare, you know, army veteran.

And Marcus, without waiting for her to say anything, he goes, oh, man, those two are in big trouble. And she goes, what? And he says, bjarki saw the whole thing and all the trolls know each other. And he's going to tell them what happened.

And wow, are they gonna get it. And I'll tell you something else. And he pulls a bag of M M's out of his pocket and he go feed him before the sun goes down. It will be double bad.

Okay? Now, the woman sitting and standing in front of him has taken this in, in a kind of confused way. She hasn't fully absorbed it yet.

She doesn't know what to make of it. It's. She's a little stunned, but the person, the woman to her left has heard the whole thing and she says, can we feed him now?

So they take the M&Ms, they take the troll, they put it behind the counter and, you know, they tore it open and they put a couple of M&MS. In front of Bjorky, the revenge troll. Now, here's what I love about this.

So I don't think Marcus intended to do anything except just sort of shake the Etch A Sketch. You know, he was just trying to wipe the whiteboard clean of all of the abuse that she'd taken before.

And I don't know that he knew what he was doing in that score, but I saw it with my own eyes. She was transformed immediately from somebody who couldn't take another human being and all their abuse to, oh, not everybody's a terrible person.

And I now have an escape valve for every time somebody's mean to me. I'm going to put another M and M in front of them, and my friend Janet's going to know exactly what I'm doing. So we're kind of. Now.

Marcus is sort of on their team now. Now, here's what happened.

I didn't realize that the women behind the counter, you see them again, because after they check everybody's bags, they go up to the gate, and now they're the gate agents. Oh, guess who got an upgrade. Marcus got an upgrade to first class.

And the thing is that, you know, people don't understand how much discretion most service people have. You know, they can give you the free cream and the coffee. They don't have to upsell you.

And maybe you just happen to get a muffin with your coffee if you're extra nice or, you know, absolutely, I'll refill that for free. You know, when you. When you are nice to people and you make a point of it, a. Even if you don't get anything in return, you don't know.

That might have been the thing in their day that kept them going. That might have been the one thing they needed in order not to be mean to somebody else. Imagine a scenario of road rage. Okay?

Somebody is so furious with somebody honking at them, they literally get out of the car, and then they use a baseball bat to knock the mirror off or something like that. Let's just look at that for a second. What? How? Do you really think it was the horn that set them off?

Or was it a chain of events before that that made them. This was the last straw.

Now imagine instead of that road rage incident just before, that person who had all this accumulated tinder that was going to light. Light up into a fire. Suppose you'd got to that person and done something nice to them. They're not going to have that road rage incident.

There's going to be no Baseball bat. There's going to be. Nobody's going to do any jail time because you let the air out of the, out of the balloon.

And I'm trying as much as possible to make a habit of being the best part of a service person's day so I can pull that grit and grime off of them a little bit. So I have a bunch of these now that I carry around with me. That's so Garchy.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:36:02

That reminds me of the movie with Samuel L. Jackson in it. I think he was in a car and he got lost. He was having a really, really bad day.

Neal Foard: 00:36:09

What's that called?

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:36:10

I can't remember the name of the movie, but I remember that.

Neal Foard: 00:36:11

Yeah, but I know exactly. See, you just.

All it takes at the end of a string of those things is one more and then you, then you lose your mind, then you go irrational, and nobody needs that.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:36:23

So I'm gonna ask you some lightning round questions and this is kind of fun. All right, give me a storyteller you admire most.

Neal Foard: 00:36:30

Well, I got a bunch of them.

So I absolutely love Garrison Keeler, I love Paul Harvey, but that's really old school, you know, Half your audience is going to know who those people are. But I also love a guy named Joe Frank. He was a very peculiar storyteller that used to be on the radio here in Los Angeles.

He had Joe Frank in the Dark was the name of his show. Then another one, Joe Frank, somewhere out there. He was a monologist. He would do these radio things that would last an hour.

And they were just fantastic, imaginative, slightly sci fi stories. And then I absolutely love Dave Chappelle because Chappelle doesn't do joke comedy.

Chappelle takes you on these journeys of stuff that happened to him. And I find those are absolutely riveting. And then Louis CK Is quite good at that too. And they'll construct a story that leads you with a moral.

But I, I really am a sucker for having books read to me. I, I love. You know, that used to be a thing like Mark Twain made enormous bags of money going around and reading chapters from his books.

And the same was true of Charles Dickens.

They, they made most of their money from live performances in front of theaters where what, what would happen is Charles Dickens would write serialized novels. So a chapter of the novel would show up in the Daily Telegraph.

But before he would submit it for publication in the Daily Telegraph, he would do a live reading of the next chapter. And people would pay through the nose to go see those live because they just wanted to Hear what happened in the story next.

And apparently he was quite a good, he was quite a good orator. So do you, who do you have as a favorite? Who do you like to listen to?

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:38:29

So I, most of mine were. Well, I'll tell you, I love Max Akado because he, in his books he tells amazing stories.

That has always kind of captured me with the way he weaves in these stories and then there's these great connection to scripture to it. So I love the way he tells stories. I also love Dave Chappelle.

He's one of those comedians who, his whole act is a one big story and sometimes he'll give you a teaser at the beginning and he'll come back at the end. Remember, he actually had something that you were dangling on and hanging on. Yeah. So I love how he could do.

And I think Richard Pryor was a great storyteller.

Neal Foard: 00:39:07

Oh, see now Pryor was the original. He was the one who really broke all of the rules. Cause up to Pryor, everybody was kind of like, take my wife, please.

And it was this snappy, you know, it was one joke to the next. And then Prior just broke all the rules. And, and Carlin wasn't the same thing. Carlin didn't tell stories like that.

But they were of that generation that decided not to do it the same way as everybody else. Yeah. Prior. Oh my Lord.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:39:37

Yeah.

Neal Foard: 00:39:38

You know who I like as an act, as a, a personality who used to occasionally read his stories was Kurt Vonnegut.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:39:44

I don't think I know him.

Neal Foard: 00:39:45

And he, Vonnegut was a, A sort of semi sci fi author. And he was famous for Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions and, and Slaughterhouse 5 was his most famous novel.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:39:59

Okay.

Neal Foard: 00:40:00

And. Oh, he was, he was a very compelling public speaker. He used to do just the most interesting tongue in cheek addresses about topics. He was a great.

They was. He was a big favorite on campuses, college campuses. Loved Kurt Vonnegut.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:40:17

Cool. What is one word that defines great storytelling?

Neal Foard: 00:40:23

Well, intriguing. So there's a mystery that has to be solved in the story.

And in my own video stories, there will often be a word or a phrase above my head for the length of the story.

And the reason I have that up there is so that you'll understand that this is going to resolve and you're going to fully understand what this means by the time you get to the end.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:40:49

I love it.

Neal Foard: 00:40:49

And if you watch, if you've ever seen the series Mad Men, occasionally they will describe an advertising campaign to their customer, to clients and Some of them are really quite artful. There's one in particular that's famous and it's the Kodak people have invented their slide projector. That is a wheel.

And so they want to call it the wheel.

And they come to Don Draper's advertising agency and he does the most fantastic story that starts with the Greek word nostalgia, which means the ache from an old wound. And as he describes this story, he resolves this whole thing by saying, it's not a wheel, gentlemen, it's a time machine.

It goes forward, it goes backward, round and round, the way that a child is on a merry go round. And that's why we're going to call it the Kodak carousel. And you listen to this and you go, oh. He starts with nostalgia. How.

How could a piece of new technology be nostalgic? Not because of the technology, but because of what it does. It takes you back in time and you just think that is fantastic to you.

Tease them a little bit, right, with they don't know where you're going.

But when you get to the end, and just as you say, Chappelle, he teases you at the beginning and then when he gets to the end and it comes back to the beginning, you go, oh, that's fantastic.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:42:19

Right? He's forgotten where he was going, right?

Neal Foard: 00:42:24

You just think he's riffing. No, bro, this guy has got every word of this is, is really well done. He, he's, I mean he is legitimately a genius at it.

And Pat Noswalt is another stand up comedian who every word has been worked out. It all appears so spontaneous, like he's just making it up there. No, no, that's the skill. They make it look like they're just making it up.

Every word has been sanded and cut to size and placed in there.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:42:58

So Neil, am I asking my other favorite question? What do you want your legacy to be?

Neal Foard: 00:43:04

That I really do want that. I was an evangelist for kindness.

That what I left anybody who came into contact me with is there was more return on investment to being nice to people than there is in celebrating cruelty and participating in a culture that is self interested. The old phrase is if you want to go fast, go by yourself, but if you want to go far, go with everyone else.

And that's what I'd like to encourage people to do is I have a kind of thing that I preach in the storyfire course, which is life gets so much easier when people like you. But for people to like you have to be likable. And the fastest way to do that is to be demonstrably nice to others.

You have to leave the house like a shepherd. Be a ladder, be a lamp, be a lifeboat. Don't be, you know, don't be a fountain, not a drain.

So that's what I'd like my legacy to be, is to spread that message to as many ears and eyes as I can.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:44:14

So on the show, we have something new. A surprise question. Pick a number between 1 and 10 for your surprise question.

Neal Foard: 00:44:20

3. 3.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:44:22

Oh, this is one of my favorite. Which band or artist, dead or alive, would play at your funeral?

Neal Foard: 00:44:31

Oh, boy. Well, so I can only pick one, right? I would want it to be happy. And you're from Louisiana, so I would say rock and doopsie. Oh, okay. Zydeco.

There's two kinds of. Well, although ska for me is like that I want music you can't. That it's impossible to be sad about.

And ska music for me is like that, you know, really fast ska. So I'll say the interrupters are rockin Doopsie.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:45:02

There you go. So, Neil, where can people find you, connect with you on social media?

Neal Foard: 00:45:07

Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find because of this. I spell my name weird, so if you can just spell it right, I'm the only one you'll find.

It's N, E, A L, F, O, A R, D. So Ford is spelled F O, A, R D. If they just Google me, they'll find me. And I'm on YouTube. I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok. I'm on LinkedIn. They just spell it right.

Also, if they're interested in Storyfire, you can find that at www.storyfire.net, but you'll find me at Storyfire. Just if you could just spell my name right and then put me into the search engine.

Rev. Dr. Keith Haney: 00:45:41

There you go. Well, Neil, thank you for sharing your insights, your passion, and your gift of storytelling with us today.

It was an enjoyable conversation to our listeners. If this episode sparked something in you, here's what you can do. Subscribe to Becoming Bridge Builders podcast.

Leave us a review to help others discover this conversation. Share this episode with someone who needs to be reminded of the power of their story. And here's your challenge this week.

Tell a story that builds a bridge between you and someone else. Because stories don't just connect us, they change us. Until next time, keep building bridges and keep telling stories that matter.

Neil, thanks so much for being a guest on the show.

Neal Foard: 00:46:19

Thank you for having me, Keith.