Episode #56 Executive Storytelling with Emily Edgeley
“ Don't overcomplicate it, you just need to humanise information and take people on a journey. And I believe anyone can do that”.
- Emily Edgeley
Emily Edgeley is a Public Speaking Coach, helping people in Tech give more interesting talks, magnify their influence and learn to enjoy public speaking.
Emily shares her story of a career spanning 15+ years in IT & Security roles, only to realise they didn’t give her the satisfaction for helping people she really wanted deep down. After 4 years running the ANZ Toastmasters Club, hosting Storytelling Workshops off the side of her desk and coaching people on a volunteer basis, she left corporate life in 2018 to start her own business. She’s coached 1000+ people across various group and private sessions, formally supported first time speakers across 6 Conferences and now runs online Group Coaching Programs.
Links:
The Power of Stories' Masterclass - Find out the magic stories hold and why you need to start telling them.
30 Storytelling Scenarios - All the ideas you need to tell more stories, more often.
Transcript
CP: Hello and welcome to the security collective podcast. I'm your host Claire Pales and today's guest is public speaking coach Emily Edgeley. Emily helps people in tech give more interesting talks, magnify their influence and learn to enjoy public speaking. She's coached more than 1000 people across various groups and private sessions, formally supported first time speakers across six conferences, and now runs online group coaching programmes. Prior to this, she spent 15 years in IT and security roles, only to realise they didn't give her the satisfaction for helping people that she really wanted. So after four years of running the ANZ Toastmasters club, hosting storytelling workshops off the side of her desk, and coaching people on a volunteer basis, she left corporate life in 2018 and started her own business. Seeing how her work transforms the lives of those she coaches brings her joy and meaning every single day. Emily Edgeley, welcome to The Security Collective podcast.
EE: Thank you for having me. And I love talking about all things storytelling. So I'm delighted to be on your podcast.
CP: You have a fascinating story yourself speaking about storytelling, pardon the pun! you've moved from cybersecurity into helping people tell stories. So tell me a bit about your experience in cyber, and then a bit more about that transition into storytelling.
EE: So I was one of those really lucky people that got my dream job, even before I had finished university. And, you know, for me, I remember students coming and talking to us and saying that even a couple of years after they finished their Masters of Information Security that they hadn't even got a job. So for me to land in a very big organisation, doing risk management, honestly, it was like a pinch myself moment. And I was given a heap of different experiences. I was looking after risk assessments, I was looking after the group risk profile for the bank. And I loved it. You know, for a long, long time, I loved the industry. I love the fact that it was so fast paced. I love the fact that I could really deep dive into the security industry as a whole. And I spent a whole heap of my time focusing on my technical skills, probably not very different to a lot of people in security. I started to get a bit of a sense of a lot of the problems that I face are not to do with my security knowledge. They're actually to do with my interactions with people. And so as I started to explore what, you know, we sort of call the softer skills, I got really interested. And I remember one specific moment that I was sitting down at my desk, and I watched a TED talk by Simon Sinek. And after the 20 minutes was up, I was literally floored, in a good way. Because I've sat through so many corporate presentations in my time, and I was never inspired. They were not memorable. And I was never influenced to go and do something as a result of their presentation. And so in that moment, I particularly remember thinking, I have to figure out how this guy does it. And so I set out on a journey of discovering what the secret was to this guy, and other presenters. And all paths really went to storytelling. And the more I found out about the power of stories, the more excited I got to use my skills. And so I started to set up workshops, and I started to teach people, everything that I knew. Fatefully, my work was going through a big restructure at the time. And I was given an opportunity to take a package. And so I finished up in 2018, my very cushy, well paid career, and started out a life on my own being a public speaking coach.
CP: Well, I have to say that losing a cybersecurity professional to something they're passionate about is something that, okay, I'll let you have that. But it is a shame to lose a female in security as well. So, but I love the idea that you are now doing something that benefits others in our industry, but also outside of that, you know, obviously you don't have to be in cyber to come along and do the courses you have and and I feel like actually in most industries, there's been a real recognition that storytelling is the most effective way to communicate. Could storytelling be used regardless of the audience and the medium and the subject matter or the message you want to deliver, you know, does it specifically need to be an executive or, you know, there are any boundaries around storytelling?
EE: Storytelling is such a super power. And it really transcends industries. It transcends level of knowledge. It transcends the type of personality style that you are. When you share a story, it's very quickly, way more relatable to people than facts and figures. You will create a sense of connection with the person that you're telling the story to. And this plays out even more so in very technical fields, like technology and security, where we're dealing so much with very deep technical things that sometimes aren't so much connected to human beings. So the tech and the security industry needs storytelling more than ever, but it's definitely not something that is, you know, just for the marketing professionals. It's also, storytelling in a corporate world isn't very different from storytelling in general. I remember when I was asked to do storytelling sessions in India, and they said to me before I landed, now, we've seen your agenda, and it's fine, but we don't want to cover general storytelling. We want to cover storytelling in the corporate context. And I said to them in response, it's one in the same thing. A story is a story, no matter where you use it. Obviously, the application is a little bit different. And I'm happy to go through some tips about that. But in reality, yeah, don't overcomplicate it, you just need to humanise information and take people on a journey. And anyone can do that.
CP: I love two of those things that you just said. One is we need to humanise information. That's brilliant. And the other one I love is that we shouldn't talk in information we should talk in stories. I wonder if the ability to do that, does that rely on creativity? Or your grasp of language? Or having gravitas? Or you know, what, what is it about? You mentioned before, that your personality doesn't necessarily matter? But how can you be able to deliver a riveting story? And how much of that can be taught to someone? And how much do you sort of almost need to embody some traits already?
EE: Yes. So clearly, there are some people that are natural storytellers versus ones that aren't. I know myself, if someone asked me a question like, how was your Christmas? Or how was something else? I might answer with a couple of word responses, like, yeah, it was great. I have a friend that I used to know in high school, and she would be to rattle off the most engaging, interesting stories, bit by bit, blow by blow, and she'd have us all captivated. And I remember thinking, like, oh, my god, she's an amazing storyteller. And I'm not, like, I'm just, that's always going to be the case. And what I learned from my experience is that you can find a structure, like storytelling is an art. You can actually learn it, there are certain things that are in every great story, there are certain things that are in basic stories.
Almost every story has a three part structure. So the more that I learned about stories, the more I realised, actually, you can almost do like a check box ticking the box of: do I have dialogue in there? Do I have descriptive elements? Do I have some conflict? Am I getting the emotion of the characters? Do I have that beginning where I set the scene? And am I closing it with the resolution at the end? So in fact, you can actually come at storytelling from a very methodical way. And that's my style. It's more effort. But it's definitely possible. So someone that finds storytelling, really, it comes naturally to them. They don't have to try. In fact, they'll have to try to be more concise. Whereas someone that's a little bit more logical, structured, factual, it'll be a more of an effort for them. But I've actually found sometimes there's two different types of people that I notice that are storytellers. There's the people that are really engaging, they can always describe the scene perfectly. They get people to really feel like they're there with them. But they don't always get to a point very well, the connection to that point is quite loose, they find that hard. The other type of people are the people that can connect the story to the point really well, but it's almost like a stick man. It needs to be fleshed out with the details and the descriptive elements. So in my opinion, even the people that are amazing storytellers naturally they have to work to make sure that they get to the point, whereas the other people that are more methodical, they have to work to elaborate on their story.
CP: I want to pick up on something that you just said around effort. And, you know, for cyber professionals, what I found is that they're often overworked. They don't have a lot of spare time, they'll likely prioritise keeping up with, you know, threats and technology trends and issues and risks in the business. If you were talking to someone who was aspiring to be a senior leader in security, what would your advice be around their need to become a good storyteller and how much weight should they give to those storytelling skills when they want to be in a senior management role, and they need to be articulating technical information to a non technical audience?
EE: I think they should put a massive amount of weight on it. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. Most people spend a lot of their time on the technical skills, as you said, and they don't think, they think that that is what will get them further in their career. Now, Google did an interesting study on this, they wanted to find out what makes our top performers so good. And so they did this big, elaborate study, they did all these interviews. And what they came up with was a set of 10 attributes. These 10 attributes were what these top performers had in common. Now you would hazard a guess that technology skills would be high on that list. The technical skills of these individuals that were the top performers was number eight on the list, and communication skills was number one. So Google, which is clearly a massive, very successful tech company, have confirmed that communication skills are way more important than technical skills. If you can improve your ability to help people understand things, and security and technology can be very hard to understand. And if you can be more memorable, if when you present, people can leave the room not only understanding what you've said, but being able to relay that message to other people, that is incredibly powerful. And if you think about it, a lot of times we get met with resistance, right? We may have stakeholders that don't see the value of the controls we're implementing, they don't see that they are worth their time and investment. If you're wanting to create buying with people, a story is the best way to do it.
CP: Do you feel like or do you know of books or podcasts or places that people can go to read up. more about storytelling.
EE: In terms of some books that I have read, "The Storyteller's Secret" by Carmine Gallo. He's the godfather of storytelling, in my mind, it's an incredibly easy read. He has a lot of stories that he shares in it, which is why it's so interesting. The other book that I actually just recently read was "Stories that stick" by Kyndra Hall. Also fabulous, it has a whole heap of techniques as well as to what you can include in stories to make it even more memorable and engaging. So if you want more of a sort of step by step view, then that's a real winner. The other thing that your readers or your listeners might not have come across is the Moth events and the Moth podcast. So as I was going through my storytelling journey, I found out about these events in this podcast where people will share a story based on one word. So there'll be given a word, let's just say, it's obviously not security related, but let's just say it might be competition. And then they have to come up with a story from their life that relates to that particular word. And you will get to hear and see, if you go to the live events, 10 people sharing a story on the same topic, which is just fascinating. Fascinating in so many different ways how people link, an experience with a particular topic, how people close it, how they make something out of seemingly nothing. In some situations, the event is absolutely nothing. One lady talked about puppets, just creating little puppets, finger puppets when she was a mom. And I couldn't believe she crafted an amazing story out of it. So yeah, that will inspire you to no end the different ways that you can use a story and the different ways you can tell a story to captivate people around a particular experience.
CP: I had no idea that that sort of thing existed. Personal story, I go running with one of my kids and he hates running. We do this thing called one word stories while we're running. So I say a word and then he says a word. And then I say a word. And then he says a word. And it creates a story until it kind of dies out and then we start a new one. And it passes the time. But it's fascinating to see how people's, different people's minds work. And you know, my mind is obviously on many things that a 10 year old's mind is not on. So, you know, we often end up starting with a family that ends up being a family of monsters, for example. But I think stories can be captivating, can pass the time, obviously. But I love the idea that this Moth event that you talk about where we're asking people to stretch their mind outside of just information and think about how can I just evolve that one word into something that's going to be of interest to other people and absolutely fascinating.
EE: Yeah. The other thing that I would, just as a tip, if I can is, I thought that because I didn't have a good memory, or because not a lot of amazing things that happened in my life, that I wouldn't be able to tell stories. But what I learned across the years was, there's your own experiences, which you can share, and they don't actually have to be extraordinary experiences, then you might have heard a story that someone else has told you, then there's the power of Google, literally, in the security industry, there's a new incident almost every day. So if you can find the details behind that, and paint the story, then there's so many options there. The last one, which is actually really good to use in the security or tech industry is a hypothetical slash made up story. And what I mean by that is, you make up a story, and you put the audience as the central character in that story. And that can be incredibly powerful. Because they're in it, there's no other story where they're the central characters. So you're going to make them feel the emotions and feel the impact of that much more. And that's great when you're proposing a strategy and the process, or the tool actually hasn't occurred yet. You don't have a story of that particular future state. So you're going to have to paint that future state.
CP: It's probably a podcast for another day, but I'm absolutely an advocate of running drills, running scenarios. And as you say, putting your, in my case my clients, but for a CISO, or a security professional, putting their own organisation at the centre of you know, a hypothetical. It can be, especially if you can create that visceral connection to the event, it's memorable. And then people think, well, I don't want to end up back in this position. And this is just a scenario, but it could very quickly become a reality at another time. And, yeah, I'm a big fan of incident drills, and you know, making sure that you're prepared, should that story become a reality.
EE: Yeah, because at the end of the day, if you think about it, how do we all learn? Like what, what happens to make us change our opinion on something? It's not something we're told, like, how many times has someone you know, you told something, and then they're like I told you, so. You wait until you experience something. It's not until you experience something that you really then learn. So the closest thing to getting someone to actually experience it is to share a story.
CP: Absolutely. I want to wrap up my last question by talking about how time poor people can be, especially in security, but in a lot of professions, and how many of my peers might plan their security presentations possibly the night before. But let's be honest, that often happens, you know, the midnight board paper. But then you hear about really great talks, and sometimes bad talks as well that have taken people weeks to write and practice. What would be some of your key tips or tricks to either get a really good story polished quickly, or in reality, to be able to tell a memorable story is going to take hard work, and many hours of practice?
EE: For people that haven't told stories before, it's probably going to take longer. The more you go on telling stories, the easier you will find it. But you can actually get to a point where you can tell stories off the cuff. I think you just have to be if it's not your natural style, you have to be conscious of the things that you need to include in it. So it should be fairly simple for people to get a really basic story out, as long as you go top down. Don't try and write it out word for word. If you get out the basic gist of who are the characters? Where does my story start? What's happening at the start of the story, you know, what's the key event? And how does the story end? Then it's like that stick man, you're changing it from almost a drawing of dots, which is the information, you're connecting the dots, which is the almost the stickman, then you want to go to if you have time, the version, which is like a fully painted picture of that person, if we're taking that analogy, so then you can flesh it out. You can add in the dialogue, then you can add in if there's emotion, is there descriptive elements, etc. So I would actually say, it doesn't matter if you don't go for the fully fledged version. If you don't have time to practice it, if you don't have all those elements, the stickman version is actually better than just the dots if that makes sense. My leaving advice to people would be don't get too hung up on making it a super engaging story, even if it's very simple, but it connects to the point you're making, that's the bit you need to work on.
CP: Thank you so much. I think there's so much in today's talk that people can get benefit from, whether you're in the security industry or not, and no matter where you are in your career, I'm an absolute firm believer in in learning this process, because you're right, a lot of it comes down to data and facts and information. how important it is for people to learn how to wrap that information in something relatable for the audience. So, thank you so much, Emily. It's been awesome to catch up and chat with you today. And we will have all Emily's details in the show notes and talk to you again soon.
EE: Thank you for having me on.