062 – Leading horses to water and lending hoses to fires
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Everyone uses analogies in their everyday conversations, but how can you use an analogy to sell an idea or reveal your employee’s potential? Listen to hear how you can, using the story of Seabiscuit.
In this week’s episode of Anecdotally Speaking, Mark and Shawn discuss how an analogy can be an effective story structure to use to show contrast and to connect with your team or prospect.
Numerous resources were discussed in this episode, and are listed below:
- Shawn’s online course, 7 Tips to Be a Better Business Storyteller—click here to enrol;
- Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk, Gillian the dancer—click here to watch the powerful story in action;
- Anecdotally Speaking episode recounting Gillian the dancer—click here to listen to Shawn and Mark discuss the story in detail;
- Michael Bosworth’s book, What Great Salespeople Do: The Science of Selling Through Emotional Connection and the Power of Story—click here for more information; and
- Our virtual Story-Powered Sales workshops—these kick-off next week, and we have a few tickets left! Click here to find out more and to register.
For your storybank
Tags: leadership, analogy, training, performance
This story starts at 02:12
Back in the 1930s, a renowned thoroughbred racehorse, Seabiscuit, was just starting out.
Seabiscuit’s trainer, James Fitzsimmons, saw lots of potential in the two-year-old horse.
Fitzsimmons was a highly experienced trainer but thought Seabiscuit was lazy. So, he worked Seabiscuit really hard and tried to ‘beat’ the laziness out of him.
This strategy didn’t work, and Seabiscuit ran last or very close to last in his first ten races.
Seabiscuit was quickly sold.
His new owners hired another experienced trainer, Tom Smith, who was known as ‘quiet Tom’.
Smith had unorthodox training methods, but he worked very hard to understand the horse.
His different approach quickly started to pay off. Seabiscuit started to win a few races, and it continued from there.
Seabiscuit virtually won every race he ran in, and he was the number one racehorse in the US and was the top money winning horse until the 1940s.
Seabiscuit showed that a horse with the same potential can deliver completely different results with a different approach.
Anecdote International is a global training and consulting company, specialising in utilising storytelling to bring humanity back to the workforce. Anecdote is now unique in having a global network of over 60 partners in 28 countries, with their learning programs translated into 11 languages, and customers who incorporate these programs into their leadership and sales enablement activities.