153 – Focus on your goal
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling, Corporate Storytelling, Podcast
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Sometimes you must ignore what’s happening around you and focus on your goal. Listen to hear how this strategy helped Julia Louis-Dreyfus survive breast cancer.
This week, Shawn shares another story he heard on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, but in the episode featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It reminds Mark of this video.
Shawn also shares some exciting news! We recently published an app on the Apple App Store called Anecdotally! The app acts as a story bank, a place to store and share your stories. The current version is beta, so we’d love to hear your thoughts.
For your story bank
Tags: bravery, death, goals, life and death, strategy
This story starts at 01:47
While filming the final season of Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was diagnosed with breast cancer. They stopped production while she dealt with the disease, which completely rocked her.
David Letterman asked her, “What was your approach to dealing with it?” She answered by sharing a story.
Several years ago, Julia and her husband were on a diving and snorkelling holiday. Her husband had already swum back to the boat, and she was a distance from it when he yelled out, “Jules, don’t be alarmed, but there’s a shark in the water. Just swim straight back to the boat.”
She could see the ladder at the back of the boat that she had to climb up, and she started swimming. And as she swam as hard as should could, she just focused on the ladder. She didn’t look left or right. She just swam and focused on the ladder.
She exclaimed during the interview, “I just wanted to get to that fucking ladder!” And she did.
She said that was how she dealth with her breast cancer. She just focused on her treatment and surviving. And she survived.
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.