Share Your Story

If you have a great story to share to bless and encourage others, perhaps one that became your message from a messy past experience where you overcome some challenge, I entreat you to step up to the plate and give this gift to others!

Here are a few tips to make it easy for you to get started.

TALK IT OUT!

You might first want to sit down and turn on a recorder – you can use your phone, computer, a digital voice recorder, or something else. Outline the sequence of events and jot down brief points of lessons you learned. Use this outline to speak into the recording device. From there you can play it back and see how it flows and if the order makes sense, along with the conclusions you drew. Normally it’s best to have one main overarching big lesson to share with your audience. Two or three little sub-points can come into play, but you want to make it easy for your audience to be impacted and remember your story so it can continue to play in their mind and bless them even into the future. Waiting several days to a week to re-listen to it can help you bee more objective about it as well.

Another way to do this is to have a good friend interview you. She can ask you questions about your experience, bringing out the thoughts and feelings you experienced, and the lessons you’ve learned – the best take-aways. She may even contribute some of her own too. Or you can just tell her your story as you record it in a normal conversational manner.

SPEAK IT OUT!

Now you need to find audiences to share your story with. Practice on your friends and family. Then share with small groups or at your church. Consider joining a local speaker group like Toastmasters if you aren’t as comfortable as you want to be yet with speaking to groups. Get a mentor or speaker coach, or even another speaker you admire to help and encourage you till your talk is the best it can be to get your message across clearly and powerfully.

Just a note to the wise: Make sure the trauma you experienced has healed up enough in you to not trigger a meltdown every time you share it. That does no one any good if you cannot continue and just leave people feeling sad for your situation. You need to be on the other side and victorious over the pain it caused. A little misty eyes now and again never hurts, but floodgates of tears indicate something more needs to be addressed for your benefit. If you think you may need more healing before you share more publicly, read the tips I have for you in the post Breakthrough To Your Story.

WRITE IT OUT!

If you are more of a writer than a speaker, or have dreamed of writing a book, then there is no time like the present to get started! As you document your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and lessons from this, you can be a blessing to many. You may even want to start sharing online through your own blog. The benefit of that is that you can grow an audience as you get feedback, ideas and suggestions, and even more similar stories and encouragement from your growing audience. As you bless them, you can find they are blessing you back even more!

The best of both worlds: If you made an audio recording of your story, as above, the bonus is that you can take the audio and have it transcribed into text if you like. There are many transcription services you can locate online. Most will charge around a dollar a minute of audio or less. They are usually fairly quick in getting the document back to you as well, even in as little as 2-3 days. You can use this as the basis for your book or an ebook online.

JUST DO IT!

Now is the time! Step up and share your story to bring further healing and blessings into your life – and to others. They are praying for someone just like you to come and share what you’ve gone through that they are experiencing right now. They need your experience from the other side of it, your faith, hope, love, and encouragement to get through this. Be the blessing you prayed for…!

DID YOU  KNOW?! It is easier than ever and very inexpensive (can be under $100) to get your book published very quickly through Print On Demand Publishers these days. You could have a paperback book in your hands within days of submitting it online! You can even have it printed digitally on a place like Amazon’s Kindle for instant download from your new fans.

There are so many inexpensive yet very effective ways to get your message out quickly and tap into the right audiences waiting for your story. I would love to help you get your message and breakthrough story out to the world to bless others. If you’d like to learn more about how that can happen and how I can help or encourage you, please contact me. I’d love to have a personal conversation with you to see how God may want to use your story to bring him glory as you help others going through similar circumstances.