I immediately began to regret that I had decided to sit and listen to the next speaker at the conference. I almost yawned in advance as some executive muckety-muck walked on to the stage. I had seen his type so many times before. The suit, the fancy title, and likely a photo of his trophy wife and Gucci-clad kids on his desk. You could practically smell his vacation homes sitting empty for most of the year. Now we’d all be enduring an equally empty speech.

Minutes ago I had been on that stage myself concluding a presentation about growth and professional development. My ideas were applauded by this audience of one hundred top business leaders in real estate and mortgage banking. I left the podium and took a seat near the front, giving myself a respectable 9.2 mark for a solid showing, humbly acknowledging there was always room for improvement. All I had to do now, I thought, was to sit through the yammering of this in-house division leader before I could collect my check and retire to my hotel room.

He walked onstage with his perfect hair and no doubt a seamlessly prepared and yet mind-numbing Powerpoint. I watched the audience shift in their seats, searching for an inconspicuous position from which they could catch up on some needed sleep.

Soon, however, things stopped going smoothly for our next presenter.

He seemed to be having some difficulty with his equipment. As he fumbled with cords, the microphone and his computer, the attendees realized this could take a while. A handful of people got up for a bathroom break or to check their messages.

After several long minutes of bungling the presenter straightened up, stared out at the crowd, and froze—a proverbial deer caught in the headlights of an expectant audience. By all appearances, this wasn’t going to go well. I’d had nightmares just like this as a performer—suddenly facing a crowd without knowing how I got there, or what I was supposed to say. A sympathetic dread for what was to come crept into my gut.

Now he was standing there looking at us, motionless, apparently drawing a blank as to what to say or do next. My judgment of him had by this time turned to pity, but I had no idea how misguided my assumptions about him would turn out to be. That pity was about to evaporate in a single act of . . . heck, I don’t even know what to call it. Because the person I had reduced to a corporate caricature now had a very human look on his face. A look, dare I say, of vulnerability.

Suddenly there was a real person standing there instead of a corporate title, and he seemed to actually be looking at us—taking us in. And then this person reached down and lifted the cuffs of his dress slacks to reveal beneath his pant legs, two pasty-white bare ankles.

Those who were settling in for their nap looked up. The meeting organizer froze. My whole being was called to attention—the way a lounging platoon of boot camp recruits falls in, ready to salute, when someone with real authority enters the room.

We had all dismissed this executive as a perfectly predictable example of corporate pablum. Now, none of us knew what was going to happen next.

As he introduced himself and began talking, he was breathing heavily as though he’d been running.

“Sorry, I’m still catching my breath. I left my black socks at home,” he explained. “I just figured that out a few minutes ago in my room, so I ran to the front desk to see if they had an extra pair, but then realized I was going to be late and said screw it.”

He paused to catch a few more breaths and then looked at us with an awkward smile.

“Just be glad I showed up with my pants on.”

A light wave of laughter rippled across the room. Now he had our complete attention as he started his story.

“A year ago, a policeman found me leaving my house, half-clothed in a manic state.” He explained. “I was addicted to painkillers.”

A prescription for pain medication following a knee surgery had snowballed over time into opioid substance abuse. Without the finances to sustain the habit, a downward spiral of criminal activity—lying, sneaking, stealing, and fabricated business trips to cover episodes of overdosing in hotel rooms—drove his marriage, bank account, physical health, and mental stability to the brink of collapse. He told us about waking up in gutters, tricking pharmacists into hoarding extra pills, getting mugged by other fentanyl dealers, and how close he’d come to losing his life.

“Not long ago,” he said, “I was inside a motel room that was being guarded by friends, begging at the top of my lungs for drugs.” He spent eight days white-knuckling the symptoms of agonizing withdrawal in that room while friends guarded the door so he couldn’t leave to replenish his supply.

I couldn’t tell you how long he was speaking. It could have been two hours or ten minutes that I’d spent on the edge of my seat. In fact, if someone had pulled the fire alarm in the lobby of the conference center I don’t think any of us would have noticed. We were riveted to this man’s story.

He had single-handedly restored the possibility of authentic conversation in a crowd that ordinarily focused on timeshare investments, upcoming European vacations, and new home renovations. He had broken the rule of facades and appearances. He was now speaking to the human in all of us. To the parts of us that had a stack of unpaid parking tickets in the glove box, challenges with our teenagers, early onset arthritis, bad knees, couches with stale food between the cushions, and secret dreams to quit our jobs and write a novel. His vulnerability gave permission for our collective humanity to be acknowledged.

He went on to describe his absolute, unwavering commitment to physical, mental, and ethical guidelines that were now the foundation of his world. In other words, the importance of vision-based habits.

He began to share the principles that sustained his second chance at life on Earth.

• Speak the truth.

• Be kind.

• Tell your family you love them.

There were ten principles in all, and not a single one came out as being trite, cliche, or Hallmark.

He had veered near enough to the abyss of what he referred to as “the hell of entitlement”, and saw that a life of service to others was his only refuge. And that meant being adamantly dedicated to his wellbeing, and intentional about the thoughts he allowed to dwell in his mind.

To his surprise, the principles he’d adopted to ensure against any possibility of a relapse also inspired others. Sharing them led to empathy, compassion, and caring, and resulted in authentic connections with human beings that led to success in his business.

When he left the stage that day I realized that my own presentation was closer to a 2.9 than it was to a 9.2 in the scheme of what’s possible as a speaker. The applause I had received was merely a polite gesture in comparison to the standing ovation he received after sending a shockwave of honesty through the room.

You don’t have to be a recovering drug addict to get the attention of a human audience. The willingness to simply speak from your most vulnerable experience is a profound gift to others. But by default, we seem to be wired for the opposite.

Since I’ve been coaching speakers and writers in storytelling, I’ve seen again and again how quick we all are to sidestep the most fascinating and useful things we have to share.

I’ve coached people who’ve been in active war zones, life threatening surgeries, bankruptcies, someone who was the daughter of a CIA spy, immigrants who came to America and thrived against impossible challenges and professionals who’ve faced debilitating fears about leadership—all of whom have downplayed or ignored the value of sharing their experiences.

Most of us focus our efforts on using our greatest strengths and talents to obtain love and praise. But the speaker I saw that day demonstrated a much more potent truth.

The moment you share your real story, especially the biggest challenges you’ve faced, is the moment you become most relatable, credible, connected and able to help others.

In addition, the clarity he gained through his self-honest sharing became the best way he could help himself.

What if a memoir isn’t something you write at the end of your life; it’s what you write to get it started.

I wrote 7 Rules You Were Born to Break 15 years ago out of a sincere wish to share what I had learned from my life as a street performer and comedian. It launched a more lucrative speaking career than I could have imagined. Since then, I’ve discovered that everyone has a remarkable life in some way and that fully owning it is the key to authoring your future.

The Memoir Project is my current focus now. It allows me to spend less time on the road as a professional speaker and more time supporting others to tell their own story. In the words of a current participant . . .

This memory reclamation project is only possible because you are here with me. Some old patterns which were so unconscious I couldn’t even describe them, are shifting and crumbling. There is space here inside me for psychic movement. I feel different in my skin and in my relationship to the rest of the world ever since last Tuesday. I feel more hopeful, more grounded. I am not just writing a book (and indeed I really and truly am writing a book!) I am reclaiming my right to be visible and to be heard without shame or self deprecation. My gratitude to everyone here is boundless. — Kate Thomson

If you’re in a professional life transition, a writer who wonders which stories from your life you should tell, or someone with friends who keep saying you should write a memoir and you don’t know where to start—I’m hosting a few free Q & A sessions about a new kind of memoir writing that feels thrilling and approachable instead of daunting and overwhelming.

Join the Memoir Q & A

If you’d like to join us for one of the memoir Q & A sessions, you can sign up here.

And yes, you can come without your socks on.

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Many thanks to the members of my Write Hearted community who provided excellent feedback on this draft.

I was not prepared for the man who showed up to fix my sink, because I hate confrontation. But in this case, something I’d read made avoiding it impossible.

I walked onto the front porch as soon as the plumber pulled up in his truck to let him in before he could knock. Knocking, of course, is the conventional and acceptable way of requesting entry into t…

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I brightly trotted downstairs for breakfast where my wife had already started her workday. She was sitting on the couch editing a manuscript, sunshine bouncing off her shoulders and chickadees swarming the laurel bush outside the window—but with an aggressive scowl on her face. I immediately assumed that she had been notif…

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We’re returning from an unexpected cross-country trip following my father-in-law’s passing.

I’ve been sitting in the passenger seat working on this week’s story, stressing that I’m right up against the deadline this week. I started wondering how long I’ve been doing this. Checking the archives, I see that I’ve published my newsletter …

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“Opa died!” I heard my wife call from the hallway outside my office.

She had texted him as usual that morning, but received no reply across the 1,494 miles between us and the front door of her father. The last message my wife had received the previous day was a short video of the wind chimes on his front porch making …

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I’m kind of a weird case. I was a very scared kid. Wet the bed until I was ten because I was afraid to get up and walk down the dark hall to the washroom. I was a chronic nail-biter as a teen. My parents found this chili-pepper liquid to paint on my fingers, designed to deter nail biting by making it a very unpleasant experience. I got used to having my…

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My wife’s a professional editor, but I rarely share my drafts with her because we’ve got a good thing going after twenty years and why would I jeopardize that to get a little free editing advice. Writers are not an easy breed to work with when it comes to providing feedback on their words, and I’m no exception. So we co…

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The gray plastic chairs were cold, hard and unforgiving.

It was 8th grade and typing class was mandatory at Greenfield Middle School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If the school administrators had declared they were going to mandate nuclear fusion experiments to be conducted in soda cans it wouldn’t have been a more absurd idea. Big energy in small spaces is a…

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If you run any kind of business for yourself, or even a side hustle, I suggest you consider an alternative to the FAQs on your website, landing pages, or product and service pages.

Far more informative and entertaining are RAQs, Rarely Asked Questions.

The beauty of this format is that you get to ask yourself questions you actually want to answer and pose…

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My wife had a look on her face that I’d seen while shopping for furniture. It was a focused expression that showed up just before a purchase.

The problem was, we weren’t shopping, and she wasn’t looking at furniture. We were in our own living ro…

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The passenger to my right was really getting under my nerves.

It was bad enough that I’d barely slept before the four-hour flight across the country to deliver a speech I hadn’t finalized yet. But the focused flying time I’d been counting on was punctuated by heavy sighs, frequent coughing, and the near constant movement of the g…

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I walked into the performance hall which was more full than I expected, glad that it conformed to the usual arrangement for a theater show—the stage in full light, the audience anonymous in the shadows.

I saw empty seats in front, but decided instead to squeeze into the back, thinking I might escape before the end of the…

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I didn’t feel ready.

As a result, I couldn’t sleep in the fancy hotel room that my client had paid for, certainly hoping I’d get a good night’s sleep before speaking to 300 of their leaders the next day.

But this was my first full-pay speaking gig and I was so anxious to make it go well that I left my room at 1 am, took the elevator to the conference leve…

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Every person who’d gathered around the bulletin board had the same dream—to perform on Broadway. But I couldn’t see the latest department notice because Terry Fletcher’s beautiful shiny-black hair was blocking my view. As hard as it was to admit, everything about Terry Fletcher was beautiful. A head taller than most of …

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I’m writing a new book this year.

It’s called . . .

The Life Story Method — Reach Your People

It will teach you how to confidently share your notable life experiences so you can write, speak, lead, teach and coach with natural authority.

Here’s the opening story of chapter one of the book.

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I was twenty-six and living paycheck to paycheck, though in those days I didn’t actually get a pay stub because I was self-employed, paid in coins and wadded up bills directly into my hat as a street performer.

When the alarm went off before sunrise on a Sunday morning in July, I imagined the crowds of tourists that would soon descend on the public marke…

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I was seated at the dining room table with my parents. Coffee and a spiced holiday tea made by my wife plumed rising steam over a pile of family photos, birth certificates, old phone records, love notes, and Christmas cards—some of which were a century old. We’d unearthed them from a remote closet during my parents’ last move, but m…

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I was flying back home from a speaking presentation that I had given the day before to a corporate leadership group. The theme of the conference had been “getting out of your comfort zone.” I’d been hired to present my incompetent waiter routine to help attendees challenge their thinking, but it was my own habits that une…

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I pulled the rental into the driveway and left everything in the car so I could proceed directly into the house on the muted, late October day. The New England fall colors had passed and a light fog was settling in over the wide Thames river alongside my grandmother’s home. I was the only thing m…

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Now we can get started.

AHEM!

Hello everyone.

It’s come to my attention that many writers have been feeling despondent and hopeless about their writing progress, down on themselves for doing less writing than they imagine is required for success. If that sounds like you, read on, because there’s a good chance that what you…

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