There is a principle in improv that sounds backward until you see it in action: the more specific you get, the more universal the reference becomes. We can use this in our educational podcasting.
A scene about “a person in a restaurant” is understandable but forgettable. A scene about “Linda at Waffle House serving cold pancakes after her partner left her” is highly relatable because it taps into a specific feeling of frustration and loneliness. The same applies to business content. When you share the specific anxiety of hiring your first employee or the jitters of your first public speech, you create a deeper emotional resonance than if you simply discussed generic “growth strategies”.
In this micro-episode:
- The “Waffle House” analogy for storytelling
- Why broad, relatable concepts often fail to connect emotionally
- How to use specific details to make your content universal and commit to a specific audience
Resources: Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.
Transcript
WEBVTT
::In improv, there's this principle that sounds real backwards until you hear it described. The more
specific you get, the more universal that reference really is. Like if I do a scene where I'm a person in a
restaurant, the audience gets that concept. They've probably been to a restaurant, but it's not all that
relatable in a tangible sense. Like no one's holding on to person in a restaurant.
::But if I'm Linda at Waffle House who has just served cold pancakes after her partner left her, the audience
probably gets that feeling. Even if it never happened to them, something like that happens so they can
relate. They can understand that frustration of bad things piling up on top of each other, all those bad
things being a pile of pancakes. They can relate and understand a feeling alone, being in a booth with bad
food.
::So that specificity makes a whole lot more people who watch that thing connect with that scene. And our
episodes can work like that too. Like if I did an episode about how I was about to hire the first person to my
team after running a business on my own for years, a whole lot of solopreneurs can probably relate to that
very particular element, even if they haven't done it yet. They know how that feels, that anticipation of
about,
::thinking about doing it.
::Or if I was about to talk about the first time I got up and stage in front of people,
::that's a feeling that a bunch of people listening can resonate with,
::even if they haven't got up to perform that same thing I was about to perform.
::That's what specifics do for our episodes.
::Our listener needs us to speak to them, with them, as an individual.
::And we can do this by detailing that specific situation or problem or fear, really. And we can do this by
thinking about the type of person that's listening to our episodes. Think about people in our
professional communities, specific people who might read the description of the show and find it
valuable. A show needs to have a very specific set of people like this who will resonate with those stories
to be specific enough to do well,
::has a podcast as a whole. So you're committing to a very specific audience as specific as those cold
pancakes in a Waffle House. That can feel a little bit intimidating because you might worry about finding
that audience but excluding that wide net is the point because that wide net might not find you to begin with
and they probably won't stick around because those analogies won't work on them. I've never been in a
Waffle House by the way.
::But specifics, that's what it's really about. I'm Jen deHaan, and this is the Credibility Minute. Find
more episodes and get in touch with me at stereoforest.com slash minute. I just don't live close to one at
all.