IAM2169 – Visual Storyteller Shares on How to Unlock the Power of Storytelling

In this episode, we have Tara Todras-Whitehill, an award-winning visual storyteller with a rich background in photojournalism.

Tara shares her journey from covering the front lines in Libya during the Arab Spring to founding two creative agencies focused on helping organizations enhance their storytelling capabilities.

Through bespoke workshops, consulting, and coaching, Tara and her team empower NGOs, social impact organizations, and purpose-driven brands to connect with larger audiences.

Tara discusses the importance of integrating storytelling into business strategies, particularly for women and minority-owned businesses, and offers actionable advice for making presentations more impactful.

Tune in to learn how effective storytelling can transform your business and create meaningful change.

Website: taratw.com

LinkedIn: LinkedIn: taratw

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Transcription:

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Tara Todras-Whitehill Teaser 00:00

They don't forget about telling the story or the connections, not all the time, like clearly that happens, but a lot of times they get just really focused on that and then they don't see that the stuff that they're doing is also a connection for a bigger audience. So we come in and, help them understand what, if we're doing like workshops and storytelling consulting.

Intro 00:24

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

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Gresham Harkless 00:52

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Tara Tadras Whitehill. Tara, excited to have you on the show. Excited to be here. Great. Thank you so much for having me on. Yes, absolutely. And Tara is doing so many phenomenal things.

I'm super excited to have a phenomenal conversation with her. But of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Tara so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's working on. And Tara is an award-winning visual storyteller with photos on more than 20 front pages of the New York Times.

After accumulating over a decade of experience as a working photojournalist and as a founder of two creative agencies, she now also works with organizations to elevate their visual storytelling skills and maximize their impact. This is accomplished through consulting bespoke workshops and coaching sessions.

The goal is to help people in organizations change the world through you. Their stories. And I was really geeking out over everything Tara has been able to do. She, her hazard, she has her photography that's been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, National Geographic online has clients including UNICEF, IRC, Sesame Street, search for Common, search Ground, the New York Times and many, many others.

And she's won numerous rewards. But one of the things that really stuck out with me when I was looking out our site, she has this quote where she says the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera from Dorothea Lang. So super excited to have you on the show.

Tara, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Tara Todras-Whitehill 02:20

Yeah, I am. Great to be here. Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction.

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Gresham Harkless 02:24

You did all the hard work. All I had to do was just read it. So it's probably a little bit harder for you to do all the awesome things. So I guess to kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started with a call your CEO story.

Tara Todras-Whitehill 02:35

Yeah, sure. So I have two origin stories one for being a photojournalist, one for starting the agency, but I think like more at this days about the agency because I felt like that's my baby. So I was working as a photojournalist in. For the Associated Press and I had gone to Libya for on the rebel side during the Arab Spring.

So I'd entered illegally because it was no longer government run through with rebels and I was on the front lines of the desert between the rebel side and the government side waiting for bombs to drop near us, but not on us. And just kind of like thinking, Is this really what I am meant to do?

Because I was with amazing photojournalists and they were doing like great jobs and I was, I felt honored to be there, but I didn't feel like that was my calling. And I was like, if a bomb drops near us and hopefully not on us, I'm not going to be the person that runs towards that. It's not, that's not in my DNA.

I want, I've never been like a frontline person. I've always wanted to do stuff behind the front lines. And that kind of dawned on me at that moment where it's like, everyone's focus is the frontline, so that was like the Genesis of the agency. The first agency I started in the second as well to help social impact organizations, tell their stories better through storytelling, working with them on projects, like managing them teaching them how to be better storytellers so that they can take those skills forward.

So we're knowledge sharing our skills as journalists and photojournalists to help them.

Gresham Harkless 04:20

Nice. I appreciate you so much and sharing that. So, I imagine that's a lot of those conversations that you touched on that you're having with your clients.

Could you take us through a little bit more of what that looks like, what that process is and how you're making that impact there?

Tara Todras-Whitehill 04:31

Yeah, absolutely. So I think especially NGOs, like in social impact organizations and purpose-driven brands, they're very aligned in what they want to do. And they're like, we've got to do this, dah, dah, dah.

But they don't forget about telling the story or the connections, not all the time, like clearly that happens, but a lot of times they get just really focused on that and then they don't see that the stuff that they're doing is also a connection for a bigger audience. So we come in and, help them understand what, if we're doing like workshops and storytelling consulting.

We come in and we do workshops with the team and I advocate for entire organizations to be storytellers, not just a comms person or a comms team, because then it adds to like the storytelling. Universe of what you can get stories from and who you can get them from. So we do like workshops focused on the basics, if they're not storytellers about how to do that and what to do, how to do that visually as well, because these days you can't do anything without doing it visually.

And so we work on that and then, with consulting we give them feedback on their organization on, different parts of what they're doing campaigns that they're running, or if they want to work on ethical storytelling or their content library or things like this, we can assist them and be get them to the level that they want to be.

But our goal is that I like to say that for this part of our, organization, our goal is our job is to put ourselves out of a job so that we don't have to be there long term. Sure. There'll be things that maybe people would be brought in for, a project or two, but if you're understanding your story and you're telling it then we've done our job and it's extremely rewarding.

So, for example, we were working with yeah, we worked with a lot of different organizations in the Middle East, and then they won this big, I think it was like a hundred million dollar grant, and so they had it for five years, and at the end of the five years they were stopping. But they wanted the program to continue and everyone on their team to be ambassadors to that program.

So we came in and helped them with their storytelling skills and how each person could really be better at telling their own story either through data visualization, presentations newsletters, infographics, any of these kind of things that, May not think of a storytelling, but certainly were.

We then were like consultants for them about what they were doing so that, here's a script, what do you think?

Here's a video, how do you do, what do you suggest? But what was beautiful about that was that at the end. I felt like we were giving them less and less feedback so that they were able to really incorporate it and say, you got this. So it was really nice because then you feel like they've taken those skills and your, like your voice, their voice is really coming through and your job is done is really done.

Gresham Harkless 07:35

Yeah. I absolutely love that. So, I almost wonder, do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce? The ability to be able to not just understand that the story is just something that you hear, but to, to understand like how impactful it can be for organizations and the people within the organizations. Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce?

The thing that sets you apart and makes you unique?

Tara Todras-Whitehill 07:53

Yeah, definitely. that's a really good question because I think we're. like storytellers by, profession, by nature. And it's not easy for everyone to get that. But I think especially I, I say that I think we're, there's a, there's this movie called Helvetica, which is from early, the early noughts.

And it was like about the type font Helvetica, it sounds like Completely boring. It took me forever to watch it, but I eventually did. And it blew my mind because it was like, I'm not a designer. A graphic designer and I don't deal with fonts, but I manage them. So I'm not like in the weeds on font.

But once I watched How About A Guy, I just realized how pervasive this font was everywhere. You looked like it was just everywhere and what it meant. when I saw it, like how I felt. So I didn't see it until that moment. But when I did, my universe expanded because I saw that. I think that's the same thing about storytelling.

Like we're surrounded by it and we're surrounded by visuals. So we don't really see it. And then, so a lot of times they're like, something's missing, or We don't know why we're not raising, we're going up, cutting through the noise, right? All these things that people say, and it's because they don't know the storytelling.

But if You feel good storytelling. Like when someone tells you a story, you're like, wow, that was, that was really powerful, but you don't know it. So until someone like points it out and says, here's the thing that you're really, that's your story. That's the things, those are the visuals.

Those are the stories you should be telling. Then like they're, oh wow. Yeah. Okay. So like it, it literally becomes like a revelatory thing. So yeah, that's kind of like what we provide is our like superpower is being like, this is what you're missing. And this is how you can. Partners harness the skill.

Gresham Harkless 09:43

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have, but what's something you lean on that makes you more effective and efficient.

Tara Todras-Whitehill 09:55

So it's a goes back to the storytelling again. So I think like a lot of people don't recognize stories in different things. So here's just the easiest thing. We all do presentations of some sort. If you looked at your last presentation, did it have. A story built into it, was it put in so that you're like starting with some emotional connection because yes, we have to give numbers and we have to, tell what our KPIs are and all of these things, but humans are not built for that, right?

Like we're built for stories. So if you want to be more effective as a CEO, as a leader, management is starting with that story, that's going to draw people in. And then you have their attention and you can do a lot more things with that. So, and weaving that through your presentation when you do those kinds of things, then this is going to just raise the level of people paying attention.

And a lot of times we're doing it online now, right? And we're not in person. We have that luxury to be on in person. That's really nice because you can make eye contact. But, we have like multiple tabs open, things pinging and dinging us all the time. And so we really need to get people's attention when we start.

And it's not the data should, there's always a line like the data should is, data should sell itself. Yes, okay, you should, but that's not the world we're living in. And so, your data should, is important, but the way to get, make people pay attention, unless it's a very small crowd that's only going to pay attention to the data and you're, 5, 10 people, fine.

But if you're looking for a larger audience that may not have the same interests, Overall, you want to give them a reason and that reason is that connection in the story.

Gresham Harkless 11:46

Nice. I love that hack. So what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I call a CEO nugget? You might've already touched on this, but it could be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Tara Todras-Whitehill 11:59

So what I would say is specifically for women entrepreneurs and CEOs, I've worked a lot and gone, there's like an investing summits for women, and I've done workshops there for them.

Women and minorities tend to be written out of investor conversations very quickly. Because that's just not the old boy network that people are used to giving money to. So that model of here's our KPIs and here's what we're going to do. And, just like the. Very bullet pointed strategy doesn't work for women and minority-owned businesses.

You have to make that personal connection and they'll tell you you're not supposed to like that's not don't put your purse and the thing that I think women specifically worry about is if we, to look too emotional. That we're going to somehow like, it's going to affect us because we're the emotional thing, but, or the obstacles were a problem and then they're not going to give us money.

But the obstacles and how you dealt with them is your journey and how you dealt with it is going to reflect how you're going to do it in the future when you have more obstacles, which will inevitably come. So, you need to. Think about that and think outside the box when it comes to how you're going to present yourself.

Cause it's not going to be the same as a white man. You're not going to get the same opportunities. So you need to do it differently. And so we work with, organizations on how they're telling their stories and, not listening to the model that has worked in the old boys networks.

Gresham Harkless 13:41

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you so much and sharing that.

And so I want to ask you now one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Tara, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Tara Todras-Whitehill 13:53

To me, it means bringing storytelling to a larger audience. I think from being coming from a news background, a lot of News professionals are like lone wolves and we do our stories in our silos and we hope to change the world that way.

And there have been amazing stories that clearly journalists have done and I love doing that and I love being a part of it. But I think it also to me starting this organization was expanding that past just doing those stories which I still love to do and feeds my creativity and in my passion.

But I want to also provide and gives me a lot of inner strength to be able to give that to others. And so when we have a CEO and a company, then I am, multiplying that effect. I'm giving it, paying it forward. So to me, that's like what it means to have the CEO role and to, make it a bigger thing than just for a singular person, teams and organizations that can really.

Use those skills well and make a bigger difference in the world.

Gresham Harkless 15:05

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So truly appreciate that, Sarah. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

Tara Todras-Whitehill 15:21

In terms of getting in touch, our website is taratw.com and you can book a you could send email or book an appointment for 30-minute brainstorming there. We're also on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn Tara Todras-Whitehill. You cannot find another one. That's the same name. So don't worry. Or our storytelling agency TW storytelling agency on LinkedIn.

If you go to our website, also, we have a newsletter you can sign up for. So we do like storytelling news, usually like once or twice a month where we find things that we think people should be. Thinking about to adapt their storytelling to not problem, really trying to be focused and helpful about it. So, all those things and yeah.

Gresham Harkless 16:09

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tara, of course, to make it even easier. We're going to have the links and information as well in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Tara Todras-Whitehill 16:19

Thank you. You too. Thank you so much for your time.

Outro 16:21

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at ceohacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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