Shannon Peel, a notable founder, podcast host, and author passionate about storytelling's power in personal and brand identities. Peel, known for her intelligence and creativity, advocates for peeling back layers to reveal the core of one's brand story. She shares her personal journey of setbacks post-40, detailing financial struggles, divorce, and the transition from a victim to a hero mindset. This shift, she explains, involved taking responsibility for solutions, leading her to start her own business and reclaim control over her life.

Peel emphasizes the importance of storytelling in personal resilience and business success. She differentiates between personal brand storytelling, where individuals see themselves as heroes, and business brand storytelling, where businesses present themselves as problem-solvers. In marketing, she notes, businesses should position customers as heroes, with the product or service as their tool for success. Through this approach, Peel demonstrates how individuals and businesses can transform challenges into opportunities by actively shaping their narratives.

To learn more about Shannon's work, check out their website at https://apeeling.marketapeel.agency/.

Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonpeel/.

Key Points

Transcript 

Craig Andrews 00:05

Today I want to welcome Shannon Peele. She is the founder of Market Appeal. Not only that, she's the host of the Brand Appeal podcast. And if that's not enough, she's the author of the Brand Appeal book. Shannon is passionate about stories and how they connect people. People describe her as intelligent, quick witted and creative. All things she takes pride in. As she values intelligent thought and solution based productivity. Shannon engages audiences by asking them to peel back. That word's going to pop up a lot. Peel back layers define the core of their value based brand story. She challenges people to tell their stories from different points of view to discover how to reframe themselves as the hero. Shannon, welcome.

Shannon Peel   01:02

Thanks for having me, Craig. I feel very privileged to be here today.

Craig Andrews 01:07

Well, we were talking in the green room and oh, my goodness, this is just going to be hard to figure out how to set priorities about what we're going to talk about. And for those listening, stop harassing the dog or whatever you're doing, because this is something you want to listen to. You're going to walk away with some amazing nuggets. And so before we get into the how and the what, let's talk about where you come from. So, first off, you're in Vancouver, Canada, right?

Shannon Peel   01:45

That's right. I live in downtown Vancouver. At the moment, though, I'm visiting my brother up in Whistler, so I live a very privileged life. I have a brother in Whistler and my parents live in the Okanagan and we have Summer Lake property. So I live a very privileged life here in British Columbia.

Craig Andrews 02:04

But life has not always been privileged for you.

Shannon Peel   02:07

No, it hasn't. I lost a lot after I hit 40. 40 seemed to be

Shannon Peel   02:19

what would I call the year. I began to slip down into the mud pit of life, where it's dark and hard to figure out which way to go.

Craig Andrews 02:29

What happened?

Shannon Peel   02:30

So it all started actually with losing money on trying to buy a company, trying to buy a business. And I got excited. The realtor got me excited and I signed off on it before the bank said, yes, we're going to give you the money. So I lost the deposit and my ex, or my husband at the time, was not very not to have the compa, as you can imagine, and I don't blame him. But he started taking control of everything, which control the money, control of how we spend it, control of the decision making. And I allowed it because I made this mistake. And anyone out there who has given up control of their life will understand that when you give up control and someone starts taking it, unless they've got your best interest at heart, it can be a really bad thing, which it was for me. We ended up moving to Vancouver. I was promised that I could do a transfer for my job. That fell through things didn't go well. So it took me about two to three years to find a job. Found a job. My husband said, we're getting divorced. Okay, we're getting divorced. But what I didn't realize is that he stopped paying any bill in my name. So all the bills in my name were Ian Arrears. And I didn't know that. The situation got so bad that I had to choose to leave the house. Now, here's one thing that I will let you know. At the time, I was so broken and I was telling a victim story. The story I was telling was my victim story. So it wasn't that I chose to leave the house. It was my ex kicked me out, me and the kids out, and stayed in the house. It took two years for him to sell it and he moved. So it was really a difficult time for me and trying to figure out how to be a single palm and being broken and not the confident woman that I had been five, six years before. Then I lost my job and couldn't find another one. No matter. I had a great resume. I was getting three interviews a week, jumping through all the hoops, going through all of the interview processes, coming up second a lot. And the problem is, when you're in your victim story, you take everything personally. So everything that an interviewer would say, I took personally. And more and more started to believe I wasn't good enough. And it just made things worse and worse for myself, not only in the job market, but also in the dating market. I was the queen of rejection because I was trying to do too many things. I was trying to get my book, my novel published. So there's rejection, there rejection with the job market, rejection with the dating. And I had teenagers. Teenagers like to push back, pushback, push back. Then my kids left. So one day I had my son, my daughter, my son's girlfriend, his best friend, and a couple of other kids living under my roof. The next day, I had nobody. Wow.

Craig Andrews 06:10

I would imagine just the sense of loneliness that sets in at that moment is overwhelming abandonment.

Shannon Peel   06:22

There's all of these support systems for mothers when mums become new mums, to teach them how to take care of their baby and bathe them and burp them and dress them and everything else. When it comes to the empty nest, there really isn't anything out there. Everyone's like, oh yeah, great, your kids are gone now you got us free time. And then the same thing happens when we get divorced. When we get divorced, everyone's like, well, okay, you got divorced. Move on. But the thing is, in these two instances of our lives, a death has occurred. Yes, my husband did not die physically, but our family died. My middle class lifestyle died. I went into poverty. I had to stand in line at the food bank. I came from upper middle class where we gave to charity. We didn't go and get charity. So all of a sudden, I'm this huge failure and living in my victim story and repeating it. And as I did, I just attracted more people, more predators, more negativity into my life. At one point after my children had left, the stress plus how it happened, my son had moved out with his friends, and my daughter got mad at me because I was dating, and I just lost my jobs or another job. So this guy came over to see if I was okay, and she decided that, oh, I had a guy at the house. I'm going to go live with my brother. My ex husband said, hey, great, you go live with your brother. I'll give you the child support, which took me three years to get and $10,000 with a lawyer.

Shannon Peel   08:24

There was this instant my relationship with my daughter fell apart completely. So we went from being good friends to nothing at all. We didn't talk for four months, and our relationship still isn't 100%, all because this one guy came over to make sure I was okay after I had lost a job.

Shannon Peel   08:54

During this time when you're so stressed out and things are happening, I would close my eyes and I would see myself in a Nazi concentration camp. I mean, I'm a history buff, watch a lot of Nazi movies. I guess that's where my brain went because I was trapped and I felt I had no control. And that was it. Like, the world hated me. One time I was going into my kitchen, and all the pain, like I had so much emotional pain. It was physical. It manifested physically. And all of a sudden, all that pain went away. I was numb, I was calm. I was completely at peace. And my brain goes, you know that bottle of pills in the cabinet over there? Go down it. That's what you need to do right now. And it made so much sense at that time. But me being a Taurus born in the year of the ox, I am really way too stubborn to do things like that. And other things came into mind. Actually, one of the main reasons why all of this, my battles with these types of thoughts have not materialized is I believe in God. I believe that there is a life after death. So all I would be doing is going from this life to another life, and it pointless. So might as well stay with the devil I know than the one I don't.

Craig Andrews 10:33

What you're describing, I've heard you say it a number of times. What you were experiencing was the product of a victim mindset, but at some point you transitioned into the what, hero or hero mindset? Yeah, hero mindset. What's that look like?

Shannon Peel   10:58

So it's really different because as a victim, everything's done to you. You have no control. You don't make any choices. Other people make choices for you. I go for job interviews, I don't get a job. The reason I can't get a job is because they won't give me one. Has nothing to do with what I can't control anything. So it's all them. A hero mindset is different. I decided to start my own business because instead of being the hero now I could go and be a victim. Now I could go and be a hero. I could go and make decisions, have control over my life, go and find customers, build my brand, build my value in the marketplace as a hero. Because heroes see a problem and take responsibility for the solution. They don't take responsibility for the problem, they take responsibility for the solution. And they go out and that's what they do. A victim will see the problem and won't even think of a solution. They'll just complain, oh actually, sorry, the villain my v's mixed up here the villain in story, a villain story. We all have villain stories as well. Don't get me wrong. We all have hero stories. We all have victim stories, we all have villain stories. Villain stories are when all you can see is the problem and you complain and complain, complain, and there's no solution. Victims do this as well. They complain but they may not be even able to complain because they don't feel they have any say in anything. Villains are putting up obstacles to the hero. Their point is to make it harder for the hero to get to their goal. So they're going to complain, they're going to throw out problems, they're going to say, well, you can't do that, you can't do that, you can't do that, where a hero is going to say, I can do that. Now a hero needs to listen to the villain because you got to know what the problem is and know what the frustration is and the pain and all the well we can't do this for this reasons. Then you take that information and you create as a hero responsible for that solution. Go and solve the problem. Now you may get knocked down over and over again by the villain every once in a while. And just like any superhero movie or action hero movie, you may sit there with your wound heal up and go out and try a different way until you succeed. So that is the difference between where I was was I had no control, no say, I didn't matter to, you know what, I have control over my future. I have control over where I'm going to be. And I make choices about whether or not I'm going to go in one direction or the other. It may be I have to make the best of two bad choices, but I'm making the choice, okay?

Craig Andrews 14:14

And that's fascinating and that makes a lot of sense. As you were telling that I was thinking about the last couple of years of my life. I was asking myself honestly, was I the victim or was I the hero? I think hero definitely know who the villain is. A lot of clarity on that. So that makes sense in personal lives. How do we apply that to business? So how does somebody make their business the hero?

Shannon Peel   14:52

Well, this is where we get into the difference between personal story branding or personal brand storytelling and business brand storytelling. Because in personal brand storytelling, yes, a brand or business can have a hero story where the pronoun is I we're telling a story about the business experiencing a setback client left. Maybe you made a mistake and you had to fix it. You maybe got a bad review. And what did you do? So this is all about the brand and what they did in order to improve. So let's say you get a bad review as a business. Oh, you see that there is a problem. You take responsibility for the solution? Now. I used to work in the online review industry, and I would get phone calls. I'm getting a bad review. I got a bad review and they got it wrong. Or I did everything I could. What else can I do to get them to make it a good review? And I would say, wait a minute. The bad review is okay. You have to take a different mindset in this. The bad review is okay. It's telling people if you are expecting this or if you are this type of person, I'm not a good business for you. And that's okay too. Yeah, as long as you tried to solve the problem and you answer that bad review with your side of the story, with your solution that you provided and sorry, that wasn't enough then. When people are reading those reviews, I mean, when I go to buy something, I'm looking for the bad reviews because I want to know, is that product or service going to work for me? And what I want? And if things go wrong, what is the company going to do? Are they just going to throw their hands up and walk away? Or do they take responsibility for that solution and try to make it better? And that's how business can be a hero. Because now they're talking about their story, what they control, what they have, what they're able to do. But in business brand storytelling, it's a little different. Business brand. Storytelling is when a business tells the customers their own stories and then just offer their product or service as the solution that they can choose in order to get the result that they want.

Craig Andrews 17:25

So let me see if I have this right. What you're saying is when you're telling stories, the hero is never you. The hero is your customer.

Shannon Peel   17:34

Only when you're telling a business. Brand, right? I really Need To Change The Name Of that because I haven't quite figured that it's one of those things that I'm working on, because a business is an entity all on to its own, so it is going to have personal stories of success and failure and just action that it takes. But when you're telling a story for marketing or sales purposes, you're going to want to tell your audience their story. You're trying to create what I call experiential storytelling. You're creating a story that your audience can experience, can bring their own experiences into, and then offering up your product as a solution. For example, you ready? Okay. Close your eyes. I always tell people to close their eyes because you could imagine better when you close your eyes. So unless you're driving, close your eyes. It's hot. The sun is beating down on you. You look around and you can see the heat waves coming off the ground. You feel the sweat sticking to your clothes and a bead kind of going down your chin. It's just so hot. Your mouth feels like cotton. It's dry. Your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth. You're thirsty. You've got this deep thirst, and all you want is something to drink to quench that thirst. Well, guess what? You've got something. Reach out and grab that bottle of Coke and quench that thirst today. That is an example of experiential storytelling because I, as the narrator, don't know all the details. I don't know where you are when it's hot. I don't know what you're looking at. I don't know where the bottle of Coke is in relation to your body. All of those details you bring into the story, and the story changes based on who's hearing it. It's different for the person beside you. Even this story that I shared with you comes from a Coke commercial from the 80s where everyone's on the beach and it's hot and they're thirsty, and then they come with the Coke with all the ice and everything's great. It's advertised how advertising utilizes storytelling to help you choose your product and service to solve their problem.

Craig Andrews 20:24

That's fascinating. And one thing that's really clear to me is we could probably go another hour diving deeper into this if we had the time, but

Craig Andrews 20:42

I think people should reach out to you and learn more about this because I think you're tapping into something that's really powerful and figuring out different times. When you're telling your customers hero story versus your hero story. How would people learn more about that? Where would they find you?

Shannon Peel   21:02

Well, they can go to marketapeal.com, and if they go to Bookappeal get to Marketpeal.com, there's all these different brands that you can go to. But if you go to Book Appeal, you're going to find a number of books there. One is Brand Appeal, where it's all about helping you define your brand so that you can know what you want to be known for and then how to create that brand story. Another one is how to stand out online so that you can create content that connects with your audience. My books are multimedia and interactive and digital. This is not something you can buy on Amazon.

Craig Andrews 21:44

Okay. All right. Well, Shannon, I really hope people reach out and learn more. I know I'm interested. I want to learn more from what you're doing. And thank you for being on Leaders and Legacies.

Shannon Peel   21:59

Well, thank you for having me and allowing me to share not only my personal story, but how to tell a brand story.