Episode 1317: Finding the Medicine Inside Your Story with Amanda Johnson

What if the stories you tell about your past are quietly shaping your relationships, leadership, business, and future? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Amanda Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of Saved By Story Publishing, who shares how storytelling helps people recognize the narratives that shape their identities, choices, and relationships. She explains that revisiting and writing personal stories can reveal recurring patterns, deepen self-awareness, and help entrepreneurs and leaders communicate their experiences in ways that foster connection and impact. Amanda also explores the idea of story as medicine, the role storytelling can play in building a legacy, and her mission to help more people break generational narratives and use their experiences to move forward. Key Takeaways: → Writing about personal experiences can reveal recurring patterns that continue to shape present-day behavior. → Entrepreneurs often need more than organization to turn their experiences into a clear, meaningful message. → Stories can serve as a form of medicine by offering lessons, identities, and themes that people can apply to their own lives. → Personal storytelling can help leaders build stronger connections with their families, teams, clients, and communities. → Writing a book can help an author confront and change narratives that may have been holding them back. Amanda Johnson alchemizes twenty-five years of transformative experiences through story literacy, writing, and narrative medicine to fulfill her mission through The Story Oracle and Saved By Story, equipping individuals to use humanity’s most innate tools to transmute the pain of their backstory into a more magically-ever-after for themselves, their loved ones, and those they serve. Connect With Amanda: Website: https://savedbystory.house/ https://the-story-oracle.com/ Links Mentioned in Episode: You Can’t Make This St*ry Up: https://a.co/d/dK2naao Raised by Story: https://a.co/d/dToxbPd Upside-Down Mommy: https://a.co/d/7yskzcZ Upside-Down Messenger: https://a.co/d/glG7v9d Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thestoryoracle114 https://www.facebook.com/savedbystory Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestoryoracle114/ https://www.instagram.com/savedbystory/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thestoryoracle114/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/saved-by-story-publishing/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host Seth Green. Today, I have the good fortune to be with Amanda Johnson. She is the co-founder and CEO of Saved by Story Publishing and is known as the Story Oracle.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Amanda, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Seth. I'm excited to be here.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  We are excited to have you. So, let's go back in time a little bit. How did you get started?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  You know, I always talk about my career like it was a little bit of a pinball machine experience. I really thought I was going to be a journalist because I loved creative writing and story. And then I got to a classic books program and I realized story is even more important than that. It shapes identity and culture. So, I became a history teacher. But I became a history teacher about the same time I became a mom. And I ended up in a school district with kids who had stories that needed a lot more time than I could give them and still have anything left for my kiddo when I got home. So, I jumped out of that thinking I would go back later and eventually found myself in a room full of entrepreneurs. I was telling them about this incredible writing instruction program I participated

• 2:18Speaker 02

  in and they said, "We don't really want you to teach us how to write. We need you to fix what we have been writing." Because they were prolific bloggers and article writers and, you know, had websites. And eventually, the manuscripts started to hit my desk. And so, after a bit of time, putting those back together, after chopping them up and chopping up a whole bunch of content that they didn't really, they shouldn't have in there anymore, handing it back to them, I noticed that especially for these entrepreneurs, there was relief and something else. And when I asked them, when I got the courage to finally ask them, what was the something else? Because it didn't look good.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  They said that, you know, "Time is money and time is family." And I feel like I spent a lot of time working on something that just didn't do it. So, I thought, "Well, help people from the very beginning." And so, I started to do that. I thought all they needed was some organization and accountability, and it turns out that they needed much more than that. So, I've been working on a model that helps individuals get clarity on what the message is, figure out how to position themselves, but also heal some of the stories that have been keeping them in a space of hurt, even though they look like superhumans in their particular domains.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Fascinating. You call yourself the Story Oracle. Where did that name come from?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Do you ever watch The Matrix?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yes, many times.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  So, which character did you identify with?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Well, I know who the oracle is, so...

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I identified with Neo, but I loved the oracle. And you know that scene where he says, "Am I the one?" And she says, "Hmm, are you?" And hands him a chocolate chip cookie. Well, eventually, after a few years of figuring out how the, you know, what the best approach was with my clients, and I could always see more than what they were saying. I could see more in the story. I could see more in their potential future and their desires for career. I could see them on stages. I could see them married to certain people, getting forwards from big names. And they would look at me like they were scared. And so, I realized it's better for people to discover who they really are and do the

• 4:40Speaker 02

  work to own and embody it and for me to just ask some really compelling questions.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  When did you first realize that stories weren't just entertainment, that they could actually change people?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Well, consciously, I realized it when I was in college. I had the opportunity to go into a classic books program and we started with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and ended with some modern-day philosophy and stories. And I had personal wrestling matches with a lot of those books. And I mean, almost, well, one of them was literally a physical wrestling match. My poor book broke over the course of three weeks while I was reading and discussing it because I was having some really big feelings about how that story was trying to shape me, right? It was sort of pushing me to think about not just the ideas, the big themes that we

• 5:34Speaker 02

  were encountering, but the way that people were engaging each other and the decisions that they were making. They really pushed at some of the personal decisions that I was in the middle of making. So, I knew that they were shaping me. And in a program like that, you can't walk away and think that story doesn't shape every single thing about us.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  You talk about helping people co-author their lives. What does that mean?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Well, there's this funny thing that happens when people get really excited. They hire me and then they jump into a program with me. And the first thing that I do is I ask them to, one of the first things, is to go back to one of those stories that was a good counter-story to where their clients are right now. You know, the people who are going to pick up the book. Where are they at? What are they feeling? What are they aspiring to? Okay, you go back and tell me what your moment like that looked like. And I didn't just ask them to tell me about it. I asked them to write about it. So, they would write about it. And of course, it was very tell me. And so, then I would ask them to go back and be the character inside the story.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  And they quickly wondered why they'd hired me because a lot of those stories are still tender. They still haunt them a little bit and they're unprocessed. And so, going back there was the opportunity to tap into that, process it a little bit more or a lot more. And then we would move through the process from this moment to that moment. They'd get a little character, moving to narrator awareness, right? Seeing above the story and more of those connections that are happening between all the characters, little wider perspective of the plot. And then they would go back to character and the narrator. And then there was this moment, Seth, every time where I would get a call or text, somewhere

• 7:27Speaker 02

  like the 60% mark of writing their books. And they would say, "You know, that thing that I've been complaining about in my coaching sessions that's holding me back, it keeps interrupting every time I write on, I work on this book." And say, "Yes, yes, I know exactly what that is." And they'd say, "Do you think that that keeps happening because I keep giving the same response that I gave in chapters one, two, three, and four whenever this happened?" So, here they had accomplished, they were writing a book about overcoming that narrative in an aspect of their lives. And yet, that narrative still existed in other domains and it was driving them crazy and wearing them down and keeping them back from their goals.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And so, those moments where we have the opportunity to be in the story and really present viscerally, we can see what's happening, hear what's happening. But we're also above the story and we can see how all the things are connected. That's when I believe we have the most agency. Like, that's when we discover agency in the story. "Oh, this is the moment. I always say this thing or I always do this behavior and I always regret it later." And then we promptly forget, right? We all have amnesia after those moments until we do something like construct our narrative. And when we do that writing, it's very, very hard to ignore those patterns and to continue them.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  You describe story as a form of medicine. What do you mean by that?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  I love this question.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  So, I was just pitching a TED Talk on this called "One More Episode." Because you know how that is when you're addicted to a good book, right? One more chapter, one more episode. I have to finish. I have to know what happens. I think that we do that not because we're lazy, not because we're checking out from our lives, not because, you know, we've nothing better to do. I think it's because there's something in there that we're trying to get. You know, narratives hold blueprints. They hold identities. They hold themes that are exact representations of what we deal with when we turn off the TV and walk away or close the book.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  And yet, most of us haven't been taught how to extract the man that is inside of these narratives and use it to move our own lives forward.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Wow. I mean, this is so amazing. What, why should a CEO or founder or business owner care about our personal story and trying to get that out there?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I won't speak for every single one, but the ones that I've met across 20 years, we're not just CEOs. We're also parents. We're also partners. We're also leaders. And the thing that is the saddest aspect of our culture right now is the disconnection that we are, we're seeing an epidemic of despair and disillusion and depression. And I really believe that story is the answer for that. Not only can we share our own stories to inspire or warn, right? The next generation, "Hey, maybe avoid these three things that I did and do it like this

• 10:44Speaker 02

  instead." But we can use stories every day, the ones that we're hooked on, the ones that we hear about at the grocery store, to connect with the people in our lives and discover a little bit more about who they are and why they're here and how we can help them. Because, like I said, most folks aren't connecting those dots into, you know, "What is this thing going on inside of me while I'm watching this show?" Right? No one's asking them those questions like I asked my son when he was little. And so, we don't have the language. Story can give us the language. It can give us some medicine to support each other and create those connections that we're all really craving.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Who is an ideal client for you?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  There's, there are two avatars that I love to work with. The first one is representative of those individuals. I call them my blowers and goers. They're like the unstoppable people who are on, you know, business number three, and they're just getting ready to put their legacy together into a book. And they need someone who can put on some running shoes and haul butt next to them. Well, they are, you know, moving the rest of the world at the pace that they do. And then the other folks that I love to work with are the ones who are sort of haunted by stories. These are people who have been thinking about writing a book since they were little or for a good dozen or few years.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And when I ask them, what do you want to write about? They say, hmm, I just know I need to write. Or they think, well, it's probably, you know, in order to grow my business or start this next chapter as a thought leader. And those stories, I love those because there's always, we're looking for the medicine in those stories. There's medicine in all the stories, but the medicine in those stories for the people who are writing it, that's the part of my work that I love the most.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  You've helped so many people. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  How to help more?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Like get in front of bigger audiences. Part of what I, I want to do now, you know, we can help 12 to 20 people every year on these deep, deep works, these big pieces of content. But when I hear that a client has stopped a generational narrative in its tracks before it got to their kids, I'm thinking, okay, how do I make these rooms hundreds, thousands of people who understand the principles that we're using to drive the transformation here? And increase that connection to other people. So that's what I'm working on next.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  That is awesome. Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Right now, I'm connecting with a whole bunch of people in a whole new ecosystem. And I'm loving every bit of it. I sort of feel like my co-author has redirected me in the last few years to get a little bit clearer about who I'm supposed to be working with. And the builders who need my help to build these legacies that they're leaving.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  That is awesome. For our folks who are watching and listening and want to learn more, where is the best place for us to send them?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Head over to savedbystory.house. And if you're interested in getting a little bit of a taste, go over to Quest Starters and see what we've got there. A bunch of free content for you.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  All right, this has been Seth Green with Amanda Johnson, the Story Oracle. Amanda, thanks again for joining us.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Thank you, everybody, for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 14:32Speaker 03

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