Well hey, Reader!

I debated for hours this morning whether to stick with the most iconic scene from Up or pull a lesson from somewhere else. After writing (and deleting) two hours’ worth of words that didn’t feel right, I decided to go with my first instinct. Sometimes, we don’t need to be clever, we just need to tell the story that comes to us with ease.

I’m assuming we have all cried over the opening montage of Up. I have cried over it so many times that even hearing the soundtrack on someone’s Instagram reel causes my eyeballs to well up a bit.

It’s a truly beautiful montage of moments. Four minutes without dialogue, just a handful of snapshots of this couple’s life that almost feel mundane: painting a nursery, patching a tire, saving coins for an adventure that never comes.

Watch the first four minutes of Up again. Notice how much you understand without a single line of dialogue. Each vignette says, This is what love looks like. This is what loss feels like.

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We didn’t have to be told that Carl and Ellie lived an epic love story that was peppered with the grief of life. They showed us through short vignettes that carried the emotional weight of each moment.

Each vignette is an analogy for something bigger: hope, partnership, grief, endurance. We don’t need the words because the images do the heavy lifting.

That’s the magic of evocative storytelling. It’s how we are able to make abstract emotions tangible, and how we let the audience feel the feeling instead of being told what happened.

But here’s the catch: you don’t get Pixar’s orchestra or visual montage to do the work for you. You have to build those vignettes with your language.

Your words have to paint the picture.

Think of it like this:

• Instead of saying “That’s when everything changed” try “That’s when I threw the plan in the trash and started over with a blank page.”
• Instead of “I didn’t know what to do next,” try “I made a pot of coffee and stared at the counter like it might have answers.”
• Instead of “I learned a lot,” try “Every time I thought I’d figured it out, life handed me a pop quiz.”

Each one is a micro-story, a single frame that pulls emotion through one vivid moment. These emotional snapshots build a shared language of feeling through detail. They translate emotion into sensory language—the creak of a chair, the hum of a fluorescent light, the sound of a key turning in a door.

Those are the cinematic moments that bring your talk to life.

Find one sentence in your talk that feels flat, functional, or cliché. Rewrite it so it’s small, specific, and charged with emotion. The goal isn't to explain the feeling. Let us feel the moment with you.

If you try it, let me know!

Until next week,