How to share better stories for your personal brand and business
Facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered when they are part of a story. Learn to share better stories for your personal brand and business.
Steve Jobs famously said:
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
It’s not enough to simply understand the value of storytelling for business and your personal brand. Like any business skill, it requires learning and practice. So, in this blog, I’m sharing my top tips for better stories.
But, first, let’s talk more about why storytelling in business matters.
The importance of storytelling in business
Neuroscience tells us when you hear a fact this engages two parts of your brain. Your language processing and your language comprehension centres. Whereas, when you hear a story, this increases by fivefold. More parts of your brain are actively engaged in the process. So, you’re more likely to remember the information.
Over thousands of years, humans have been evolutionarily hardwired for storytelling.
Storytelling helps release oxytocin. This is the chemical that builds empathy and trust. It causes us to care about the people involved in the story.
Neuroscience research shows that on average humans spend 30 per cent of waking hours daydreaming. This is except when reading, listening to or watching a story.
When you experience an event external to your own mind, it’s processed through your filters. Our brain’s filters include our values, beliefs, memories and past decisions. This creates an internal emotional state.
Stories have the powerful ability to connect your personal brand to your people. To engage with their shared past experiences, beliefs and values. And shared values unite us.
1. Know the ‘Origin Story’ and ‘Founder Story’ of your personal brand
Humans crave context. These two personal brand stories - your origin story and founder story - help create ‘world-building' for your audience. Consider all your favourite TV shows, movies, books. Usually, you learn upfront how characters came to be in certain positions.
Your Origin Story
Most people tell stories about their current role, current life or recent industry experience. To strengthen your audience’s connection with you, share your backstory.
Reflect on your childhood experience, standout memories, interests, heritage, upbringing or earlier professional career. What were the defining moments?
You don’t owe anyone every detail of your life story. That’s yours to hold sacred as you wish. Decide what aspects are most relevant to what you want to be known for. What's most relevant to the problem you help solve? Which leads to your next essential story. Connect your narrative to your founder's story.
Your Founder Story
Given your background, what was the catalyst for what you’re currently doing? The reason you founded your business or are working in your current field. Do the heavy lifting for your audience by connecting the dots. Help them understand your credibility for what you’re doing today.
Together, these stories will highlight why you’re the best person to solve a marketplace problem.
2. Be intentional about the type of story you’re telling
Storytelling in itself is not enough. You must be intentional about your stories.
Consider your next content piece, speaking engagement or day-to-day leadership. What types of stories are you telling? And importantly, why you’re telling them?
In Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, storytelling expert Annette Simmons’ key storytelling ideas are:
Who-I-am stories: Builds trust
Why-I-am here stories: Explains what qualifies you
Teaching stories: Demonstrates how new behaviours change results
Vision stories: Reframes present difficulties to ‘worth it’
Value-in-Action stories: Demonstrates what the value means
I-know-what-you-are-thinking-stories: Builds trust by sharing secret suspicions, and dispelling objections
For authenticity-in-action, Simmons also recommends four story types:
A time you shined: Communicates integrity, compassion or learning
A time you blew it: Shares vulnerability to build trust
A mentor: Expresses gratitude and humility, and likely highlights your own values
A book, movie or current event: The characters and storytellers have done the hard work for you. Explain what it means to you and connect its relevance
3. Work to a storytelling structure
Storytelling is an art that’s been practised for thousands of years. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Work to a storytelling framework as such:
StoryBrand framework
Branding master Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework in Building a Story Brand outlines:
A character (your audience is the hero, not you)
Has a problem
They meet a Guide (this is you or your brand). With 1) empathy and 2) authority
Who gives them a plan
And calls them to action
That helps avoid failure
And ends in success
It honours your audience i.e. your customers, team or stakeholders as the story’s hero. A hero on a mission. And as personal branding does best, positions you (the Guide) in service to your people.
Story Spine framework
In The Best Story Wins, experienced Pixar storytelling, Matthew Luhn (who worked with Steve Jobs) shares the Story Spine storytelling structure he teaches top businesses:
Exposition
Inciting incident
Progressive complication
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
When in doubt, think in 3s
In Building a Story Brand, Donald Miller recommends a story one-liner. Inspired by Hollywood, where writers pitch a logline to busy studio executives. Loglines make or break a pitch and help form the movie’s marketing. Take a simple scroll through your streaming services to see loglines at work.
Your one-liner becomes the answer to the question, “What do you do?" Or “Tell me about yourself.” Like any good three-act story, it has a start, middle and end:
The problem (you help solve)
The solution (you offer the marketplace)
The success (the transformation)
4. Create a sensory experience
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) uses ‘representational systems’. These are the sensory modalities that describe how people process information.
NLP’s ‘VAKOG’ model includes:
Visual (sight)
Auditory (sound)
Kinesthetics (touch/feeling)
Olfactory (smell)
Gustatory (taste)
Creating a sensory experience is the icing on the cake of your storytelling. It helps with ‘narrative transportation’ - making your audience feel like they are there with you. Adding a sensory experience to your storytelling helps connect with different system preferences.
5. Show, don’t tell
The average person is exposed to thousands of marketing messages daily.
Marketing to Mindstates by Will Leach says you experience more than 35,000 decisions per day.
Behavioural economics tells us humans have two systems:
System 1 (95%)
Unconscious
Fast
Automatic
Emotional
System 2 (5%)
Conscious
Slow
Indecisive
Logical
The most effective branding strategies tap into the unconscious mind. This is because humans buy emotionally first and then rationalise with logic. Visual priming and framing, therefore, become essential for your personal brand.
Priming
This is a subconscious reaction to stimuli that impacts conscious decisions.
Framing
Visual framing is the presentation of elements in relation to the main subject.
Say someone visits your website or profile. You have a twentieth of a second before neurological processes kick in.
Rather than lazy generic options, use photos that prime and frame. Clearly communicate your key messages. In an instant, communicate your personal brand value.
Your profile pictures
Make intentional choices.
Use a photo with deliberate wardrobe, colour and background choices. Reflect your personal brand style.
Your story’s other characters
Share the other characters in your story. Imagine watching a movie, or TV show or reading a story with only one character. It’s unheard of because humans are social beings. We understand people and their values better by the company they keep and the relationships they value. The presence or personality of other characters helps say something about our own. So, share the other characters of your story to help your audience understand your values.
If you share other team members, it helps your audience build trust with them.
Social proof
Your customer stories add social proof to your personal brand or business brand. This builds trust. You can tell your audience how great you are, or you can show them. And let your social proof do the talking for you.
Consider the hero banner on your website or LinkedIn profile for example. Pick an image that shows any or a combination of:
Your value in helping to solve a problem: For example, mine is designed to communicate the value of personal branding in a noisy marketplace. View it here.
Your creditability: A speaking engagement, media opportunity, book or similar
Your customer experience: You on the job
Your customer transformation story: This shows your customer success stories.
Don’t just understand the value of storytelling; practise telling better stories. Be intentional about the messages your personal brand is communicating through your stories. And use stories to make them memorable.
