Welcome to Issue 69 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about using storytelling for brand building. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) (Miss past issues? Read those here.)

"How're you doing?" she asked from the other side of the screen.

"To be perfectly honest," I said through a forced, toothy grin, "I'm just ready for it to be over."

It was Thursday, and I was in the digital waiting room of a virtual conference for solo business owners doing a routine tech check before going live for a workshop I was scheduled to deliver in 10 minutes to an audience of more than 600 people.

Even though I was doing all of the deep breathing, I could not shake my nerves. And it wasn't because I didn't know or feel confident in the material—I've presented a version of this workshop live and virtually a few dozen times over the past year—but because I'd never presented it in front of an audience this large.

But also (and this was really it) because it was the first time I was sharing my entire life story in front of a live audience in a business setting.

My goal was to validate the big hypothesis around my work. Which is, in its most current iteration, that in order to become truly known and get people to care, you must allow yourself to be seen. And not just any story will do—you have to get personal.

So I told the story of how a tragic event in my childhood shaped my worldview and approach to relationships in adolescence, which then contributed to a tragic loss in adulthood and ultimately resulted in a shattering realization that what I truly want in my life and through my work was the very thing I was avoiding. It was (just like that last sentence) a lot.

And then? The group chat erupted.

While I couldn't pay attention to what, exactly, was being said, I could see from the corner of my eye that the chat was popping off and accompanied by many little praise hands and heart emojis.

My whole being relaxed a little. My breathing and heart rate regulated. The hard part—the big, personal story—was over.

And now, with what felt like a truly captivated and receptive audience, I talked about storytelling frameworks for brand building.

A Good Approach

Matthew Dicks, who has written several books on storytelling and is best known for being a record-breaking Moth StorySlam champion, argues that if you want to connect with an audience, the story you tell has to be about you.

There's no doubt that a story about something or someone else can be captivating and entertaining and help you get your message across, but it won't allow the audience to know you any better or feel closer to you in any way. And that, in this brave new world, is not only a huge missed opportunity, it's becoming near critical for earning attention and trust.

While I've become more comfortable with sharing personal stuff publicly, I fully get the reservation. Many of us (most of us?) prefer to keep a certain amount of distance between our professional and personal selves, and sharing a story about how our childhood trauma shaped our decision to go into marketing, or whatever, is far outside of our comfort zone.

But, as Brené Brown argues in Dare to Lead, we don't actually have two separate selves that we toggle between. We only have one self, and pretending otherwise doesn't necessarily protect us—it just means we show up to our professional lives as a diminished, armored version of who we are.

And the result is the difference, as these middle schoolers pointed out, between fitting in versus figuring out where we belong.

Professional personas—and other people's stories—are things we invent and hide behind to feel safe. And while they might keep us safe, the cost is connection.

What I can tell you from showing up more honestly with more of my humanity and coaching others to do the same, is that anytime you reveal more of yourself and your story, the response is never negative.

In fact, it's always praise hands and heart emojis.

A Good Start

What if you don't have a good personal story to tell? Like, "Renee, I just fell into accounting because my parents did it."

Allow me to prove you wrong. If you've ever felt feelings, you have a story to tell.

So many of us worry that our stories are too small, too specific, not relatable or not applicable to what we're teaching or selling. If that's you, then the most important component of storytelling you need to internalize is this:

In the personal is the universal.

Your audience may never have been in your exact situation, but they've felt trapped, ashamed, guilty, lonely, lost, stuck, proud, free, or one of the myriad other markers of the human condition.

My story, while big and tragic, is ultimately about loss and how that shaped me. And I know that every single person in that audience and this one has experienced loss in some form or another.

It's simply those specific moments—big or small—rendered honestly and in full detail, that allow your message to be felt intuitively and not just intellectually. That's the content that gets encoded in memory.

So when you tell a personal story that changed the way you think or behave that informs what you do and why you do it, it's not ever really about you. It's about what it means to your audience.

And the more personal and specific you can be, the more they can see themselves in it.

In this way, self-disclosure doesn't mean full disclosure. It simply means sharing something meaningful that led to a valuable insight for someone else that gives them a good reason to choose you.

A Good Framework

An origin story that explains your unique point of view and approach to the work you do doesn't need to start in childhood, like mine does. It just needs to be a foundational story that explains why you do what you do.

It needs to have a clear before and after and a moment of transformation that made you realize things should be done or seen differently. It's your only entirely original way into what you do that offers a valuable and unique perspective and approach to solving the problem you solve.

The simplest framework for telling that story is this:

I used to believe this… But then this thing happened…. And, because of that, I now approach it like this….

Simple, but (like anything worthwhile) not easy. It took me weeks to workshop my origin story and many, many rounds of editing. Because how do you tell an entire life story in 10 minutes? You don't. And that's the point.

You have to distill your story into the most important points and ruthlessly cut out details that don't move the narrative forward.

When editing my own foundational origin story—or any story, for that matter—the question I ask myself line by line is this:

Does this detail move the narrative forward, or does it introduce another element that creates a question in the audience's mind that then needs further explanation or context?

If it detracts from the narrative and doesn't move it forward, it's gotta go. (Just don't slice anything that rips the emotion or beating heart out of it.)

Then, you just have to pick a place to start telling it and see what comes from the reaction.

A Good Takeaway

While I was so ready for that talk to be over, it turned out to be the beginning of a newfound conviction I have for pushing the personal-professional boundary.

After the presentation, I received over 200 new connection requests (and counting!) and almost just as many direct messages that are turning into potential partnerships, paid work and other opportunities. One woman even insisted on reading my Astrological chart. (Why not?)

Whether or not you're ready to share more of your story, I hope you consider that maybe the distance you're keeping between your personal and professional life is the same distance that's keeping you from the people you're trying to reach.

What would it look like to shrink the distance a little and allow the people you want to attract understand who you are, where you're coming from, and make a case for why it matters to them?

I can't make any promises for how you'll be received, but know that I'll be over here sending you praise hands and heart emojis.

A Few Good Resources

1. If you want to workshop your own origin story, Will Greenblatt's 3-act framework is a great place to start. He helped me shape mine and I heart him very much.
2. I follow a ton of internet rabbit holes, but this one led to a call for speakers if that's something you're interested in.
3. ​A convincing argument for making "heavy" things.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee