Welcome to Issue 70 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about telling better business stories. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) (Miss past issues? Read those here.)

Hello Reader,

As I write this, there are eight little girls wreaking havoc around my house, leaving a trail of potato chips and pizza crumbs across every surface while hunting for my two sorely traumatized cats.

Though don't feel bad for me—I did this to myself.

It's part of an annual ritual I started when my eldest daughter, now 11, turned six and asked to have her closest friends over for a sleepover as her birthday gift.

Growing up in a household with a stepdad who didn't like anyone entering his sacred space—let alone a gaggle of squealing girls—and now living on my own, I'm determined to have a home that's infinitely more open and joyful.

Though this particular sleepover didn't come at the best time this year.

It's been an unusually packed week with recitals and school events, and my calendar a wall of calls and 1:1s I booked from a workshop I gave earlier this week. (Note to self: teach more workshops.)

As a result, I've had no window of prolonged quiet time to write. These newsletters take some effort to develop, and this week I only have a handful of half-baked ideas and snippets of stories that still need shaping.

So today, instead of a story with a tidy little takeaway, I'm trying something different and taking you behind the scenes of how I capture stories throughout the week and then turn them into relevant newsletters and short-form social content.

And this week, that goal is to help you find and shape stories that you can use to create content that's uniquely yours.

A Good Start

There are three things I constantly hear from business owners who want to use more personal stories to build their brand but get stuck somewhere in the process. You either:

1. Don't feel like you have enough good stories to tell.
2. Have too many good stories to tell and can't choose what to focus on or decide what's relevant.
3. Don't know how to tie a story back to your audience in a way that feels natural. (Because no one wants to be the "this is what my wedding taught me about B2B sales" guy.)

My problem this week wasn't only that I was crunched for quiet writing time, but that I struggled to pick which thread of an idea to pull. I struggle with this one a lot.

Because I have a practice of noticing and capturing what captures my attention, by the end of each week I have a long list of potential ideas, stories, observations, or insights to work with.

This week, one idea came from noticing how my 11-year-old and all her friends are truly in this in-between period of their lives. One moment they're talking about their boy crushes and painting their nails and the next they're playing hide-and-seek and making friendship bracelets.

Observing them made me think about how much, as business owners, we're constantly finding ourselves in between identities—growing out of one way of being but not fully confident in the next—and holding both while struggling to understand it, much less articulate it.

Another idea came from watching some of the most notable graduation speeches this year, and realizing that one of the easiest ways to find your online tribe and earn trust right now is to publicly declare where you stand on AI. And maybe not just easy, but almost expected.

For social, I thought about simply posing the question, "But do I have to talk about AI?" to express how so many of us are actually feeling about it.

And a third idea came from reading an interview with Scott Galloway, a wildly successful online business owner who, when asked if weaving personal stories into his now 400K subscriber newsletter felt intuitive from the start, answered that yes—it was immediately obvious that his stories resonated. He added that his most read post to this day was about putting his dog down, noting that "there's a wide space for men my age to talk about their emotions."

That made me think about how each of my storytelling cohorts have always had all women and no more than one or two men. And how my most recent retreat only had one man to 11 women because I made a decision early on to be inclusive of all genders precisely because I believe there aren't enough vulnerable spaces for men to come as they are.

So, those are three of a handful of stories and snippets I noticed this week that could have been the topic of this week's newsletter, had I had more time to write it.

Noticing those things—and relating them back to something I'm working on, something I know my audience struggles with, or something we're collectively thinking about—is essentially the first step of the process.

If you don't have a practice of noticing and capturing what captures your attention each week—whether it's an experience from your day or something you heard, read, or watched that made you feel something—then you won't have much material to work with.

So if your problem is feeling like you don't have enough stories, I suggest you start there. And if your problem is figuring out which one to go with? Read on.

A Good Next Step

If you have a bunch of ideas, the next step is deciding which idea to develop. For that, I (try to) ask myself these three questions:

1. What are my business goals for this month or this week? If I'm trying to launch another cohort, for instance, the story about how I curate the community is the most relevant.
2. What is my audience struggling with right now? Or what's the most culturally relevant thing that I can tie back to the problem I help solve? For that, maybe it's the story about how we talk about AI to attract like-minded clients or audiences.
3. What am I actually interested in writing about right now? Because without that, the content always falls flat. This week, if I had time, I'd probably develop the story about being in the in-between. (Because it's how I'm actually feeling.)

That's basically the whole process for using personal stories to market yourself.

Notice how two of those three ideas I mentioned don't have anything to do with my personal life. So if that's your hangup, I hope you can see that sharing more personal stories can simply mean sharing your point of view on things that capture your attention and are relevant to the people you're trying to reach.

You can't start the process without understanding what your audience cares about. And you can't connect with them without noticing and making a note of the things you observe, feel, and learn every day.

As for ensuring that you don't force the lesson? That's just it: Don't force the lesson.

Because I'm talking to clients, prospective clients, or peers nearly every day—and engaging in the conversations they're having on the internet—what they care about is constantly on my mind, making it easier to make those natural connections.

If you start to force a lesson into a story or a story into a lesson, it's not going to land and it'll make you feel cringy about the whole thing.

So that's it. That's the entire process. I really hope it's helpful.

If any of my half-baked ideas sparked something for you, I'd love to hear what resonated. Maybe I'll develop one of those for next week.

Somehow, the girls have kept themselves entertained this entire time (and only managed to break a single glass).

But now I'm being summoned. Someone needs a snack, someone can't find their charger, and I'm pretty sure one of the cats is now trapped behind the drawers in my closet.

The chaos continues, which means so does the material.

A Few Good Resources

1. Apparently, I’m not the only parent struggling right now. I just learned that this chaotic end-of-school-year time has a name. It’s called “Maycember” because it’s just as packed and joyless as the wrap-up ahead of the holidays. If you, like me, are just now hearing of this, prepare to feel seen.
2. Or, if you're a millenniall, maybe you need to read this.​

Hope you have a good one,
Renee