Welcome to Issue 63 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about how to tell a better story to build better brands. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) (Miss past issues? Read those here.)

And huge apologies: This newsletter is coming out a week late. A weekend ER visit (everything's fine) and a client conference that took my life force delayed the writing process.

Hello Reader,

It was supposed to be a harmless Tweet thread about the 1950s Korean War—the kind of thing you scroll past between cat videos and political hot takes. The kind of thing that appeals to history nerds, trivia junkies, or anyone procrastinating their actual work.

Except it didn’t read like history—it read like breaking news coming from the United States Central Intelligence Agency: “North Korean troops massing at the 38th parallel. Civilians evacuating.”

The internet panicked, and my new friend Amanda Schreier panicked along with it.

As lead writer and content strategist for the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, Amanda was responsible for that Tweet. Without realizing it, she made it appear as though the agency had just announced a present-day military escalation on social media—and all because she forgot to include a “history lesson” hashtag on the thread. Whoops.

Luckily, a few smart journalists set the record straight, and the agency—along with Amanda—was saved from creating a full-blown international crisis.

This is just one of the stories that Amanda shared with my storytelling community and me last week. But it’s the one that really stuck.

Because while revealing personal stuff to a bunch of strangers on the internet is scary, I’m pretty sure nothing you or I publish is ever that consequential. It's easy to forget that nobody pays as much attention to what we share as we do. And even big, potentially messy mistakes can be fixed.

But reminding us to relax isn’t why I wanted to learn from Amanda. What I wanted to know was how, in her 15 years as lead storyteller, she turned one of the world’s most secretive institutions into one of the most followed—and surprisingly human—brands on the internet.

As brands and business owners, we might not be keeping national secrets, but we all have plenty of stories that contain sensitive information, details that could reflect poorly on us or someone else, or cautionary tales about former employers or clients that need to be anonymized. And, as a result of not wanting to give away too much or keep it “professional,” many of us struggle to show up with any personality.

So, how do you do it? How do you become one of the most followed brands on the internet and keep it real without being too revealing?

All problems have opportunities, according to Amanda. And in this case, the tighter the box, the more creative the content.

A Good Approach

So the first thing I wanted to know from Amanda is how she found stories to tell when the most seemingly interesting ones—things like undercover missions, spy methods, and accounts of alien activity—were completely off-limits.

And her answer (perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone in the world of brand building) included looking for stories with a human-interest angle.

By digging through old archives and interviewing staff members, Amanda uncovered and wrote stories about all sorts of interesting things that ended up having mass appeal online.

For instance, she found one story about how, without knowing it, the CIA hired a bunch of amateur magicians whose knowledge of tricks like sleight of hand and misdirection came in handy during missions. After realizing these were valuable skills for any intelligence officer to master, the agency began a program for training new hires on magic. (Fun, right?)

Another popular story was about a group of CIA officers in the 1980s who were so fed up with Washington, D.C. traffic that they started commuting to work by canoe. The blog and social post that accompanied it had black-and-white photos of the officers paddling across the Potomac River and climbing up the muddy banks to headquarters before starting their day. People loved it.

But Amanda’s most popular story by far was the one about Lulu, the bomb-sniffing dog who simply decided she wasn’t interested in the job anymore and dropped out of training. Amanda wrote about it honestly—explaining that Lulu would go live a happy life with her handler instead—and the story went so viral that it landed the CIA on the front page of the New York Times and the Today Show.

The point is that none of these stories damaged the credibility of what is a very serious institution doing very serious work.

Instead, it gave the world a window into the organization and the people behind it. It allowed us to see and understand its mission, vision, and values through small, everyday stories that highlighted its humanity.

Through Amanda’s storytelling, the world realized that behind one of the most guarded institutions in the world is just a bunch of fallible people.

And fallible people who learn lessons that help the rest of us are just the kind of relatable stories we have all in our archives.

A Good Secret

For many of us, finding relatable stories to tell isn't always the problem. The problem is telling either difficult stories with sensitive details or other people's stories with sensitive details that taught us valuable lessons.

Maybe you're worried that sharing too many revealing details could make you look bad, breach client confidentiality agreements, or make a prospect hesitate to hire you—even if the story is an important part of why you're doing what you're doing, what you value, and the belief system that drives your work and sets you apart.

For instance, a member of my storytelling community is suing her former employer over what she believes were unethical and harmful layoff practices. She wants to speak publicly about what happened and the broader leadership issues it exposed, but she’s concerned that sharing specifics could jeopardize her lawsuit and future relationships.

I have another client who was laid off under difficult circumstances, and that experience became the catalyst for the business she’s building now—one designed to do things differently.

In both situations, the questions at the core of the issue are the same:

How do I share the relevant parts of my story without exposing myself or others, damaging my credibility, sounding like a complainer, or facing retribution?

To that, Amanda repeated something I ask all my clients and students all the time: Before telling a hard story (or any story, for that matter), the question you need to ask yourself is “why?”

Why do I need to tell this story? Is it relevant to my mission? Is it relevant to my audience and business I'm building? Why? And how does this story move me and my brand closer to my goals?

If the answer is no—and it's not relevant to your mission and business goals—then maybe you need to find another place to tell the story.

I have several clients who have started Substacks, Medium accounts under pen names, or private Instagrams that serve more as creative outlets than business drivers. They’re simply places to explore and play and tell stories that are burning a hole inside them. These platforms could become an extension of their business one day, but for now, they're just a place to tell these stories that don't have a place in their brand building.

So that’s one approach.

But if the answer to all those questions is yes? Well, in that case, you need to figure out how to “go sideways,” according to Amanda.

She had to do this all the time at the CIA. For instance, she wanted to show the public how intelligence analysts think. But she couldn’t use a current case without risking classified information. So instead, she wrote an article called How to Investigate a Flying Saucer.

On the surface, the story was about UFO sightings from the 1950s. But underneath, it explained analytical tradecraft—and how intelligence officers reason through uncertainty—using only declassified material.

Spoiler alert: It turns out about 80% of those sightings were actually just CIA test flights of new aircraft. The technology was so advanced at the time that even other pilots assumed they were seeing something extraterrestrial—a myth the CIA didn’t attempt to bust because it kept foreign adversaries from realizing what the U.S. was actually testing.

(Which still, by the way, leaves a stubborn 20% of sightings unexplained that Amanda politely declined to comment on. But I guess that’s a mystery for another day.)

So what could this look like for those of us telling personal or client stories?

For example, instead of talking about what went wrong at the company the member in my community is suing, she could write about business ethics as a pattern or position it as a situation she was close to.

Without giving away specifics, she could write about the moment she realized there are certain leadership principles she refuses to compromise on, a culture she’s committed to creating, and the lines she won’t cross in her own business.

Like in any good storytelling, the goal is to extract the emotional core of the circumstance you’re describing and teach the universal takeaway.

And the added benefit of telling a story about an injustice you faced or a difficult lesson you learned this way is that it positions you as forward-looking rather than reactive.

Now, if you worry more about client confidentiality, then Amanda suggests combining similar experiences into one narrative that names a pattern.

So instead of sharing a specific client story, you can say, “I keep noticing this pattern across my clients…” Or, you could find another story that’s not as sensitive—like her story about UFO’s—that highlights the same key takeaway about your unique approach to solving a client's problem.

Amanda also suggests simply getting consent from the subject of a story before publishing it or building storytelling for brand-building permissions into your onboarding process.

This is something I do all the time. And I, for one, have never had a client prevent me from sharing an anonymized lesson.

A Good Takeaway

Alright, so the upshot is that you’re not that important, the secret to brand building is to show the human side of your work or organization, and the government may or may not know something about aliens.

Kidding. I think the real takeaway here is that, whatever our constraints, we need to ask ourselves: What is this really about? What’s the universal lesson here? What humanizes me and my brand? And what can I safely show that still builds trust?

Most of us are not one hashtag away from an international incident. But we are one decision away from either hiding behind our constraints or using them as a creative discipline.

The story you think you can’t tell might just need a different angle.

Because the point of any story is never found in the details. Instead, it’s in the belief you formed, the values you won’t compromise on, and the way you see the world now that helps the people you’re trying to reach.

If Amanda could humanize the CIA without telling us the juicy stuff, the rest of us can probably figure out how to tell our hard stories without burning everything down.

The not-so-secret secret to good storytelling is finding the universal human truth that gives meaning to what happened.

A Few Good Resources

1. If you want to learn storytelling from people like Amanda inside my community, the waitlist for the May Short-Form Storytelling Cohort is open.
2. ICYMI: March 10th is the LAST DAY to apply for the New Narratives retreat.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee