Stories About What We Do™
Founder story | Fundraising pitch | Media interview | Public speaking | TED talk
Stories About What We Do™ are the most important — and difficult — stories we tell.
Stories About What We Do™ are an established genre of story you see from TED stages to investor pitches. You know them when you hear them because they make you excited about what the teller is doing, even if it doesn’t relate to you directly.
They are the stories that make people follow an organization online — even if there isn’t a way for you to get involved, you still want to know what happens next.
When Stories About What We Do™ work, they:
build trust
generate alignment
enable your audience to predict what you will do next.
When they don’t work:
it doesn’t feel authentic
your audience isn’t engaged
your audience is engaged but doesn’t act
Leaders today is expected to have — and tell — Stories About What We Do™, but they are uniquely difficult to tell: you’re telling a story that hasn’t yet ended, you are the protagonist and narrator, and the stakes are high.
Story-Modeling™ was developed using narrative theory, neuroscience, scientific modeling and 20 years’ communications practice, to create a reliable method for revealing the story you are trying to tell.
Stories About What We Do™ are critical for:
Running a startup
Public speaking
Building a team
Media interviews
Fundraising
Navigating a career change
Building a public profile
Your story is probably much more interesting than the one you have been telling.
Why? Because everyone makes the same common mistakes (read below).
Common Mistakes
If you’ve been making these mistakes — you’re in good company.
Telling someone else’s story.
The stories we tell are usually the stories we have been told — by our parents, teachers, bosses, mentors.
When your story doesn’t feel authentic to you, that’s because you’re telling someone else’s story about you., and your point of view doesn’t align anymore. Your story needs to describe your point of view, not someone else’s.
Fitting in instead of standing out.
When you become a founder, leader or spokesperson, you need a story that inspires others to join you. But, we are used to telling stories that describe how we fit in — whether on college applications, in job interviews or social gatherings.
Your story needs to be about what is different — novel — about you, and what you are doing that no-one else is doing.
FAQs
What are some examples of Stories About What We Do™?
TED talk: How Nearly Dying Helped Me Discover My Own Cure (and Many More) by David Fajgenbaum
The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus
Aren’t Stories About What We Do™ career narratives?
No.
A career narrative is centered around your career: it starts when your career began and ends when your career ends, and follows the path of building your career over time.
Stories About What We Do™ connect your work to your life; the story is about you, not your career.
A career narrative usually start with “I began my career at…” and follows a plot of jobs, promotions and qualifications. Stories About What We Do™ often start with the personal experience of a problem, followed by a solution idea, and ends with efforts to solve the problem.
Why did storytelling suddenly become so important?
Web 2.0 created new opportunities for storytelling at scale, through blog, website, video and social media platforms. Early viral videos made use of these platforms to tell stories, creating pressure to use storytelling in marketing campaigns. Twenty years later — while it’s rare for a story to go viral, storytelling is considered a critical communication skill for leaders and spokespeople.
How are Stories About What We Do™ different from brand narratives?
A brand narrative is centered around a brand: it starts with the development of an idea for a company and charts the path of building a brand over time. Stories About What We Do™ are centered around a person and describe their work and their relationship to their work.
What about personal brand?
For most of us, personal brands are as much a fact of life as digital identities. Today, most people have a digital identity that spans their personal and professional lives, leaving leaders and spokespeople in need of a Story About What They Do™ that connects the work to the person in a way that is cohesive and complementary.
How are Stories About What We Do™ different from persuasion?
Stories About What We Do™ can be persuasive, but they are not successful if they are persuasive.
Persuasion is concerned with the audience’s opinion, and is successful only if the audiences’ opinion shifts.
Stories About What We Do™ are concerned with the teller’s experience, which triggers an empathy response from the audience. Empathy provides access to a point of view in addition to our own, and is an important skill for bonding in relationships — which can make these stories persuasive.