Personalize Your Message
If you don’t care, why should anyone else? If you do care, prove it by telling a personal story. Stoke the embers of positive emotions by letting listeners “observe” your actions and emotions in real life. Give evidence that you walk your talk.
Build trust and validate frustrations by sharing personal stories about mistakes or by admitting negative emotions. If unaddressed, negative experiences can fester. A personal story reframes unpleasant experiences as obstacles overcome.
Executive Secrets: What’s Your Story?
By Annette Simmons / Illustration by Bruce Brown
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You’ve always heard that sharing personal narratives in professional settings isn’t done. But there’s no better way for customers and coworkers to see your values in action than a carefully chosen short story.
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If you care about your job, if you’re passionate about excellence and committed to your customers, then missed deadlines or unhappy clients are going to leave you frustrated. And anyone who tells you “it’s not personal” isn’t involved enough to know that if it’s important, it is personal. So why not punctuate your business communications with pointed personal elements?
The idea that “business isn’t personal” is a myth perpetuated by people who think it’s possible to sustain “good” emotions like enthusiasm, inspiration, and passion without ever experiencing “bad” emotions. If you want others to care deeply about success, you can’t jump ship when they feel deeply upset by failure. When passionate people encounter obstacles that block their best efforts to deliver excellent products and services, they can get really ticked off. Achieving big visions and difficult goals demands the kind of personal commitment that both celebrates success and detests failure.
Managers who deny the validity of a passionate individual’s frustration only increase that individual’s retreat into cynicism and apathy. Scratch a cynic and you may find an idealist who cares so deeply that he or she doesn’t want to be disappointed one more time.
Personal becomes important. / How do you reclaim deep emotional commitment from coworkers who are practiced at keeping their distance? Be the first to take the “it is personal” plunge. Demonstrate your own personal investment and two things happen. First, people sense permission to feel strongly about things. Second, your emotions trigger the emotions of others. There’s no better example of this than the reaction you get when you incorporate personal stories into interactions on the job, whether in small meetings or presentations to large groups. When you tell a true story that illustrates when, where, and how you feel personally invested in your work, those around you will be inspired by your example. People naturally follow individuals who have a passion for bringing meaning to their life and work.
Tell a tale. / Your daily actions tell the story of your personal commitment to your values and goals. People’s perceptions of your story—the kind of person you are, the values you hold dear, corners you will never cut, etc.—profoundly affect the level of personal commitment they feel toward you and the organization you represent. Regardless of what you say, people’s perceptions of you and your actions can build up or degrade their confidence that you’re “walking your talk.” When time is short (i.e. in most work interactions), often the only way to quickly illustrate the values you aspire to is to tell a personal story. No one has time to listen to your life story, but a three-minute real-life sketch of your actions can give others the opportunity to trust that you are, indeed, committed to success.
Not a good storyteller? / If you’re breathing, you are a storyteller. You tell stories every time you describe something that happened. The trick is to pay attention to which events you describe so you send the messages you want to send. Stories reinforcing expectations of success and standards of commitment multiply the personal investment of the people around you. Finding those stories is easier than you think.
What values guide you? Pride? Respect? Or is there something more attuned to success in your business, such as a transcendent devotion to the client? Stories about “dumb customers” or “Murphy’s Law” just reinforce cynicism. List two or three values. Next, find an example of that value in action so you can tell it in story form. Re-create an event in words and tone so others experience it for themselves in their imagination.
It’s silly to walk into a room and say, “My name is Annette, and I have integrity.” People decide for themselves whether you have integrity by observing over time. Without that kind of time, it makes sense to shape others’ opinions of you by sharing a story. Doing so delivers a compressed sample of your actions so people can decide whether you live by the values you endorse.
Where do I find stories to tell? / Search your memory for events relating to any of the following four topics and you will find stories that illustrate your values:
A time you shined. Your true nature shows best when you are tested. Think of a time when it cost you something to stick to your values. For instance, dem-onstrating integrity, or even customer commitment, always costs you time. Acts of integrity often occur without witnesses, so you must tell stories of this integrity if you want to reinforce this value in your organization.
A time you blew it. It sounds backward, but telling a story that discloses a mistake can double your impact. The very fact that you’re sharing a personal failure, flaw, or embarrassing moment demonstrates trust in your listeners. When you show trust, people tend to trust you back. Don’t worry about misunderstandings. People can infer from the way you tell the story and the tone in your voice how you felt about failing your own standards and how you strive never to let it happen again.
A mentor. When you talk about a person in your life who demonstrated great dedication to a value, people naturally assume you aspire to that level of commitment.
A book or a movie. Find a scene from a book or a movie that exemplifies a defining quality of your personality. A lawyer I know once said, “The summer of my 12th year, I read To Kill a Mockingbird and decided I would grow up to be the kind of lawyer Atticus Finch was—but more than that, the kind of father he was.” He transformed himself before everyones’ eyes into a current-day Atticus Finch. Everyone laid off the lawyer jokes after that.
Stories translate acronyms into reality. / Jack Hagerty of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center recently put storytelling to the test in his segment of a daylong employee-orientation program. As a senior training facilitator, he ends each day with a message about “Everyday Pride: Professionalism, Respect, Integrity, Diversity, and Excellence.” He added this story to his normal presentation:
“Last year, a good friend of mine found out he had cancer. Sheldon was a patient here, in this hospital. From the time my wife facilitated introductions 15 years ago, we were close friends with Sheldon and his wife, Barbara. They were opposites: She is an artist and he was a scrappy ‘mustang’—the rare ship’s captain who rises through the ranks instead of graduating from the Naval Academy. Our friends didn’t think of them as married so much as ‘in love.’
“At 79, with a dark, full head of hair, he seemed so healthy that he and his doctors decided to try a short surgical procedure rather than chemotherapy. Everyone agreed that the surgery would require less recovery time than chemo. He’d be home in three days.
“Two weeks after the procedure, he was still in the hospital. On the 17th day, my wife called me at work to say that Shel had died—unpredictable complications. It was a terrible shock. I dropped everything and rushed to see Barbara at the hospital. As I arrived, she walked up to me and placed her hand on my chest, right here where my ID badge hangs, and she said, ‘Everyone has been so nice to us. They took such good care of Shel—they did everything they could.’
“I felt a rush of gratitude. I was so grateful the people I work with took just as good care of Shel as I would have. And then, strangely, my mind wondered ‘What if they hadn’t?’ What if Barbara had said—‘that terrible nurse did this or that’? I would have been horrified. It shows me how our idea of daily pride is very real and personally important to me and all of us because every single patient that comes in is someone’s friend or daughter or son.”
Later that week Hagerty received this e-mail from the manager responsible for employee orientation:
“Jack, you were amazing yesterday—the best I’ve ever seen. After personally presenting EdP [Everyday Pride] the last few times, I really started feeling that it wasn’t that important a presentation. I also felt that at the end of the day, there is no way to get the audience engaged. I was completely blown away to see how effective you were in getting the audience engaged and participating. I was really moved by your personal examples … and really touched by your story about your friend. It was inspirational and poignant.”
Amazing is not an adjective people use unless they feel truly moved. Tell a personal story next time you want to convey your commitment to excellence. Chances are, you’ll get amazing results.
Annette Simmons, the author of The Story Factor and Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins and president of Group Process Consulting, recently returned home to Louisiana after living abroad.
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