The Buried Treasure In Your Stories
How to use the experiences you’ve been leaving on the table
Authentic stories trigger the release of oxytocin, the neuro-chemical associated with trust and connection. In fact, when your team knows your story, they typically trust you more, which can allow them to move faster.
They benefit from hearing about the mentor who took a chance on you when you didn’t deserve it, the launch that blew up in your face, or the moment you realised you were leading from fear rather than vision.
When we ask clients what gets in the way of sharing a story, they often say that they simply cannot think of one. In this article, we’re sharing a few ways of accessing your stories, along with the best ways to deploy them.
Surface The Stories You’ve Forgotten You Have
Unfortunately, most people, when asked to reflect on their career, default to a dry, chronological, LinkedIn-style summary that flattens everything interesting about what they’ve actually lived through.
To find the stories that move people, try the following…
Spatial And Sensory Recall
Grab a physical notepad (writing sparks more associative thinking than typing). Then map out three categories…
People: Draw your name in the centre and map out the relationships that shaped you. That mentor who took a chance on you. The teammate who quietly saved a launch while you were getting the credit.
Places: Be hyper-specific. The humming silence of a server room at 3:00 AM during an outage. The exact layout of the cramped basement where your first product pivot happened. The motorway service station where you took a call that changed everything.
Objects: Identify things with symbolic weight. A cracked phone screen. A handwritten note from a customer. Objects anchor memory in a way that timelines don’t.
Once you have a handful of story kernels, don’t simply rely on your memory. Build a story database using a spreadsheet, a Notion page, an Airtable base, or whatever tool you’ll actually want to come back to and use.
Catalog each story by its theme (resilience, intellectual humility, radical candor), its moral (the single takeaway you want the listener to walk away with), and its anchor (the sentence that reconnects the personal moment back to the business context - “I’m telling you this because I see us facing a similar fork in the road right now”).
Crowdsourcing
If solo reflection feels like a luxury you don’t have time for, try an “Object Standup” with your team. You can do this regardless of whether you meet physically or virtually. Once a quarter, ask everyone to bring one physical object (or a photo of one) that directly or indirectly represents a lesson learned. You’ll gain insight into the moments that actually shaped your team, which in turn, will sharpen your instinct for which of your own stories will resonate with them most. This activity delivers a double-win because, in addition to collecting great stories, you’re also modelling the kind of vulnerability that makes it safe for others to do likewise.
The Right Story For The Right Room
Having a rich catalogue of stories is only half the work. The other half, and where leaders sometimes fall short, is knowing which story to deploy, when, and how.
A story that lands beautifully at a late-night team offsite can fall completely flat in a boardroom, or worse, land as tone-deaf in a cross-cultural setting. The questions to ask before delivering any story are…
What do I want this person/people to feel?
What do I want them to do differently as a result?
If you can answer those clearly, choosing the right story becomes significantly easier.
Start With Audience Emotion
Before you decide what to share, ask yourself: what is keeping these people up at night right now?
Are they burned out and running on fumes? Burned-out teams don’t need a highlight reel. They need to know you’ve hit a wall too, and what it actually took to get through it. The goal isn’t to inspire them to push harder. It’s to make them feel seen.
Are they facing an ambiguous strategic moment? Teams facing a decision with no clear right answer don’t need a hero story. They need to hear about a time you made the best call you could with imperfect information and had to live with it.
Are they new to the organisation and still forming their picture of who you are? People who are new to you don’t need your greatest hits. What you’ve done is on your resume. Knowing why you did it, and what it cost you, is what builds trust quickly.
Match The Format To The Moment
You don’t need a twenty-minute anecdote to create connection. A three-sentence story snippet in a Slack channel can shift the tone of an entire thread.
“I remember when we pushed a bug that took down the payment gateway in 2018. I felt sick. The way our lead dev handled it, with zero blame, is why I’m obsessed with blameless retrospectives today.”
Short, specific, human and it communicates a set of values in under fifty words.
Start Small, Start Today
Leaders who can’t tell their stories don’t disappear. They just gradually lose the room to someone who can. The Slack prompt, the object standup, the story database: none of it is complicated. The only thing stopping most leaders is the mistaken belief that their experiences are neither relevant nor interesting enough. That’s why we’d encourage you to allow yourself a little time and space to bring your stories into focus and see what that work yields.
And if you want to go deeper on how storytelling connects to the way you show up as a leader and how people experience you in the room, well that’s exactly what we share in our Presence & Influence Workshop.
What is one object on your desk right now that carries a lesson?
Let us know in the comments.