Storytelling for Professionals: The 6 stories worth telling
Updated: Sep 17
How to find the stories that help people understand who you are and why your work matters
By Jana Denker
At the beginning of my speechwriting workshops, I often ask people what they remember from speeches or presentations they’ve heard.
They rarely say, “The statistics were excellent.” But humor, something that moved them. And very often, they remember a story.
Facts matter, and so does expertise. But stories have staying power and speak to more than our rational mind. They also give us something facts alone can’t: a glimpse of the person behind them.
That’s particularly important when people are deciding whether to work with you, hire you or trust your judgement. They may be impressed by what you know. A story can help them understand something about the person who knows it. And this builds trust.
The difficulty is finding those stories. "I don't have anything interessting to tell."
I bet you do. Stories just rarely arrive neatly packaged. They’re buried in company histories and experiences that have become so familiar that nobody thinks of them as stories anymore. Something worth telling may have been compressed into a sentence such as The business started with three employees or And then I quit.
Here are six places I would look.
The On-Fire Story
Sometimes I know I’ve found a story before I’ve heard the whole thing. I can see it in the person telling me.
I once coached a young writer who had a lot of doubts about her work. She wasn’t sure she was good enough or even had something worth saying. Then she began talking about the act of writing itself, how she felt during. And her whole demeanour changed. Her face became animated, her voice had more colour. No trace of the uncertainty I’d been hearing before. She was glowing. Literally.
I’ve learned to pay attention to moments like this. A subject comes up and something changes. The person in front of you suddenly has detail after detail and could happily keep talking. That’s what I call an On-Fire Story.
If you’re looking for your own, ask yourself:
What can I talk about for an hour without running out of things to say?
And pay attention to what happens in your body when you do.
The Origin Story
An Origin Story doesn’t necessarily begin when you founded the company or entered the profession. The more interesting beginning can be much earlier.
Imagine an architect whose work has become known for small, beautifully considered homes. As a child, she hated the enormous show houses her parents took her to see. Why did anyone need so many empty rooms?
At eight, that wasn’t an Origin Story. It was simply something she noticed.
Only much later does the thread become visible.
Where did this really begin, before you knew it was beginning?
The Authority Story
Credentials tell people that you know something. An Authority Story shows them how you came to know it - and that can build a lot of trust.
Twenty years of experience may be impressive, but twenty years contain particular moments that explain what all that experience taught you. You may have a medical degree. But perhaps there was something your learned sitting with a very sick patient that no textbook could have taught you. That's embodied authority
How did you come to know what you know?
That’s often a much more interesting story than the qualification itself.
The Turning-Point Story
I worked there for seventeen years. And then I quit.
There’s almost certainly more inside that sentence. The turning point may not even have been the resignation. It could have happened months earlier during an ordinary meeting, when you heard yourself talking about what the team would do next year and suddenly realised you didn’t want to be there next year.
The resignation came later.
When you come across an "and then I left" or "after that, everything changed", go back. When did the direction really change?
The Struggle Story
Successful people and companies can become very good at compressing struggle.
The first year was difficult.
I’m immediately interested in the word difficult.
What was happening before you knew how it would turn out?
That’s usually where the story is. Not in the polished lesson afterwards, but in the period when the answer wasn’t obvious.
A Struggle Story doesn’t require you to turn failure into public confession. It can simply let someone see how you responded when reality refused to cooperate with the plan.
The Conviction Story
Most of us can tell people what we believe. The more interesting question is how we came to believe it.
Imagine a leader who insists that bad news should travel quickly upwards. On its own, that could be a sentence on a leadership slide. Then she tells you that early in her career she watched a relatively small problem become an expensive one because everybody knew something was wrong and nobody wanted to tell the boss.
Now the belief has a history.
Which of your strongest convictions has a story behind it?
Before you tell it
Finding a story is one thing. Choosing the right one depends on what you want the story to do.
A story can help people trust your judgement. It can make an idea easier to understand or give someone a reason to care about it. Sometimes you tell one because you want people to see the person behind the expertise.
That changes which story you choose.
If you’re introducing your work, an Origin Story might help people understand why it matters to you. An Authority Story can show how you came to know what you know without turning the conversation into a list of credentials. If you want to make a point people will remember, a Conviction Story may do more than another explanation.
So before you start polishing the story, ask:
What do I want this story to do?
Then there is another question: Why would anyone else care?
Something doesn’t become interesting to other people simply because it happened to us. There needs to be something in the experience that reaches beyond the event itself.
Your disastrous first presentation may matter because the person listening knows what it is like to want to be taken seriously. A decision to leave a job may resonate because someone else is wondering whether it is time to leave something behind.
A story worth telling therefore isn’t necessarily the most dramatic story you have. It’s the one that helps you do what you’re trying to do with your communication and gives the person listening a reason to stay with you.
And once you start looking for your own stories, you may notice something else.
Some are much easier to tell than others.
You may be perfectly comfortable talking about how your work began, yet hesitate over the story that reveals just how much you know. A conviction that feels clear in private may become softer when you imagine saying it publicly.
Even the On-Fire Story can have an edge. The thing that makes you glow in conversation can suddenly feel like too much when other people are watching.
We edit ourselves long before we edit our words. And once you start looking for your stories, you may discover that finding them wasn’t the difficult part after all.
The more interesting question is which ones you are willing to let other people hear.
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