Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Identifiable Characters
More so than with any of the other essential stories—whose main characters
are sometimes customers, as in the value story, or sometimes a stakeholder
telling the founder story on behalf of the founder—the identifiable character in a
purpose story is almost always the storyteller. The leader who learned the lesson.
The person who had the experience. While you can tell a purpose story about
someone else, the best ones are about yourself.
This is both exciting and challenging.
Exciting because the options for the stories you could tell are limited only by
the number of days you remember being alive, and I mean that in a literal sense,
not an existential one. As the identifiable character, it means any given moment
in your life can become a purpose story if you match it to the right message. For
example, one of my favorite purpose stories is one I heard when a speaker was
uniting and inspiring the audience to follow their own purpose. He shared his
experience of going through a bankruptcy and how he had to move in with his
girlfriend. His office was a tiny desk squeezed in next to their bed. One night, his
girlfriend came home, he was working at his tiny desk, and he had all of his bills
and all of his paperwork from the bankruptcy laid out on the bed. She didn’t
want to disturb him, but it was late, so she walked in and kind of slid under the
covers under all of his paperwork. He looked over at her, asleep under piles of
paperwork, and thought, 
This is the last time she has to sleep under the weight of
my bills.
That moment became his fuel to never give up.

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While you being the main identifiable character opens up unlimited purpose
story material, as every Spider-Man knows, with great power comes great
responsibility. Because though the main character is often the leader, the story is
actually about the audience. Yes, Michael’s water polo story was about him, but
it was designed to prompt the audience to put themselves in his shoes. Yes, the
CEO of the Maricopa Medical Center told a story about his first forum, but it
was specifically designed and delivered so the audience would see themselves at
that meeting and feel the same pride those present all shared.
The key to using identifiable characters well in a purpose story is to reveal
details about yourself. Something as simple as what you were wearing that day
or a specific observation you made or thought you had. But as you do, keep your
audience in mind. What details will they relate to or connect with? What detail
will make them say, “Yep—that’s so me”?
Authentic Emotions
An effective way to blend the experience of the identifiable character (you,
the leader) with the experience of the listener is to lean on emotions.
What makes a purpose story work is not how clearly you can recite the
sequence of events. The success of your purpose story is dependent entirely on
your ability and willingness to share how you felt about these events. These
emotions don’t have to be big. In fact, indifference is often the primary
emotional state. What 
does
need to be big—the bigger the better, really—is your
willingness to be vulnerable, to share things about yourself that aren’t typically
shared in business.
Yes, you heard me. Vulnerability. My guess is you’ve heard this before, the
importance of vulnerability in business leadership. And while it’s not the most
comfortable buzzword for business—no one wants to be exposed—research has
shown time and time again that being vulnerable in business has the power to
propel you to success.
Researcher, author, and famed vulnerability expert Brené Brown says,
“Vulnerability is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity. There can
be zero innovation without vulnerability.”
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We all know that innovation and
creativity are the things that will, ultimately, move business forward. But still we
hesitate.