Get High at Work!

Why to Tell Your Story

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

I’ve written recently about telling your story and how to keep telling your story ad how some stories write themselves, but haven’t really delved into some deeper reasons to tell your story, so here’s the “why” of telling your story, both your personal story and the story of your business.

I spent the day today on the road with my family going to and from a funeral in Murfreesboro, TN. I have two teenagers, so part of the chatter on the way up was about why exactly we were driving 3 1/2 hours each way to go to the funeral of a lady we never met. It was an excellent teaching time, mainly to get through to a couple of teenagers that it’s not about them, but also that it was about our friend who’s mother passed away after 88 wonderful years of life.

It was a wonderful home-going celebration of this lady’s life, and the theme that ran throughout all the words shared about this lady was “stories.” Sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, and friends all spoke of the stories this lady would share about life, love, friends, family, history. Everyone who knew this lady knew everything about her life…

Because she constantly told her story, both in writing and verbally.

What’s this mean to you and me? Here’s 4 simple thoughts to answer that question, and I hope drive you a little closer to sharing your story.

  • All it takes is one generation who doesn’t know your story for your entire story to simply vanish forever. If you don’t regale your new employees with the genesis of your business, how will they ever know, understand, and live out the culture that you created?
  • How will they know how it all started? It’s said very often that you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been or where you came from. Or that you should always remember where you came from. But what if you don’t know where you came from? What if those who came before you never shared those stories? Who have you received advice from? I’ll bet you next month’s coffee bill that they gave you advice in the form of war stories from their own hard knocks.
  • Who else knows your story? Very few people know your own story as well as or better than you do, so who better to share your story than you? If you don’t share it, who will? We’re not talking NY Times bestselling autobiographies here, but rather simply how you got where you are today and why you chose that path, or that path chose you.
  • How do you entrench your team in the culture if you don’t tell them the stories behind each and every part of the culture and why that particular word or phrase is used? How will they know?

You have to tell them. Everyone loves a story, and everyone has a story. Your story matters. Tell your story, or it might just vanish. That reason alone is a huge part of why we’ve engaged in telling the stories of the people who have walked the halls at Atlanta Mission. Their stories are rarely told, because many times their stories are not pretty and don’t always end in “happily ever after”, but those are the stories that make us understand how important our own stories are to the people right next to us.

I’ll let you decide whether these points are more appropriate for your family tree or for your business, but it’s likely that the two are very intertwined.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • DGM4 Starts Tuesday at General Assembly

    If by now you have not made your way down to spend some time at General Assembly at Ponce City Market, you’re pretty much doing it wrong. GA is a great global brand in the digital training space, and they’ve built up a first class operation in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Tomorrow night at 6:30pm,…

  • Content + Images = Dope

    Good content is nothing without good images. It’s like PB&J. Or a bagel and schmear. Or popcorn and butter. My love affair with food aside, content and high-quality complementary photos and graphics are the perfect match. The Lowdown There’s a reason you can’t have content without an image. It’s the world we live in now:…

  • My process for creating blog content

    When you create blog content for a living, you can’t wake up each day and say, “ok, how we gonna do this today?” You have to have a process. Just like the process that we teach in Pitch Practice every week, it’s a construct that you start with and then adjust to your own style,…

  • 3 Reasons Why Every Digital Marketer Should Learn to Code

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog in Digital Marketing, Work Life. The definition of “marketing” hasn’t changed in 100 years or more. However, the methods, tactics, and tools of marketing have changed rapidly in the last 10 years. Today, if you want to lay claim to the title “digital marketer,” you’d be…

  • 7 Upcoming Speaking Events at SuperNova South and General Assembly

    Summer is almost over, the kids’ school starts next week, and the fall schedule is about to kick into high gear. I’ll be teaching, leading, and otherwise getting up in front of people on several occasions for various reasons on a plethora of different topics in the coming weeks. Here’s the list of upcoming events.…

  • The 3 Ingredients for Outstanding SEO

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. Since Google took over ownership of the search functionality on the internet, the term “SEO” (search engine optimization) has been top of mind for any serious website owner. If you cannot be found easily when someone searches for your product or service on Google,…

  • Three great questions about social media strategies

    Last night I led a full house class called “Advanced Social Media Strategies” at General Assembly. This class is fun to teach, and we had a very large group with tons of great feedback, questions, and anecdotes to share. There were three questions in particular that we spent some extra time on. Should “going viral”…

  • Content Marketing Takes a Turn for the Worse

    When content marketing was first hailed as an initiative for brands to reach customers, marketers and consumers alike couldn’t get enough of it. But in the past couple of years, content marketing has turned down a dark path. We’re now producing gobs of articles and podcasts and social posts that mostly repeat each other. They…

  • Digital Marketing Terms & Metrics

      We kicked off a new class last night at General Assembly called “Digital Marketing Key Terms & Metrics.” We had a great turnout, and I tried a non-traditional delivery of this class. I didn’t use a slide deck. #FREEDOM! Instead, we started off with a little brain-freeing inspiration from this fantastic video. No, instead,…