Want to Build a Deep Connection With Your Audience? You Just Need to Master This Concept.

The following is adapted from my new book, Story Like You Mean It.

When we’re put on the spot and asked to tell our story—in a job interview, at a business conference, or meeting a new colleague or prospective customer—we often hesitate. There’s a stutter step, a stumble you feel in your brain as it searches through your life’s experiences. You’re trying to grab one you think is relevant to the audience in front of you, but there is simply too much pressure. It’s a sort of meltdown your brain goes into when you feel put on the spot.

The problem is, when we hesitate, we lose the opportunity to shape how our listener sees us. And, in most instances, we miss our best opportunity to build a deep connection with them. 

If you know how to tell the right story effectively, though, you can remove this meltdown. You can seize the chance for meaningful, purposeful storytelling that captures who you are right now or who you’re en route to becoming. 

You can connect with your audience, even if you’ve just met them, on a deep level. It all starts with mastering one concept. Do that, and you will be well on your way to building a connection with your audience.

What Stories to Tell? 

When you’re thinking about how to tell an engaging, powerful story, you must understand one core concept: different types of experiences have a different amount of weight in your life. Mastering this concept—that there’s a hierarchy to your experiences—is vital if you want to build a connection with your audience. 

When you can identify, explore, and connect those experiences, they create a powerful story that almost paints a magical picture of who you are. And it feels as animated to you, the teller, as it will to the listener. 

There are so many stories; how can we possibly figure out the hierarchy?

Well, the good news is that there’s a model for that. Once you learn this model—this hierarchy—and figure out how to apply it to your story, you’ll be golden.

Developing Your Story Hierarchy

An effective story that builds a deep connection is based on a three-layer hierarchy. The three layers are hero, collaborative, and virtuous. 

When you investigate your own life, you can pick experiences throughout your life from each layer that may have relevance to a particular storytelling moment. I call those moments blue dots. Once you’ve identified those blue dots, you can sort them into a cohesive, whole story.. 

Then, you can start to adapt your cohesive whole—your stories—into your story hierarchy. That hierarchy is what helps us understand and provide context to lived experiences, both our own and others. Let’s go through it one by one so you can see what I mean.

Hero Stories

Hero stories are the basic story we all want to hear and we all want to be able to tell, because everyone experiences them at one point or another, and they represent the human capacity to overcome and survive some condition. They represent strength, grit, and perseverance. They give a person credibility. 

When you feel something threatens the fundamental elements of your existence, you become heroic so you can survive. Hero stories occupy the lowest level in the story hierarchy: they’re the base your story should rest on.

A hero story attests to your life on the planet as an individual, responsible first and foremost for preserving yourself. You’re being a hero to overcome the obstacle in front of you, not necessarily trying to save another human being. 

Hero stories can be about a lot of things: a physical injury that caused you pain, developing a technical skill, getting over a divorce, having the courage to tell the truth when no one else did, adapting to a new environment, completing some physical feat, standing up to a bully, letting go instead of clinging on… they just have to represent how you overcame some sort of adversity.

Collaborative Stories

If we’re never heroic, we will probably be less likely to be invited to a collaborative experience. Without evidence of your grit, perseverance, and courage, others won’t want to work with you. Yet, some people move straight to telling a collaborative story, without telling a hero story first. Don’t do that, though: you need to take your audience on the journey if you want to connect with them. 

If you go straight into your collaborative story, it has no foundation. “Oh yeah, I understand finance. We worked well together.” It’s just words. There’s no credibility. You have to start with the hero story. 

If you’ve first described how you studied finance in college or learned to balance the cash receipts at your parents’ store every night after closing, then I start to think of you differently: “That guy has grit and perseverance. He can work in different environments. His collaboration is valid. He brings value.” 

Collaboration is marked by communication, organization, and openness, which show others what you think and compels them to listen. It’s vital to building a deep connection with your audience.

Virtuous Stories

Our hero and collaborative stories help us move to the top of the story hierarchy. When the hero moment connects to a collaborative moment or possible future moment in retrospect, we tend to revisit a likely sweet spot and think, “I love some of this work, this thing I’m doing, this encounter that I’m experiencing. It feels like a peak moment. If I could only do this over and over and over again, I would feel more like myself.” 

The blue dots you identified show the obstacles you overcame at the base level when you became the hero of your story. Overcoming those obstacles led to fruitful or even challenging collaborations and a level of belonging in relationship to other human beings. That prepared you to reach forward into the future for your virtuous moment at the peak. 

There’s your hierarchy: Self. Others. Super-self.

Hierarchy Builds Connection

The next time you’re searching for a way to build a deep connection with your audience, remember your story hierarchy. Better yet, get prepared in advance.

Think through your life’s formative moments and sort them into hero, collaborative, or virtuous stories. Figure out how they connect, how one leads to the next. When you do that, and when you practice telling your story and using the story hierarchy, your brain won’t freeze if you get put on the spot. 

You’ll know exactly what hero story to tell to show people you’ve overcome obstacles. Remember, they’ve overcome obstacles too, so this invites connection. From there, you’ll be able to move seamlessly to the collaborative story—demonstrating to them that you’re someone they can work (or interact) with. Finally, you’ll be able to take them to the top of the hierarchy and confidently share your virtuous story. 

Rather than missing your opportunity to connect and shape how they perceive you, you’ll have used your understanding of hierarchy to demonstrate your value and at the same time build a meaningful, shared connection. 

For more advice on how to create stories that will help you build connections, you can find Story Like You Mean It on Amazon.

Dr. Dennis Rebelo is a professor, speaker, and career coach. He is the creator of the Peak Storytelling model, his research-based method for crafting the narrative of who you are and what drives you and why, utilized by former professional athletes turned nonprofit leaders as well as entrepreneurs, CEOs, guidance professionals, and advisers throughout the world.

Dr. Rebelo, former president of Alex and Ani University and co-founder of the Sports Mind Institute, recently received the 2020 Thomas J. Carroll Award for Teaching Excellence at Roger Williams University. He currently resides in Rhode Island.