661: How to Tell a Story About Yourself, with David Hutchens
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2024
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Hutchens: Leadership Story Deck
David Hutchens helps leaders find and tell their stories. He works with leaders around the world to find, craft, and tell their most urgent stories for the purpose of creating shared meaning, preserving culture, disseminating learning, and speeding change in organizations.
He has taught the Storytelling Leader program at some of the most influential organizations, including NASA, Paypal, Loreal Paris, Cisco, Walmart, Google, FedEx — and he’s written many books, including the Circle of the 9 Muses*, Story Dash*, and The Leadership Story Deck*. He is the co-creator with longtime friend of the show Susan Gerke of the GO Team program.
Many of us have heard that we should be vulnerable and, at least occasionally, share a story about ourselves. But how do you tell a story about yourself without making the entire interaction about you? In this episode, David and I explore how to best utilize a personal story to help the organization move forward.
Key Points
- While leaders more often tell stories about others, a personal story can be very powerful for relationship building.
- An effective, personal story is 2-3 minutes.
- Telling a story about yourself needs to have a leadership point. Be clear on the “so what?” once the story concludes.
- Even if you don’t quite capture all the emotion, say the word out loud that describes the emotion you want to convey.
- Share your stories with others to get objective insight to tighten your message.
Resources Mentioned
- Leadership Story Deck by David Hutchens (use code CFL24 for a limited-time discount)
- To receive a free copy of the Story Canvas, David invites listeners to reach out to him directly via david@davidhutchens.com
Related Episodes
- Ignite Change Through Storytelling, with Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez (episode 268)
- How to Start Better With Peers, with Michael Bungay Stanier (episode 635)
- What Vulnerable Leadership Sounds Like, with Jacob Morgan (episode 648)
Discover More
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Many of us have heard that we should be vulnerable and at least occasionally share a story about ourselves. |
| 0:07.0 | But how do you tell a story about yourself without making the entire interaction about you. |
| 0:13.5 | In this episode, David Hutchins returns |
| 0:16.1 | to show us how to best use a personal story |
| 0:19.4 | to help the organization move forward. |
| 0:22.3 | This is coaching for Leaders, episode 661. |
| 0:26.0 | Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. human potential. |
| 0:38.0 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders and I'm your host Dave Stahoviac. Leaders aren't born, they're made. |
| 0:46.0 | And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. |
| 0:52.0 | One of the elements of conversation that's so critical for leaders is the element of story. |
| 0:59.0 | Storytelling is the language of leaders. |
| 1:00.7 | It is the medium that we can utilize in order to be able to connect with the people |
| 1:06.9 | we have the privilege to influence in our organizations and to be able to have our messages |
| 1:12.0 | land in a more effective way. Today I'm so glad to |
| 1:14.9 | welcome back to the show our resident storytelling expert David Hutchins for |
| 1:20.1 | a different perspective than we've looked at story in the past. |
| 1:23.2 | He's been on the podcast many times over the years and we've often looked at it from the |
| 1:27.8 | perspective of how do we tell stories about the team, about the organization. But today we're going to look at it from the lens of when we do need to tell a story about ourselves. How do we do that? When do we do that? And most importantly, what does that sound like? I'm so pleased to welcome back David Hutchins. He helps |
| 1:46.4 | leaders find and tell their stories. He works with leaders around the world |
| 1:50.9 | to find craft and tell their most urgent stories for the purpose of creating shared meaning, preserving culture, disseminating learning and speeding change in organizations. |
| 2:01.0 | David has taught the storytelling leader program at some of the most influential organizations. David has taught the Storytelling Leader Program at some of the most influential organizations, including |
| 2:05.6 | NASA, PayPal, L'Oreal Paris, Cisco, Walmart, Google, FedEx, and many other organizations. |
... |
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