How To Connect A Personal Narrative To a Brand Message
Your personal experience becomes a story other people care about when it captures an emotion underlying a universal human experience or truth. Let’s dive into how.
The stories I share that get people talking rarely have to do with my message.
At least not on the surface.
The hook is something a psychic said, a judgement I’m passing, the way something strikes me at one hyper-specific point in time, space, and mood.
But underneath the seemingly disconnected observations from everyday life, there's a structure at play that makes content both:
Entertaining
Relevant
The personal story to personal brand message writing process this:
OBSERVE → REFLECT → CONNECT
Turn A Personal Experience into a Personal Brand Micro Story
The OBSERVE → REFLECT → CONNECT is when you start with one story or observation amongst your boat loads of ideas, reflect on what you learned from the experience, and connect your realization to a relevant message.
Important: It’s (very) possible you’ll uncover more than one piece of wisdom when you reflect on your experience. In micro storytelling for short-form content, share one message per post. You can tweak the story down the road to share another message (never fear retelling stories as they so often get better with every pass).
OBSERVE → REFLECT → CONNECT is a show, don’t tell approach to sharing a message that yields so many responses because it lands the point without preaching.
In that show, don’t tell spirit, here’s an six-minute video explaining how to find relevant messages in random stories.
I chose the example in this video because the story, at first, seemed beyond irrelevant, yet turned out to be the conduit for a message, shared in a recent newsletter, that generated more than a dozen thoughtful replies that brightened my week.
If you’re very happy for J in Portland, but wondering how do I even come up with interesting story ideas in the first place, this video attunes your senses to the story-worthy moments in your life.
Cyndi Zaweski, Owner of StoryCraft
Cyndi is a writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of StoryCraft. An award-winning journalist, she helps small business owners share their story online to grow without question digital marketing tactics. Her advice for sustainable content strategy has been featured by Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard. Her brand storytelling clients have been featured major media outlets including CBC, the Minimalist Podcast, and iHeartRadio. She writes about writing micro personal narratives that build algorithm-proof personal brands. In her own micro nonfiction, she explores the tension between being yourself and marketing yourself; outer expectations vs. inner knowing, and the reality we create when we tell better stories.
