The Olympics are over but the images from the games are lingering in my mind. I watched a little bit of everything -- from water polo and climbing, to track and swimming, to bike racing and gymnastics. The picture that takes up the most my 2020 Olympics memory, however, isn’t anything that happened at one of the events. It’s a picture of Suni Lee’s front yard where the homemade balance beam that she practiced on as a child could be found.

Just before sitting down to write this, I had to do a search to see if you could still get jack-in-the-box toys. You can. You can get them in even more variations than the standard clown that was the norm when I was growing up. The ageless thrill of the jack-in-the-box is a mixture of predictability and surprise. You know as you turn the handle what’s going to happen. Yet when the lid flips up and the toy pops out, it’s always a surprise. This is what happens in storytelling, and I call it impact and insight.

Something a client said at a meeting recently has been mulling around in my head. What she said was a great compliment, although I don’t think she realized it. She validated that my work with their organization is not just to help them with marketing, but it’s also to change the way they think about who they are trying to reach by getting into their story. Here’s what she said. “I keep hearing your words in my head, Lori. Why are we doing this?”

What's the single most important ingredient in your success story? I won’t keep you in suspense, but first-- what it isn’t. The single most important ingredient in your success story isn’t success. It’s distress. Surprisingly enough, when you leave out the struggle that led to your success, you really have no story at all.

​I know why you haven’t started using a storytelling approach to your marketing and communications. You’ve been hearing about it everywhere – from your industry organization, in your social media feed, at training events. You’re sold on its power to connect, persuade and motivate people. You just haven’t taken that first step. Here’s why. You don’t know how to find the stories you need to tell.

Storytelling for business isn’t anything new. It’s been an on-again, off-again buzzword for a long time. At face value, the word “storytelling” seems a little fluffy and certainly, everything that is being called a story is not a story. The reality is that companies that have embraced a storytelling approach to communications are finding benefits in all areas of their business, not just marketing. They have found that storytelling isn’t just for telling stories.

When I was in college, I worked for the New York Times. That’s how I started out a talk that I gave recently to the Women Executives in Business (WEB) organization in Mankato. Until I became a student of storytelling, I didn’t understand the value that my personal stories could have in the business world. But the success of this talk, measured in audience feedback, proved out the concept that good stories power up your communications. Here’s what happened.