Introduction

“Tell me about yourself.”

The person is taken by surprise. They hesitate, then start to mutter something about what school they went to, what jobs they’ve done, what their ambitions are. It sounds like website copy. It’s boilerplate; it’s an overpracticed, highly memorized elevator pitch. It has no flow, no character, no interest.

Maybe it’s not a complete train wreck, but they get the order tangled up and you see the frustration on their face as they realize they’ve lost the listener’s interest. It’s awkward for both of them.

Their stumbling their tails off, and they finally blurt out, “How about you?”

The other person is ready. She explains in a few sentences the decisions and actions in her life, showing how she has overcome obstacles and worked with others to have ended up in this exact place at this exact time on her way to her next goal. This time, the listeners get it. They pay attention, they buy into the story, they form a connection with the speaker.

We’ve all had times when we’ve been more like the first speaker, right? We can see that the other person isn’t really listening. We kick ourselves and think “I should have said this” or “Why didn’t I say that?”

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Shape the Conversation

Imagine walking into a room, say for a conference, job interview, or a business development meeting. Maybe you’re a leader in your field. Maybe you’re just looking to make your name for yourself. Whatever the situation, the stakes are high. You really want to be heard. You’re prepped and ready. And then, inevitably—because it is almost inevitable—someone asks about what you’ve been up to.

“Tell me about yourself.”

You’re being given the chance to shape how someone judges you. You don’t want to miss it. An uninspired story isn’t just a poor story; it’s a missed opportunity.

I’m going to show you how to take that opportunity to tell your PeakStory—the story that not only shows your value and worth but also shows how you got here and where you’re going. And you’re going to learn a lot more about yourself, your abilities, and your motivations.

When someone says, “Tell me about yourself,” what they’re really saying is, “Show me what you can add to my life. Show me why I should listen to you.”

It’s the same when they say, “Tell me about your company.” That’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is, “Tell me about yourself—and why I should listen to you tell me about your company.”

We’ve all been there. Sometimes it happens to you; sometimes you watch it happen to someone else. One way or another, it happens to all of us, sooner or later. We get put on the spot because someone wants to know something that’s not about our job, not about our product—but about us.

The only reason we keep getting away with the same humdrum responses is that everyone else comes up with the same thing.

Whenever we walk into a conference, an interview, an orientation for work or school, or a sales meeting, people are wondering, “What value do you bring to the conference, the school, the service? Why are you trying to sell this thing or this service?” When they ask you about yourself, you see in their eyes that they want to hear something positive about you—but you default to the soundtrack: “I’ve got a dog and a cat named Felix, and they fight a lot.” “I really like the school. Good story: my aunt went here.” “I’m really glad to be here working for ABC Fidelity, Elemental LLC, PQR, Z [whatever…plug in the name]. I’ve been with the company for eight years, really great company to work with. And like, yeah, it’s good to be here.”

In terms of telling your own story, this is the net sum zero.

Today, everyone talks about what we’re netting out in terms of energy. How much energy are we using? How much are we replacing? It’s the same with telling our stories. Either you took energy away from the people in the room, or you brought positive energy to the room. Nobody ever walks away saying, “Boy, I met John. I’m completely neutral from having met John.”

StoryPathing™

Your story is a great source of energy. Any chance to tell it is an opportunity to provide energy to others. But the energy doesn’t come from the story alone. It comes from the value your story suggests you bring. That might be commercial value, social value, your value as a friend. It makes other people more willing to listen to you. And that’s all that anybody needs, right? In an interview, a sales meeting, or at a conference or seminar.

We want people to listen.

What makes people listen is knowing that the very thing that you’re doing right now, you’re supposed to be doing. That you’re aligned with your story. That this is where your story has brought you.

When you tell your story, it provides not only an anchor in the past but also a compass that points to where you’re heading. It brings you to your current reality en route to a “somewhere” you’re projecting. Psychologists call this making a provisional identity claim. I call it storypathing.

Storypathing says to the listener, “Here’s where I’ve been. Here’s where I am. Here’s where I’m headed.”

That stakes your provisional claim right there.

The next bit goes like this: “It all makes sense, doesn’t it? You feel energized. And don’t you want to support me? You think I have value and worth, and my story has shown that. Thanks. Because it’s my story, and I’ve thought about it and I’ve activated it.”

By storypathing, by making sense of where you’ve been and where you’re headed, you can show that you have more engagement and more value wherever you land because your story aligns with who you are.

If I understand that the very thing you’re trying to do right now is what you’re supposed to be doing, I will grant you some sort of opportunity. I’ll give you space or support. I’ll introduce you to more people. People have no problem extending a meeting or doing anything they can to help somebody get to this place of alignment.

We have an impulse to support people who are good at things. We buy tickets to see people who are good at singing; we go to plays to see good actors. If you’re good at telling your own story, people will buy in. They’ll see not only that you’re good at what you’re doing but also that you have evidence of your value because the evidence is embedded in the story.

You’re talking the talk because you walked the walk.

“Can I Do It?”

You might look at your life and worry that you don’t have the kind of experiences that will let you storypath. Wrong! If you’ve lived twelve years on the planet or ninety-two, you can tell your story to show your value.

We all can. Storytelling isn’t foreign to us. We did it habitually when we were younger. For whatever reason, we fell out of practice, but it’s still latent within us. It’s an unused muscle we can start using again.

It’s not just telling a story, like relating an anecdote or having a chat. It’s more than arriving at a meeting and saying the traffic was really bad so I’m a little bit late. That says nothing about you.

Storypathing is an act of self-authorship, but it’s also a method for discerning lived experiences. Anyone can drift through a “normal” life. They’re not that engaged in the world, and the world’s not that interested in them. When you storypath, the world makes more sense because you’re making more sense of it. (Trust me, it all makes sense!)

Storypathing helps a person live what some psychologists call a phenomenal life—not meaning phenomenal as in fantastic but phenomenal as in full of phenomena: in other words, facts, occurrences, and circumstances. A branch of psychology called phenomenology teaches basically that a phenomenal life is a life of full awareness of one’s feelings and connections and how they occurred.

In other words, everything starts with you.

Your PeakStory

Storypathing allows you to put together your best narrative in the best way to create your PeakStory.

PeakStorytelling is a method of storypathing to identify and prioritize life moments to build our story, which we then share with others. It gathers self-event connections, which are moments and experiences that echo through the rest of our lives, and it overcomes two main obstacles that prevent us from telling our PeakStory.

First, most of our lives don’t include a lot of purposeful reflection that allows us to drill down into the meaning of what’s happened in the past. Although many people achieve moments of reflection through therapy, a spiritual approach, or being out in nature, that reflection isn’t systematic. Those moments fall short because they’re disconnected. They can’t tell your story over time.

PeakStorytelling begins with self-reflection. We can’t express ourselves unless we can make sense of ourselves. Otherwise, we might as well just post pictures on Instagram that reveal next to nothing about us. You can’t judge someone from a picture; you can’t show worth through a picture. Yet, we take that course because it’s just far easier to post a picture than to reflect deeply on moments in time.

Systematic,...