4 Effective Ways to Tell Your Story

In this day and age, the development of what many are calling a personal brand is becoming more important. A personal brand and developing personal branding is an ongoing process of establishing a desired impression or image in the minds of other people about an individual. Typically the branding of an individual has a direct connection to a particular business and its services or products.

If you need to establish or develop your own personal brand, you may wonder how you can effectively tell your story as part of your efforts. There are a number of key ways in which you can tell your story as part of your personal brand development efforts. Four key tactics are presented here for your consideration.

Inject Humor in the Telling of Your Story

The value of self-deprecating humor cannot be underestimated. Self-deprecating humor essentially is making fun of yourself in an appropriate manner. Engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor can make you more likable in the eyes of others, likability being an important aspect of personal brand development. 

Humor can be utilized more broadly when it comes to telling your story. You can convey amusing anecdotes. You can even tell simple, and yet tasteful, jokes. What you cannot do is use humor at someone else’s expense.

Humor can also be an imperative element in repairing damage experienced by your brand. If humor is used, it must be presented in a manner appropriate to the situation but that does not make inappropriate light of it.

Share Tales of Disappointments and Failures

Very few people make it through life without disappointments and failures. Another strategy you can employ as a means of effectively telling your story is to share tales of disappointments and failures.

You don’t want to go overboard in this regard. You definitely do not want to be maudlin. Directly sharing a disappointment or failure conveys a sense of honesty to others. It also humanizes you. Honesty and humanization draw people to you, makes you more relatable to others. Ideally, a tale about a shortcoming in your own life ends either with what you learned from the experience or how you overcame it.

You need to convey that even in a challenging moment, you were able to get something positive out of a disappointment or failure. You were able to learn and overcome and then move forward with your life.

Mention Mentors and What You Learned from Them

If you are like most people you’ve had at least one, if not more, mentors in your life. Whether we like it or not, people are oftentimes judged by their compatriots. Moreover, your mentor very well may have his or her own cache and set of credentials.  

On some level, the status, talents, experiences, and successes of your mentor, or mentors, reflects upon you. Others will assume that you have your own cred for a particular mentor or mentors to take you on in the first instance. What attracted you to a mentor is then built upon through and enhanced your association and experiences with a mentor.

For these and other important reasons, as part of telling your life story in a brand development effort, sharing who mentored you should be conveyed to others. You can even focus information conveyed to others about mentoring on the specifics you learned from mentors.

Share a Life Experience that Deeply Changed You

Finally, when desiring to effectively convey your story to others as part of a personal branding process, be sure to share a specific life experience that truly changed you in a lasting way. This type of life experience can be either a positive or negative event, a happy happening or a sad occasion.

The key to this element of telling your life story is understanding the two elements that come into play here. First, you need to concisely tell others about the experience itself. You don’t want to spend too much time telling others about the experience itself.

Second, once you’ve concisely shared information about the experience itself, you need to expand on how it deeply changed your life. You need to delineate how this particular experience impacted your life.

In the final analysis, taking a comprehensive approach using all of the tactics recommended here can prove to be the most effective way to tell your story. While that requires more effort and organizational skills on your part, the net effect will be a far more compelling presentation about what you’ve done and who you are.

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Jessica is a professional blogger who writes for Faxage, a leading company that provides Internet fax services  for individuals and businesses.