Storytelling is an essential skill

It’s why the Chartered Institute of PR, of which I’m a member, has been agitating for communications specialists to be on boards or at least advisory boards for some time.

Storytelling is one of the major ways in which you can amplify your credentials and make them more memorable. Here are three ways in which I could tell you about my business:

* I’m a media trainer
* I work with PR companies to help spokespeople clarify and deliver coherent messages
* I’ve been that journalist who is after quotes but who isn’t the expert in a field other than writing and reporting for years. I’ve realised increasingly that I’ve been dependent on people making themselves and what’s going on very clear during all of that time – but I only interview them when they’re feeling tense about speaking to a journalist. That’s when they screw up. So I like to help build confidence and ensure that when someone speaks to a journalist, their expertise gets into the resulting coverage and it’s accurate.

The third needs cutting but it offers a much more relatable and interesting version of who I am and why I do what I do than the blander first two, accurate though they are.

So if someone asks what you do for a living and why, do you have a story behind you? Every board has someone dedicated to employing people, someone else whose job is to build sales, someone assigned to financials – but often the board misses out the bit about how they explain themselves to the outside world and even internal stakeholders.

If you’d like to talk to me about developing your storytelling, don’t hesitate to ask.