Make Space For Your Story
We are living in an age of efficiency. As a brand strategist and storyteller, I’ve had the privilege of shaping positioning statements, purposes, value propositions and core narratives for many products across just as many different categories–from communications technologies, to fintech, to logistical operations tech and identity verification. Streamlined, efficient, seamless… these are the words these founders want to scream through the megaphone.
The irony in being the one to shape these brand stories, the drivers of our ever-more efficient world, is that personally, I bristle and feel a little bit angsty over the pace at which innovation has changed the pace of our everyday lives.
I believe the need for achieving faster, doing more, and conditioning ourselves to be efficient multitaskers is actually destroying the value of nothingness, the treasure of down-time, and the magic that happens in the space between tasks and to-dos. I see the loss of physical and metaphysical openness and empty room in our schedules and lives as a threat to our stories–the source of our self-awareness and the number one way we derive meaning from what we do.
If we’re always doing, we’re focused on our tasks at the level of the task. We’re in the weeds like little worker ants carrying 50 times our weight in a steady procession. In a literal sense, we’re living our lives from one single event to another. And even if we do have down time in between–the 10 minutes between meetings, the 5 minute wait while picking up your kids, the 15 minute drive–we’re often filling this space with more information, digital content, social scrolls, interesting podcasts or catching up on emails.
We’re losing the time to rise above the ground level and see larger patterns and how these events hang together in a story arc. We’re losing the chance to see a bigger picture and glean insights and higher-level awareness. Living life at the pace of technology’s gifted efficiency, we’re losing nothingness and boredom, treasures that could otherwise be seen as a chance to realize deeper understandings of ourselves and explore the “meaning of it all.”
Make space for your story!
Embrace nothingness and see what discoveries might click. Open up without intention, just be, and rest assured, something will reveal itself–a new thought, an understanding, an insight or a sense of knowingness. This is why creative people take walks–and why many say the best ideas come to us in the shower.
I offer this advice to any and every individual hoping to grow in this life. And I also offer it to my clients and any brand looking to articulate your story for the people you serve.
For as many times as I’ve had clients and partners want to get to an articulation of their purpose, value proposition or positioning quickly, I’ve seen how impossible it is to slapdash your story (if you want it to capture the real meaning of your brand and the work you’re doing in the world). The best brand stories are born in the space between singular events and discussions. They have been given the down time for all the potential threads that might weave the story together to sit in our hands while we–the team shaping the story–get a feel for what is central and what we can let go of.
When we tune out the noise of the world, we give ourselves quiet to hear the story that beats in our hearts and space for the story to show itself in the right words and sentiments.
Sure, we can spend a half-day workshop getting you to an articulation of your brand story in a page. But when you’re cooking dinner or driving to an appointment a couple days later, a thought on how to say it better will strike you when you’re least expecting it. It just needed a little extra space.
