I admit it took me a few years to catch on.

I’d have high-energy storytelling coaching sessions. They’d say they grasped how important it was to tell stories in business.

But they didn’t do it.

Now, I pride myself on being a tolerable teacher, but after seeing client after client fail to put storytelling into practice… I felt like a failure.

Evidently, it wasn’t enough to give business people storytelling tools and frameworks. They needed something more. But what? I started to listen more closely, and I finally started to understand.

Internal Obstacles to Telling Stories in Business

What kept these storytelling coachees from telling stories was…

• NOT a lack of belief in the power of stories
• NOT even a lack of content or opportunities to tell stories

It was a series of doubts.

They weren’t doubting Storytelling. They weren’t doubting me.

They were doubting themselves.

Here, then, are the top three ‘excuses’ I encounter – common reasons why people don’t put what they know into practice when it comes to business storytelling.

1 – We’re busy! We don’t have time to tell stories!

2 – I don’t have any interesting stories…

3 – I don’t feel comfortable telling a story in a business context

Business Storytelling Obstacle 1: Time

“We don’t have time to tell a story.” Have you ever thought this?

More often than not, it’s wrong. Actually, you don’t have time not to tell a story.

There are so many meetings where people talk past each other because they’re using abstract language, where a story would help ground everyone with a common understanding.

This goes for any field.

The NGO “Cup of Color” is a collective of socially-minded artists who work with people going through really hard times. They paint walls in refugee centres and red-light districts to bring hope to poverty-stricken or even war-torn communities. Here’s one example of their work.

There was a similar wall in Myanmar/Burma, where people had painted messages of defiance, comfort, and hope. Shortly before this huge wall was painted in Zürich, Switzerland, the military painted over that wall. Messages flooded in that it means so much to know they’re not forgotten, and that the messages of their hope live on in Switzerland.

Now these artists go some of toughest places on earth. They’ve worked together for years. You’d think they know what they’re going – and they do. Yet they were struggling to put into words what they did and why it mattered.

This had become a problem because they had started to attract a lot of volunteers. And they found it hard to explain to these volunteers and others exactly who they were.

They were great people with great ideas. But as in any organisation, if you have an influx of new people who aren’t clear on identity, then you have different voices pulling in different directions and diluting the vision and effectiveness.

I sat them in circle and asked simple questions: “Tell us about a time when you thought: Yes! That’s it! That’s why I love Cup of Color. This is why we do this work.” So we went around the circle and everyone shared story.

It was a beautiful time of reconnecting not just with the vision, but also with each other. A real teambuilding exercise.

A few days later, I received an excited message from the NGO: “We all feel like we’re on the same page again and can finally tell outsiders who we are. We’re refocused and reenergized.”

All this in a couple of hours, where often endless discussions fail. How? We started with the concrete story and THEN we derived abstract words.

Solution to Obstacle 1?

Understand that Storytelling is not a distraction. It’s a shortcut.

That will give you the confidence to tell, and ask for, stories.

Business Storytelling Obstacle 2: Hollywood

While Hollywood movies can give us a lot of storytelling tricks, I also think they’re a huge obstacle to people telling stories in business. We think we need to give people a blockbuster story – and we rightly feel hesitant about doing that, because ‘this isn’t the place for that kind of thing’.

At a Christmas gala with dozens of national ambassadors, I got talking with a lady in red, who turned out to be her country’s First Consul. We were soon discussing how storytelling could help in her diplomatic work. Eventually she paused and lamented that she didn’t have any exciting stories to share.

The irony was that she’d just told me how she chose to live in bilingual Biel rather than German-speaking Bern because she struggled to integrate her children into school. This, I pointed out, was a perfect story for connecting with individuals or giving public speeches!

A lot of my clients – powerful people in positions of authority – are worried about boring their listeners, when everyday examples are precisely what people can relate to. Hearing about an ambassador’s difficulty with her children’s education humanizes her, the otherwise remote holder of a high diplomatic office.

Solution to Obstacle 2?

Keep a record of everyday observations and encounters you can relate to illustrate your points.

Don’t announce the story with a drum roll, which gives you and your audience unrealistic expectations. Just slip it in. People won’t notice you’re telling a story – the story will do its subtle work.

This brings us to the root issue of every other internal objection to NOT use stories in business…

Business Storytelling Obstacle 3: Self-Consciousness

One of my mandates is with an Ivy League university in the States, where I met a brilliant scientist. This post-doc, let’s call him Andy, has developed a wonderful solution that could change the world.

I won’t tell you too much because it’s cutting-edge deep tech, but it has to do with a certain type of vehicle knowing where other vehicles are. Andy was struggling to raise capital for his startup. A tech guy, he’s comfortable explaining all about the technology, but not necessarily why people need it, or why they should invest in it.

So Andy hears about me and asks me to help him develop a storified investor pitch. And we have three or four sessions, when it emerges that Andy helped BMW develop their driverless technology – specifically, helping cars sense each other even around corners.

“Andy, do you think that maybe investors would like to know this?”

Is it relevant experience? Is it a track record?

You bet! But Andy left this out because he thought he shouldn’t be talking about himself.

This isn’t just an obstacle for technical people. I find a lot of us in business hesitate to share personal insights into personal observations. We feel it’s not professional.

The root cause?

My theory is that it’s because we’re afraid to actually put ourselves out there. Telling a story tells us a lot about the storyteller. It’s easy to hide behind jargon, which makes us sound smart (we think).

Why is this a mistake? Well, a huge part of communication is not about the message … it’s about the messenger. In person-to-person communication, your actual words only account for 7% of how your message is received.

So if we try to hide our personality, our motivations, passions, ourselves – if we neglect the importance of ourselves as the messenger – we damage our message.

Solution to the root issue of Obstacle 3?

Understand that business is personal – you can be you!

You were hired for your expertise, which comes with your experience. So please, do us all a favour and share it in the form of simple stories.

Find out how in my book, Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack.

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Does the above resonate with you? I’d love to hear from you!