From your resume to your meetings: Why authentic storytelling, communication is important

Think about your resume. From the summary section right at the top of the resume to your achievements and highlights, essentially, your resume is a space for you to tell your story.

But, why to stay with just resumes? From the interview you ace to get the job of your dreams to every project update, every client discussion and every startup pitch is also an exercise in storytelling. A key communication skill, unfortunately, is not a skill that we are taught formally in our education system. But it is one of the most practical and useful skills for our work

The question you might have: Are people just born storytellers or is this a skill that can be learnt and practised?

The good news is that we are all natural storytellers. It’s an age-old skill and we can learn to practice it more consciously.

What can help us in that practice?

Well, there are a few steps to this.

How can we understand our audience:
Whenever we are sharing our story for business (any business communication), we are doing it for a purpose and with a stakeholder (s). The story has to make sense for them. Hence understanding their objective is important.

Think of it as something as simple as the voice of the story. If the same story is told in the voice of two different characters, what we share and how we share it could be different.

Similarly, an understanding of our audience can help us sharpen our communication and choose the right communication format, length and type.