A Who I Am story helps the teller to build trust and credibility with her audience by sharing a story or experience that provides an insight to her listeners of the kind of person she really is.

In the 2008 United States presidential campaigns, both presidential and vice-presidential candidates spent a significant amount of time telling their personal stories as a way to forge a personal connection with potential voters. Regardless of your political views, it was important for the candidates to share their personal journeys with us so we could get a sense of the experiences and environments that shaped them, the challenges they faced and the obstacles they overcame. Their personal stories gave us a sense of their values, their leadership styles and their character. Were they someone we would trust with the multi-faceted and complex responsibilities of the highest office in the land?  In The Story Factor (2006) author Annette Simmons says,

How can we expect people to trust us, to be influenced by us when we don’t let them know who we are? When we separate our attempts to influence from who we are personally, we neglect the most important criteria most people use to decide whether to listen to us or not (pp. 7-8).

According to Simmons, we spend way too much time focused on communicating with our listeners’ rational brains and not enough time communicating with their emotional brains.

In The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, organizational storytelling guru, Stephen Denning, suggests that our uniqueness as individuals does not lie in the roles we play or the abstract values we claim to have. We are the “one-of-a-kind” people we have become through the experiences we have had and the way we have responded to them. Telling your audience the story of one or more turning points can help listeners to get inside your life and go through what you went through so they can experience the kind of person you are.

Denning provides the following key elements to consider when developing and telling a Who I Am story:

1. Reveal yourself implicitly. Rather than tell someone what you value, share a personal story in which you demonstrate the value you hold through the actions you took.  
2. Exploit the fractal nature of identity stories. You don’t need to communicate an entire lifetime of experiences for people to understand who you are. A small sample, or even a single story, can help your audience determine who you are.
3. Be authentic. Be sure you embody the story you are telling about yourself.
4. Focus the story on a turning point in your life.
5. Tell a story with a positive tone. As a leader, you need a story that shows how you overcame an obstacle, learned an important lesson, or derived something positive from the experience.
6. Tell your story with context. Your story should follow the lines of a traditional story with a situation, a hero or heroine (most likely you), a plot, an obstacle, a turning point, and an ending.
7. Use humor to brighten your story.
8. Use emotion to spice up the story of who you are. You’re trying to make a strong, emotional connection with your audience with this kind of story. Your story should be one in which you felt some emotion in a situation where the audience can identify and empathize with you.
9. Don’t overstate your good qualities. Talk about overcoming adversity. Be generous and gracious to others who contributed to your success.
10. Make sure the audience wants to hear your story.
11. Understand the audience’s story.
12. Make sure the audience hears the story you tell. Each listener has his or her own internal filters that influence the story they hear. Get some feedback to make sure the underlying message of the story you intended to tell was communicated effectively to your listeners.

Often a Who I Am story leads into a Why I Am Here story, which conveys the intentions of the storyteller in the specific situation in which he or she is speaking.  Is there a situation in which you need to establish trust and credibility with your audience? Consider crafting and telling a Who I Am story to make the connection.

[tags] The Story Factor, Annette Simmons, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Stephen Denning, Who I Am Stories, leadership communication, building trust and credibility [/tags]