The Winning Story

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Dennis Rebelo. He is a professor, speaker, and author of a really terrific book called Story Like You Mean It: How to Build and Use Your Personal Narrative to Illustrate Who You Really Are. He is the creator of the Peak Storytelling model. His research-based method for crafting the narrative of who you are and what drives you, and why. Utilized by former professional athletes-turned-nonprofit leaders as well as entrepreneurs, CEOs and advisors throughout the world. Dennis recently received the 2020 Thomas J. Carroll Award for excellence at Roger Williams University.

So let's jump in. There are a lot of questions. We'll get to as many as we can. One that is really a pervading question for students, alumni and others who listen to this podcast is we all have to introduce ourselves. So here is a question from an MBA student. He said: “I fumble over the question, ‘tell me about yourself?’ And it can be in a whole variety of settings, from a gathering of friends to networking interviews. This is true even when I know to expect it. How do you advise someone to move away from a list of facts to an interesting, engaging and compelling story?”

Dennis Rebelo: It's remarkable that we know something doesn't work, yet we continue to do it. So let's start there. Why do we even do that? There's pressure on us to conform to what has been done before. So how do you stop doing it? You start doing something else. You really have to open yourself to self-reflection. And this is not a therapeutic approach. This is just thinking. You want to be able to show accountability for your narrative moving forward. Utilizing your agency or your free will. So what am I saying to this student to stop it? Right?

Anita Brick: Let me jump in for a second. Sometimes they don't know how, but I think more times than not, no one has ever pressed that to think differently. Give us some like things to start with. Otherwise, it seems philosophic and inaccessible.

Dennis Rebelo: So you have to stop, number one. As I said, with lots of energy around stop, stop, stop. But what do you do now? This student is really getting to the crux of why I wrote the book. I couldn't stand watching it. I couldn't stand doing it myself. And so I researched it. But I also lived it out in my practice.

So what do you start doing? Start thinking of your life as, you know, the life of a movie character. Right? But not in a fantastical way. In an accounting way. So what I did was I built the structure that didn't exist, which is the Peak Storytelling map. The first part is you have to think of the events in your life. Think of yourself as a dot collector. You're collecting all of these dots. Now, the other bit is this: think of your life as having chapters past, current, and future. Everyone wants to know well, who are you anyway? Like Anita? Who are you? How are you doing all this good work, you know, sharing stories and interviewing people. Where did this come from? It's natural. When you answer the question and you tell your story over time, it has more substance.

Anita Brick: I’m still like way up in the stratosphere here. What if nothing's really happened to me so much?

Dennis Rebelo: I don't believe it.

Anita Brick: Okay, and I agree with you. We all have stories and we all have stories that are powerful. But how do you prompt yourself to identify those stories? I was talking to someone the other day. Engineer. I worked on this. Most of my clients were military, and she's a delightful person. But her story didn't match. But she couldn't get to what was the interesting part. And as it turned out, the interesting part had to do with athletics that she didn't think would present her in a positive light because she was a cheerleader through college. But she discounted it–that  wouldn't even have been a blue dot for her. Well, to me, the cheerleader is a gymnast who works very tightly on a team. And we talked it through and she was like, yeah, that makes sense.

But how do you do this on your own? If you don't have someone who's pulling this stuff out and you're like, yeah, that doesn't count. How do you get that first piece?

Dennis Rebelo: You actually did the work that she could do for herself.

Anita Brick: But she wasn't doing it for herself.

Dennis Rebelo: Right. But she also had no methodology.

Anita Brick: She did.

Dennis Rebelo: What was the method?

Anita Brick: The Peak Storytelling platform. Having read the whole book has a lot of elements that we actually used.

Dennis Rebelo: Okay.

Anita Brick: And we've been using them for years. Do you need to find someone external to you to have a voice to say, to have bounce, to have a sounding board?

Dennis Rebelo: What a great question. Yeah, what a great question.

Anita Brick: Or can you do it on your own?

Dennis Rebelo: Let me get clear on that. The key though, and I think it's really important, is that we undervalue self-reflection in our own assignment of meaning to different moments in our lives.

Anita Brick: So if the student starts thinking about even this, tell me about yourself is a way to build bridges with the other person, inform them and create an opening for the other person to do the same.

Dennis Rebelo: Bingo. Yeah. That's right.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. All right. So here's another MBA student. And she said: “When I tell my story I am worried I'm going to say the wrong thing or even worse, be boring and easily forgettable. Help and thanks.” So the wrong thing kind of thing. I felt that way a lot. Today, if f you wake me up in the middle of the night and say, Anita, can you give this talk on something I know in an hour for a thousand people online. I'm like, sure, I'll do it. But that's not where I started. I was like a lot afraid of saying the wrong thing. And when you're afraid of saying the wrong thing, you usually do. And there's a discomfort that you have that people pick up on, and it makes them uncomfortable.

How do you suggest that people experiment in low risk places? So if you say the wrong thing, it's not such a big deal.

Dennis Rebelo: That's right. So I love what you just brought up, which was the low risk. First and foremost, there's going to be a change. The first thing is how do you address fear? Lookit, just don't fear it if you have meaning. This is an inside, outside world. We always hear about self-determination, but yet we don't practice it. So lookit, you know that your own events matter. Start to treat it when you apply them by speaking as them mattering. Now the other bit is about the fear. How do you get rid of fear? Will you do exactly what you said you do live reps, but you start in the kiddy pool where you're not going to drown. So where you could be at an airport. Could be before an official zoom call starts, you know, and just tell your story, you know, whatever the story was again, past. Now, future, whatever the stakes are. Start low, go mid, and then work your way up to high.

Anita Brick: Yeah I agree and I think that in terms it's saying the wrong thing, you have to be okay with it not being the right thing. I go in, I'm presenting insights from data and I say the wrong thing. So some of it is, it's not like being. Oh, I should have said this, and I said that. It's that I said this. They wanted that. And so I misaligned. But the same thing applies to make those presentations go have those dialogues with people in low risk environments. And then you can always, you know, as we always say here, what went well and what could be even better?

Dennis Rebelo: Well, well here's the other bit to add: audience analysis, intention, and outcome. Great opportunity for you to take a pause before you go in and say, who is my audience? Really? Who are they? What is their makeup? Are they a bunch of tech people, you know, are they engineers? Is it mixed? Is it a board? Who are these people? Who do they think I am? This is a big point too. Who do they think I am? We typically do this, and I mentioned it in the book that there's a thin slice. It's a missed slice. Typically people judge people but take stock. How do you look, where do you come from? You know, what schools have you gone to?

And what do people typically think that people who look like you have gone to these schools? What are typically the things that people think? And how do those misconceptions or missed slices not serve you? And how do you reframe yourself using rhetoric, your story, in a way that helps to boost your value and worth. So you eliminate that misjudgment quickly. And if you don't it, they will.

Anita Brick: And again, this feels kind of up in the air theoretically. So let's–

Dennis Rebelo: We can do it.

Anita Brick: Let's look at someone who is an alum: “I used to know my story. I've been in the same career and on the same path my entire career. Now I want to pivot and do something different and my story no longer fits or makes sense.” Now, let me fill in a little bit of information here. And this is someone who has a PhD in science and got her MBA and now wants to do strategy consulting and so wants to go from in the weeds in the plant, very operations tactical to strategic. And she's having a hard time translating. Where would you start with someone like this?And I know the backstory so I can fill you in?

Dennis Rebelo: That's exactly what I was going for. I'm so glad you do. It's great that they have PhD and MBA. Very well schooled. We're going to look for three different elements, but we're going to look for Hero, Collab, Virtuous. We'll get there in a minute and I'll explain these very very quickly. Folks from all ages and stages can do this. And that's why this is set up this way. So just because I happen to be a PhD, I don't want anybody to get intimidated.

Anita Brick: This group is good. We're good.

Dennis Rebelo: Yeah, good. Think of three types of stories. Before we get into this, I have to set this up for the listeners. Think about a triangle. Think about three layers of stories. The base of the triangle is level one. These are Hero stories. These are stories where you overcame an obstacle. Maybe you had to adapt. Maybe you had to use your communication skills. Maybe you had to apply influence in your life, stand up to a bully, whatever it might be. Maybe parents divorced at an early age and you had to learn how to accept people and be accepted. I'm not sure what it is, but it's something. Maybe you had to get through a difficult school program.

In the middle is our Collaborative stories. What I learned is that you can create a system if you study stories, that actually works really, really well. And that's that if you start with a Hero story from your past and you move to a Collaborative story where you're working with somebody to create something that's the middle of the triangle in front of you. So if you're drawing this, just put a lot of dots in the collaborative section.

And then at the peak, the little triangle at the top are Virtuous stories and put a big heart at the top of the triangle. That's where you say, I love this thing that I'm doing by myself or with others, but the thing that I'm doing by myself, it feels so amazing. And I'm using so much creativity, and I'm so engaged that it would be immoral for me not to do that. So for me, it's teaching, for you it's convening people to talk about career development.

Now, the question is, how does the person get to strategy? Because otherwise I have no idea what their path is. We call that the story path. So what you want to do to an audience is explain it. What do you know about this person's ability to overcome obstacles? Give me like a Hero story.

Anita Brick: So she came to the United States to get her PhD without a lot of resources.

Dennis Rebelo: From another country. Was it English language learner?

Anita Brick: English second language.

Dennis Rebelo: Okay. That's a big deal. That's a double. Okay. Great. Why did the person choose the United States?

Anita Brick: The reason that she chose the United States was to increase the opportunities that she had, the opportunities meaning that there were more options for her, especially being a woman.

Dennis Rebelo: Okay. So see you giving me so much richness here. All right. Great. And what I'm doing, just so you know, Anita, and I know you've read the book, I'm using the story stamp as I talk to you to say, okay, here are some skills, here are some motivations. And that's that circle in the book that overlays a moment so that people can kind of dissect the ingredients. Very easy to do.

Okay. Now give me a collaborative experience, something that you are aware of, Anita, where she was working with others to create something, an outcome, some project.

Anita Brick: Okay. A couple of things. Two experiences in the academic world. One during the PhD and multiple during the MBA. Lots of group work, lots of collaboration across different types of people and levels in an organization. However, probably her peak experience in that realm was being part of an operational transformation in the company that she most recently worked for.

Dennis Rebelo: Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Anita Brick: She was an expert in ops, and she worked in a cross-functional team to plan and then execute this operations transformation.

Dennis Rebelo: Okay. Why was that so powerful to her?

Anita Brick: She had no choice. It was part of the job. And it wasn't a choice. It's like, okay, you're on this team now. Go for it

Dennis Rebelo: What did she like about the people that she was involved with in that experience?

Anita Brick: And they were all committed and that was the biggest thing.

Dennis Rebelo: Anything she didn't like about it?

Anita Brick: She didn't like ops. She no longer wanted to do ops.

Dennis Rebelo: Because she…

Anita Brick: Wanted to do something more strategic. This is where we started.

Dennis Rebelo: So let's go to the virtuous point. So now we're getting to the heart of the matter. So now it sense making right. But now you've got to add voice to it. Now she wants to go into strategy, but it's very likely that she could have made other decisions. She could have gone to another type of company and done ops with different people with different backgrounds who are also committed.  When did she discover strategy is the thing? Why is this person choosing strategy?

Anita Brick: If she had a taste of it during the transformation process, because she worked side by side with external consultants from a top-tier strategy consulting firm.

Dennis Rebelo: So now many people would stop here and say, well, that's why. What about the experience though, that was so powerful? Like, what about those people that were different than the other committed people.

Anita Brick: I don’t think it was the people. I think it was the expansion of the impact.

Dennis Rebelo: So she liked making an impact that was more significant.

Anita Brick: Correct.

Dennis Rebelo: Sounds like you know her really well.

Anita Brick: I like people's story. I like to learn who they are.

Dennis Rebelo: Well I'm smiling. I'm like, this is great because I'm mapping this all up. How would she have told her story before? Just I want to do this and it's different than that. And like tell me.

Anita Brick: Yeah, I would say she would say I'm here because I want to become a strategy consultant. I have a PhD and an MBA and experience in operations.

Dennis Rebelo: So this is a brilliant person. You just unpacked because you were such a good teammate in the back and forth with me. So thank you, Anita. you just unpacked the significance of three dots in her life. A hero dot, a collaborative dot, and a virtuous dot. Those three dots equal peak story. So if she's going to say I want this strategy, think like a good lawyer, she needs to usher in some experience that supports that this is in alignment with her thing, the thing that she wants. Because we all know this, Anita. People who are hiring are very, very good at understanding that when they say yes to someone, or even if it's a networking opportunity, that it's their reputation on the line. And there's some, some risk for that person that's saying yes. Her job as a storyteller is to make a good case, like a good lawyer, even at a networking event. So I'm gonna put myself on the spot live. I would say, well, it's great to be here having this conversation on zoom. I'm used to being really remote because I came from fill in the blank. This country, I have to say, as an English language learner diving into doctoral studies, MBA work was a bit of a challenge, but I knew that if I were going to open up opportunity, I needed to be highly exploratory and that commitment would mean displacing me and making me really uncomfortable, not just with the language, but also an education system that's very unique. But I learned to self hack that system. I figured out a way to overcome some barriers to language, and eventually became pretty good. And when I dove into an experience during my journey that was highly positive with an ops team, I was part of an Ops team that actually did cross-functional work leading to organizational transformation, and I was dubbed as that ops person, which I have to say, since I understood the the essence of good systems thinking, I feel good about. And I felt great about the people on my organizational team because they were very committed individuals. So I know I like smart people, I know I like systems people, but what I didn't expect is to get so lit up by the taste I received from external consultants. They actually provided me an opportunity to see how my impact could be even more significant, almost like the opportunities that were provided by coming to the United States to do my doctoral work and my MBA work.

So I realized that one of the things that's a big part of me is being an impact person. Yes, but being a bit of a pioneer explorer. Being within an organization, sure, it's really fun, but being able to work with top-tier consultants, being one of them, that can be multilingual is really more important to me in a strategic way, because I can zoom away from the details, but I still know the details because I've had operations training, so it's almost like having the best of both worlds.

So I figured, let's go for it. This is one life to live. And I'm thrilled to be having this exploratory conversation with you, John. Boom! Done.

Anita Brick: That was awesome. Really awesome. Oh my gosh, that was terrific.

Dennis Rebelo: Well, you put me on the spot. I have to become this person pretty quickly. So thanks for the pressure I love it.

Anita Brick: Yeah you were really good. That was a great, great example. So thank you. To shift gears a little bit, do you have time for a couple more questions?

Dennis Rebelo: Yeah. Let's roll with it. I'm having a great time with you. This is wonderful.

Anita Brick: Good, good. I'm glad. I'm very glad. Here's someone who's a friend of Booth who asked this question. Said: “What tips would you have for persuasion slash storytelling that hits on controversial or polarizing topics?” I think the question is, how do you tell a story when you know that a portion of that room is going to be against what you have to say, regardless of the topic?

Dennis Rebelo: Good, good. Well, first you have to believe. You have to believe that the storytelling effort is going to bring you something that has a clear, positive outcome for you as the storyteller based on your position. What is your intention? Again, who is your audience? And now comes the more challenging part. What parts of my story do I amplify and what parts of my story do I start to, we call it flattening. Do we flatten a little bit? I was put in an ELL class as a young kid. A lot of negative words were used about my people. My father's side is all Portuguese. I came over from Portugal, and so my grandfather's name's Jose. He's no longer with us. Very dark skinned, Jose. At a time where in my town there weren’t a lot of dark skinned business owners named Jose.

So the white teachers put me into a class because I'm white. Like, I present white because of my surname. Very, very challenging scenario to be put in because I was excited. As you can tell by this conversation, I like learning, you know, and I was really excited about my first day of school. So this is a story that is very meaningful to me, because I was with my grandfather all the way to his last days and sat with him in bed as he passed through those last days, and he told me lots of stories. In fact, my grandparents and great grandparents were the first people I really interviewed before I did the institute and built my own systems, etc. to help people tell their stories. There are opportunities for me to use that story when I'm working with diversity, equity and inclusion populations who normally might fashion me as just a white guy.

You know, I don't know what it's like to be black, but I know what it's like to be Portuguese and be negatively spoken to and put in a group. How I bring that out? First of all, I have to believe that the story matters, and you can tell by my recollection of it. It does matter a lot to me, and I'm not going to take too much time to dive back in my archives here.

And then I have to figure out how do I fit it in here, to speak to an audience where maybe I'm one of three white people in a room who are really advocates for transformation in a particular section. Now, if I don't understand that and I don't make that bridge, I don't mean to sound challenging, but then I don't deserve to get the outcome, because I didn't reflect enough and connect enough before I went live.

So it is really challenging, I think, to your friend of Booth who is asking this question, it's a call for creativity. By creativity, I mean that you have to really spend time around the linguistic part of bridging a story that might prompt a person or people's receptivity to you, given the controversy at hand. And then it's like a release of that to then move into why it's persuasive or how to be persuasive, but also why that element is persuasive will just show up within the next part of your story.

Remember, when we talk about storytelling, we're talking about connecting multiple dots. And that's what helps people become convinced that you are the person who should have the voice that you have on this controversial topic, in this space and place in time right now. And when you can do that and show that you have value and worth, then people will listen, which I think is at the heart of this question, and you can persuade them to think about what you're suggesting.

Anita Brick: Yeah, I know that's very well put, that's very well put. Wow, we've gone through a lot of different things and thank you for trusting me enough to take the risk to transform some blue dots, some experiences of someone you've never met into an incredibly powerful story. So thank you for that as well.

Dennis Rebelo: My pleasure.

Anita Brick: I know this was really this was really fun.

To kind of wrap things up and bring them together. What are three things that you would advise someone to do who wants to develop and share a career story that is powerfully compelling?

Dennis Rebelo: Yeah. So number one, don't get stuck in thinking that the lane of life that you live in is always career. Your life has family and friends, work and education. The other lane is what you do for recreation and fun and maybe spiritual slash nature. Really, everybody has about four real identities that they play out in a day, even though it seems like we're probably doing a million things within across a, you know, maybe 100 different populations and our lanes, it's really just four stamps. Like they say, I'm in this lane, I'm being a son, I'm being a father, I'm being a worker, I’m being, you know, a person who loves riding mountain bikes. Whatever it is, don't cabin off those experiences because who you are as an individual, as an integration of work and life and the best storytellers that you've probably heard and you already know this, you know, I'm saying this to the listeners, right?

Because you've heard where the pathway of an individual seems very un-linear. But when you go through these experiences and you start to allow yourself to explore them, you'll probably find that they influenced your career. And ultimately we spent so much time at work, you know, why not do something that truly engages our full identity? Don't relegate yourself to just career. In the book, I talk about the Steve Jobs story and how it actually follows a Peak methodology, and that can be very helpful for people too.

The second thing I would say is that sometimes we think of Simon Sinek’s great explanation of why and we say why and then, but we go at a really quick pace getting to the motivation or why you behaved in a particular way in these three moments that equal your peak story.

So hero, collab, virtuous equal peak story. My why is very different in my three areas of my life. And maybe, maybe not. You have to get clean with your why over time, just not what your why now. So be careful not to just talk about your why now. Look at your why over time you'll probably catch sight of your motivational orientation.

Third, you know we don't use our recording devices and on our phones, on our telephones and, you know, our digital devices as much as we could to understand how we sound when we go live. So when you go live for a story, the lowest stakes is doing it and recording yourself and listen to yourself. Now, it could be the one of the most painful episodes of replay that you've heard in a while. Or it might be really wonderful for you, and you might not realize that you're really good at in particular settings or telling a particular part of your story. I would advise individuals out there looking to tell their stories to really start using the recording device, understand your breathing, how it plays its part. When people go through the peak story style which I present in the book, I typically see this, Anita, people who go through it, whether it's a student or private client, they start to breathe differently. Their aspiration is differently sounding. There's calmness, there's confidence. There's a little bit more depth to the voice, a little bit more body, a little bit more timber. And I think that that's something that you should pay attention to when you listen to your recording.

Rollo May, the great existential psychologist, said, it's an ironic habit of human beings that we usually speed up when we lose our way. We know that people start to speed up when they don't want to be somewhere, i.e. in the story or in the communication. So they leave fast, right? And it's like running through the house, right? I don't want to be here right now. I've got to go to the gym. You know, I want to go on a hike. So don't leave your story. Stay with it. And if you're speeding up, ask yourself, why and then go back. Past now future find hero collab virtuous you know and then work it out. And then over and over again you know on average probably we have people listen to their recordings 33, 34 times before they go live and they make lots of adjustments, you know.

I mean, it's a big deal, right? Like you're going into the batter's box and you're going to take a swing at a pitch thrown by an interviewer or somebody saying, I hold the money for your next funding project and/or whatever it is. And, you know, to not be ready for it is not to honor the power of your own narrative. So let's get to honoring your story. Right? And so it's an inside job, but you have to play it to the outside world. On the way, record yourself.

Anita Brick: Brilliant, wonderful time together. Thank you so much for the work. Really did enjoy Story Like You Mean It. It's powerful and as are you. So thank you for making the time for us. There's a lot that we all–that I–learned, and I'm sure that those who listen will have many takeaways. So thank you for doing this. Thank you for the work that you do. And I look forward to having another conversation with you at sometime in the future. So yeah, again, thank you so, so much.

Dennis Rebelo: Yeah. Right on. Story like you mean it, right? Why not.

Anita Brick: That's right, that's right. Well thanks again, Dennis.

Dennis Rebelo: My pleasure Anita.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.