Interpersonal relationships are a fundamental component of human happiness and, for many, of professional success. Few have studied the role that stories play in this process.
In this article, you will learn:
- Why Dale Carnegie’s book is so popular
- What are the two components behind a business relationship?
- How to use character stories and lessons learned in this context
A revolutionary book
In 1936, Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People, a highly innovative book for its time.
“Self-help books didn’t exist yet,” his daughter wrote for the 2022 audiobook version. “Improving meant improving your table manners, or acquiring a taste for the arts and literature. You didn’t learn to make friends from a book. You were either popular and successful, or you weren’t.”
Dale Carnegie wanted to change that. He knew that human relationships could be taught.”
Since then, How to Win Friends… has sold more than thirty million copies—it’s the second best-selling self-help book in history—and has been translated into more than thirty languages. (Warren Buffet claims that the course based on that book changed his life, so much so that he only has one academic diploma hanging in his office: that one.)
What made How to Win Friends… so popular (still selling 250k copies a year)?
Two wishes that we all have
One reason, I think, has to do with the correlation between interpersonal relationships and happiness. The big conclusion of the famous Harvard Study of Human Development (research that is in its eighty-fifth year) is that “Good relationships lead to health and wellness.”
Carnegie (with a g that sounds like in “goat,” not like in “genie,” and whose original last name was Carnegey but changed to Carnegie to make it easier to remember) tapped into the natural desire to build relationships that most human beings seem to have.
But How to Win Friends… satisfies, as its name suggests, a second wish.
To influence others, you need to convince them, regardless of whether they are your friends or not. The most common way to do this is by using words and arguments. And for the contemporary professional, this means making a presentation. (There are, of course, other tools of persuasion, but many of them revolve around specific words, whether spoken or written.)
Both desires are related: making friends (or building relationships, if the whole friends thing gives you the creeps) and influencing others are both about winning people over.
In Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that the process of persuasion usually occurs when there is ethos, pathos, and logos .
- Ethos: the trust and credibility that the audience feels towards the speaker
- Pathos: the speaker’s ability to appeal to the audience’s emotions
- Logo : the rational quality of the argument
That is to say, you need to be good with words, but also with your own credibility as a person.
A new approach at Astrolab
For almost all of our history, Astrolab has been dedicated to operationalizing logos and pathos, that is, helping our readers and audiences to make their ideas appeal to both the rational and emotional parts, but almost always from the point of view of communication, not the communicator.
We have recently come to realize that, while this is important, we have been ignoring the role that the speaker plays for himself, not for the ideas he shares. At best, we have left it to the imagination of those who read or listen to us.
And that is an opportunity.
For many of us, medium- or long-term relationships – with clients, suppliers, co-founders, investors, colleagues – play a crucial role in our professional success. “Others” have resources – time, money, approval – that they might or might not share with us.
Think about your job. I’d bet that 90% of you reading this need to convince others of something: to invest in your startup (greetings to those from 500 Startups who listened to me in Oaxaca: I’m late with these posts, but I’m here), to convince a client, to get the support of a manager, to get approval for a budget.
All of this involves winning over others, but you’re hardly going to achieve this with your ideas alone. You need to invest in creating an identity that is pleasant and trustworthy. This post is an effort in that direction.
The elements behind a successful relationship
Behind any good relationship there are at least two conditions: sympathy and trust.
In the most cited scientific article on the subject -by far-, Nicholson et al (2001) argue that interpersonal trust leads to good relationships, and improves communication, cooperation, satisfaction and purchasing intentions.
So far, none of this is news. Nicholson and his colleagues wanted to go further. Specifically, they sought to decipher how liking, defined in that same article as the overall emotional attachment between two people in a business context, and trust were related.
Researchers designed a survey that was completed by 238 heavy equipment store owners. In the survey, owners answered questions about salespeople with whom they had had interpersonal and business relationships for between one and nine years.
The survey assessed four elements: interpersonal trust, interpersonal likeability, similarity of business values, and frequency of personal interactions.
The results? That likability largely determines the trust we feel for the other person. Perhaps more relevant: trust operates through sympathy. The more sympathy, the more trust, especially in longer relationships.
So if we want to build relationships, let’s focus on building trust, but especially rapport.
Stories as a tool to build trust and rapport
How do you build trust? Let’s start with how not to: by telling someone “trust me.
How so? Let’s see if storytelling helps in any way.
A few years ago, three guys from Finland conducted a study to understand whether stories told by a leader in a business context helped build trust between two people.
Through fifteen interviews, the researchers proved that almost all the leaders interviewed communicated their values – which are democratic, generous, etc. – and their vision of the world using, mainly, stories.
By daring to tell stories—sometimes personal, sometimes taken from famous people—leaders put themselves in a vulnerable position, a condition for creating deep connections with others. In the words of Brené Brown:
“In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there’s a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. “We do this because we feel the most alive when we’re connecting with others and being brave with our stories.” ― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.
In addition to building trust, stories can be used to generate rapport. Connection stories help with this, especially when they make others laugh or at least smile.
In the Finnish study, one of the findings was that leaders use humorous stories to connect by sharing past experiences.
I’m sure you can name some very successful business people who are experts at using humor. There’s something about humor that disarms and changes the energy of a conversation. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, thinks the same: “ The most popular type of stories is… funny stories. I think everybody should know how to tell a funny story.”
In previous posts in this series, I talked about connection stories , which are used to grab attention, which help keep it engaged by communicating basic information about a brand, product, service, or personal expertise.
What I want to do in the rest of this post is talk about two types of stories, funny or not, that help to generate both trust and sympathy.
This is the perfect time for a warning: if these types of stories are misused, they can work against you. We’ll also talk about how to get around these obstacles.
The stories are:
- Character Stories, which reveal a personal attribute or belief that you are proud of.
- Stories of lessons learned, about mistakes that became learning experiences
Character stories
In Hidden Potential, Adam Grant writes that character “goes beyond having principles. It’s a learned ability to live according to your principles.” If you want to communicate what kind of person you are, share stories where we can see your character in action.
Let’s look at a couple of character stories. For each story, try to answer two questions:
- What does this person want to convey to me with his story?
- Did they succeed?
I’ll confess something to you: I personally care less about the specific type of story, and more about the use or purpose. Rather than obsessing over whether a story is about character or lessons learned, understand what effect it has on others.
If they help you generate sympathy and/or trust, go ahead.
If you feel like the story isn’t working, or it’s working against you, make adjustments… or use another story.
Seth Godin
You can listen to it from 5:20 to 9:30 here, or read the transcript I made. (Note: Seth says it’s his origin story. Personally I think it’s more of a character story, but that kind of doesn’t matter. The important thing is whether it helps you get to know him better as a person, and I think the answer is yes.)
I’ve been rehearsing my origin story for a really long time.
When I was 14 years old, my dad worked for a company in Buffalo, NY.
For a bunch of reasons, some good, some ridiculous, he didn’t like boats, and a guy who worked with his company said:
—Hey Bill, I just got this new boat, and I’m going to sail it on Lake Erie to Detroit. Do you want to come and cruise with me this weekend?
Well, first of all, he couldn’t sail because it wasn’t a sailboat. It was a 25 ft motor boat. And secondly, my dad didn’t want to go because he hated boats.
But he nominated his eldest son. He said:
—No, I can’t make it but my son would be happy to go.
So with 25 dollars in my wallet, and a ticket back from Detroit to Buffalo on USAIR, we headed off.
Now, Lake Erie is a lake so big that when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t even begin to see the shore. It’s sort of like an ocean in that respect.
So we started off, it’s a sunny day. The water was flat. It was great. But after a couple of hours, the wind blew up.
And I got really sick.
And the guy was mad at me for getting sick on his new boat, but what can I do? I was really sick.
The second day, I hadn’t eaten of course, cause I was just fasting until I got home, the water was like glass. And we’re going along and we’re doing fine.
And at five o’clock at night, the boat ran out of gas.
And so we’re standing there and the boat starts rocking, and rocking, and I get sick again.
And he says:
—Don’t worry, the coast guard will be soon and look, over there, you can see the lights of Detroit.
Well the coast guard comes out, and throws us a jerry can full of gas, and goes away.
Well, the yachts that had the boat put the gas into the engine and it doesn’t start.
So we’re in the water for another hour in the dark.
Finally the coast guard comes back, and tows us into Detroit. Except it’s not Detroit, it’s Cleveland. He also got lost.
Finally pulled into Cleveland around 11 o’clock at night. It’s 1974.
The guy says to me:
—Here, this is George. He’s going to take you to the Rapid, and you can go home tomorrow.
—Oh, the Rapid. A hotel, great.
So George and I get into the car, and he doesn’t drive me off to a hotel. He drives me off to the Cleveland Rapid Transit Service, in the middle of a tough neighborhood. In 1974. In a tough city.
Somehow, I figured out how to get on the train, figure out where the airport is, and get to the airport. There’s one bus running at 12:30 at night, and I take the bus to the hotel, to the Hilton.
I go to check at the Hilton and the guy says:
—20 dollars in advance.
So I gave him all the money I had left, and I went up to my room.
Now, I remember, I was supposed to be on the flight that landed four hours ago.
No cell phones.
My parents were at the airport, I’m not there.
So I call home, and I’m exhausted, and I say:
—Mom, Dad, don’t worry, I’m at the Hilton, I’ll figure out how to fly home tomorrow.
Next morning, at 6am, the phone rings, it’s my Mom, and she says:
—You’re in Cleveland!
—Yeah, I know I’m in Cleveland.
But I’d forgotten to tell them that I was in Cleveland, and my Mom had been calling every Hilton hotel in concentric circles in Detroit, until she found me.
Well, I flew home, 10 o’clock in the morning, with my vomit encrusted shirt, having not eaten in two days.
My Mom picked me up at the airport, handed me a change of clothes, and took me to school.
She says:
—You’re not sick, you don’t get a day off.
And that’s my origin story.
You’re not sick. You don’t get a day off. You’ll get rejected, you’ll throw up on the boat, you’ll get lost in a big city, and you’ll figure it out. This idea that after an incident we can choose a narrative, begins to open doors for us. It changes how we see the next challenge.
Daniel Marcos
Daniel Marcos is an entrepreneur I admire and have been stalking for a while. In an interview with Oso Trava, he tells a story that is half about origin, half about character. The story begins at minute 29:47 and ends at 34:40.
One of mine
That’s where Dan Macías, one of my best friends, appears.
What do they have in common? They all communicate something about the storyteller, usually something good. (If it’s not something good, then perhaps it’s a lesson learned story.)
Stories of lessons learned
Lesson learned stories are about failure and what happens after that failure (usually a learning experience or a decision). Failure stories help connect on a much deeper level, because we make ourselves vulnerable, as Finnish researchers proved.
Preferably, these stories are about bad or personal decisions, but with a learning experience at the end. They can also be about failures or bad decisions by others, but they generally have less impact because they don’t put you in a vulnerable situation.
Two of mine
Speaking of vulnerability, I’d like to share two stories that I don’t usually tell together, but I think they are more or less related. Note: no subtitles this time, sorry!)
Ben Zander
Ben Zander is the music director of the Boston Philharmonic, and his 2008 TED Talk is one of my favorites. On that occasion, Zander closed with this story, sharing a lesson learned by someone other than himself.
Before moving forward, don’t forget to answer the two questions I asked above (what does this person want to convey to me with their story? Did they succeed? )
Three tips on how to tell them
- Find them and tell them with a giver mentality. How can you add value to others? By all means, build your brand (you are the first and usually the only one responsible), but do it with an integrative (giver), not a distributive (taker) mindset.
- Focus on what you have learned, not what you have achieved
- Stories don’t have to be prepared
In the study of the Finns I found that some of the stories the leaders told were planned, but most were improvised according to the conversation.
I understand that I’m suggesting something difficult – telling stories without necessarily planning them – but having the intention to do so will predispose you to seek out those opportunities.
And that’s it! It’s not easy to be vulnerable, to have the perfect balance of emotion, and at the same time make an effort to be very transparent when telling it. The worst that can happen is that you lose trust and sympathy… but it’s a risk that at least I decide to take. Almost always.
Challenge
Instructions
- Read the following prompts (taken and translated from this article published in INC Magazine) and pay attention to what happens in your memory.
- Choose one of those memories.
- Now ask yourself this question about that memory: does it help you communicate some trait of your character or some lesson you have learned and consider important to share?
- If not, go back to the list and choose another memory.
- Once you have the memory, turn it into a story you can tell in two minutes or less.
- Optional: Make sure it includes the elements we talked about in the Origin Stories post
Prompts
- A conversation that changed my life
- How did I become who I am today and how did I get to where I am?
- How was our company founded?
- What do we stand for as a team or company (and what we don’t tolerate)?
- The best/worst team I’ve ever been a part of
- The Biggest Lesson I’ve Learned About Myself (Maybe the Hard Way)
- Where have I had difficulties or a challenge that I overcame?
- How did I come to understand my core values?
- A moment when I lost confidence in myself
- Who are we here to serve and why?
- How is the competition nipping at our heels?
- What did I learn from a difficult person in my life and what am I grateful for?
- A skeptical client whom we convinced
- A team that struggled and then succeeded
- A difficult but necessary change that I / we made
- Our best work and how we did it
- Our biggest mistake and how we recovered
- What am I/we are most proud of?
- Who can I always trust and why?
- Something that should never have worked, but it did
Record yourself on video and send it to three people. Ask them to answer the following questionnaire. Or if you prefer, send us an email with your videos to: hola@astrolab.mx and we will be happy to help you with the feedback.
Rubric
- Was it easy to follow the story? YES/NO
- Did I make you feel any emotion? YES/NO
- Have you increased your desire to go out with me for a coffee or a beer sometime soon? YES/NO
