#497: How to Land Your Ideal Job by Telling Your Accomplishment Stories

Imagine hitchhiking from Fargo, ND, to work on the Grand Coulee Dam in 1947 with little more than a suitcase and $15 in your pocket.

That’s what our dad, Keith, did as a newly-minted civil engineer following World War II.

One brisk evening on a dirt road outside of Billings, MT, a rancher in his pickup pulled over to Dad’s thumb.

“Get in if you need a ride,” the cowpoke prodded.

As they rumbled down the road he asked, “Where ya headed?”

“Hopefully to work on Grand Coulee Dam,” Keith responded.

“Hmmm,” the driver grunted.

“What?”

“You’re never going to make it,” he said.

I asked Dad how that cowboy’s comment struck him.  He said, “I thought he might be right.”

He wasn’t sure if he was shivering in the passenger seat from the cold or the fortune-teller driving the old Chevy truck.

But he did make it to Coulee City, WA, and spent a couple of years building colossal powerhouses on the northern reaches of the Columbia River.

His career took him to Seattle where he met our mom, Pat.

Pat and Keith wanted a large family, eventually having us seven kids. He knew he needed a better job and more income, maybe even becoming a partner one day.

So, in 1954, he grabbed a handful of index cards, typed out his brief story, and sent it to potential employers.

Keith Howell’s original cover letter that launched his career as a civil engineer.

Luckily for us, Keith festooned one of his “terse” cover letters to his den wall for posterity.

I find it interesting that he innately used an ABT as the framework of his short story.

And even back in 1954, he was sensitive to the time and attention of his prospective employer: “I’ve chosen this terse method of contacting you in order to save time.”

That cover letter landed him a job with a construction company that became Constructors PAMCO, where he was co-owner and president until he retired in 1985.

This short story written to time-restricted employers launched his epic construction career.

It’s no different in 2025, according to our guest, Amanda Miller, Your Career Advocate.

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#494: How to Make Culture Change Easy Using Your Stories

What if you could finally create the perfect culture for your organization—the one where everyone’s on the same page and firing on all cylinders?

If everyone truly aligned with your vision, then collaboration would flow, innovation would thrive, and success would feel…well, almost effortless.

But here’s the rub: culture change isn’t a quick fix. It’s an ongoing adventure—like herding feral cats through whitewater rapids in a rubber raft (fun to imagine, not so fun to do).

That’s where your stories come in. By sharing them, you keep the momentum alive, rally your team, and make the whole process a little easier (and dare we say, more fun).

Jamie Notter, founder of PROPEL and co-author of Culture Change Made Easy: See Your Hidden Workplace Patterns and Get Unstuck, is your go-to guide for this wild ride.

With 20+ years of consulting experience, Jamie has turned messy workplace cultures into powerhouses of productivity and innovation. His four hit business books have helped countless leaders ditch outdated management and embrace the “future of work.”

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495: How to Reframe Your Personal Brand Story With the Vital Framework

You hear it a lot: crafting an authentic personal brand story is crucial.

It helps align your personal and professional pursuits, enabling you to achieve success in both areas and maintain a life of fulfillment and connection.

But many entrepreneurs fail to integrate their true selves into their brand, leading to misaligned priorities in their business, burnout, and strained relationships at home.

By embracing your unique identity and following frameworks like those shared by Katie Richardson on today’s show, you can create a business that thrives without sacrificing the health and happiness of your family.

Katie built a multi-million dollar international company called Puj with distribution in 2,000 stores in the US and 26 countries.

She sold it for a fortune only after it nearly cost Katie her health and family. (more…)

#494: Speaking Secrets to Dramatically Increase the Impact of Your Stories

One of the most rewarding periods in my career was when I was a Professor of Storytelling in Arizona State University’s Executive Masters for Sustainability Leadership Program.

For five years, I taught storytelling to executives worldwide in iconic brands that included American Express, Philips Electronics, and Cummins.

My promise to each student was to help them own any room with their stories: from the boardroom to the break room to the chat room to the living room.

But I cautioned them that storytelling isn’t enough. That story loses its importance if you deliver it with a boring, resting business face.

To connect, you want to tell your stories with the kinetic energy of oral pacing, non-verbal cues, and using your environment like a stage, even if you’re stuck on ZOOM.

Communication and speaking coaching, Laurie Schloff, co-author of Smart Speaking: 60-Second Strategies for More Than 100 Speaking Problems and Fears, shows you her speaking tips and techniques to help you own any room.

Even Oprah tapped Laurie for a guest appearance to teach her audience how to use their whole being to become an impactful leader and speaker.

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Vivek Shankar

#493: How to Unlock Customer Insights That Make Your Stories Sell

In July 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker launched the Significant Objects project to objectively measure the effect of narrative on an object’s subjective value.

They purchased 100 tchotchkes and knickknacks in thrift stores like Goodwill, for an average of $1.25 apiece.

Then they hired creative writers to attach a fictional story to each object and sold the items at auction on eBay.

For example, they purchased this acrylic-encased globe for $1.49. Guess what it sold for because of its story? $197.50!

They made meaning and money out of the mundane.

Glenn and Walker invested a total of #128.74 for the first collection of baubles, sold that collection for a combined $3,612.51, and created an ROI of 2,800 percent.

They said,

“Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.”

We all recently witnessed this same storytelling phenomenon on a grand scale when absurdist Italian artist Maurizio Catalan bought a 25 cent banana from a Manhattan Street vendor, taped it to a white wall with masking tape, called his conceptual art, “Comedian,” and sold it to cryptocurrency entrepreneur  Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for the piece.

I think the joke might be on Sun who apparently has more Bitcoin than brains.

Catalan, on the other hand, created a roughly $6.2 million dollar ROI by reframing this mindless artwork with a story.

But what it really illustrates is that we are truly a planet of storytelling apes.

So what stories are you telling to evolve your commoditized product or service offering into an appealing treat?

Today, you learn how to craft your stories from a B2B content marketing expert, Vivek Shankar, who will help you turn customer pain points into growth strategies through the stories you tell.

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Chris Miller

#492: How to Leverage the Power of Place-Based Storytelling

Today I have an expert on place-based storytelling for you who will show you how to make your brand, sales, and marketing stories more compelling by centering your stories on a time and a place.

Chris Miller is the Corporate Communications Manager at Visit Phoenix, the non-profit organization that promotes the Greater Phoenix area, the fifth largest city in the country, as a travel destination and meeting venue.

Tourism generates an estimated annual revenue of over $12.9 billion for the metropolitan area.

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Luke Peters

#491: How to Leverage Your Brand Story for a Profitable Business Exit

As an entrepreneur, you’re excited about launching and/or growing your brand and if you get everything pretty close to right, then you can sell your enterprise for top dollar.

But are you so busy building your organization that you haven’t invested time in planning your exit?

Luke Peters is the former CEO of NewAir, a company he founded in 2001 that sells compact appliances for your home or office.

It used to be a direct-to-consumer play, but the global recession upended that model and the big box retailers like Lowes and The Home Depot presented some formidable competition in the online market.

So Luke pivoted and began selling through them, which created a whole new set of problems he had to deal with before orchestrating and remarkably profitable exit from the company.

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Pia Silva

#490: How to Quickly Build a Badass Brand to Profit On Your Expertise

We’re like Veruca Salt, the spoiled girl in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory story. “We want everything and we want it now.”

Okay, so that might be a gross overgeneralization. But you must admit our impatience is stoked with every rapid Amazon delivery.

So can you do rapid-fire branding for your small company, turning what used to take months into a couple of weeks or even days?

Pia Silva believes you can.

Pia is an entrepreneur, speaker, coach to small branding agencies, and author of Badass Your Brand: The Impatient Entrepreneur’s Guide to Turning Expertise into Profit.

In 2021, she founded No BS Agency Mastery, a training program in which she teaches one—to two-person branding agencies how to scale to $30-50k months while reducing their workload by up to 80%, all without employees.

Pia delivered a popular TED Talk on cultivating true confidence. She is also the host of a top-ranked podcast “No BS Agency Podcast,” a former Forbes contributor, and has been featured on MSNBC, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Entrepreneur Magazine, among other notable platforms.

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Tamsen Webster

#489: How to Inspire Meaningful, Lasting Change and Build Enduring Buy-in

You know how exciting and rewarding a major change in your life can be.

But you, me, and everyone we’re trying to change hate change.

It appears to scare the sh!t out of us because it activates the amygdala, which thinks change is a threat. So it releases a milkshake of hormones for fear, fight, or flight.

This is our basic survival instinct, which believes that remaining in the status quo will keep us safe even as everything is changing around us.

Seems odd given that evolution is all about the survival of the fittest; changing as our environment changes.

But people resist change because of:

Today, we focus on how to lessen resistance to a proposed change using effective storytelling.

My good friend Tamsen Webster joins us to share insights from her new book, Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change.

You’ll learn some of those principles as Tamsen takes us on her journey in change management and communication, emphasizing the importance of understanding how adults learn and the need for effective storytelling strategies to get people to buy into and prosper from your change initiatives.

Because, the risk of change lands squarely on the shoulders of the initiator. If you’re the initiator, then those are your shoulders.

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Jane McCarthy

#488: How to Discover Your Brand’s Authentic Feminine Archetype

Early in my career, I was taught to ask my customers insipid questions like: If your brand was a dog, what kind of dog would it be?

What kind of car reflects your personality? How about a drink? Are you a cocktail? A beer? Diet soda? Energy drink?

This accepted branding process never sat well with me.

From all our insightful exploration, we have determined that your brand is a five-year-old green golden doodle named Hazel that drives an Audi Q3, enjoys Manhattaans, reads Vogue and Outisde magazines, and gives her Nordstrom personal shopper birthday presents.

Seriously, man, that was nuts. This put me on a quest for a more authentic exploration, which led to my discovery of brand archetyping.

Here at last I found a foolproof way of sculpting and authenticating a brand’s distinctive, enticing personality.

It is important to understand your brand personality because it informs the creative expression of your communications.

How do you currently look, sound, and feel to your customers? Are you a Ruler brand like American Express, a Creator personality like Lego or Ikea, a Regular Guy/Gal persona like Charles Schwab, a Caregiver identity like Oprah and her OWN Network, or do you represent the character of the Hero archetype like Patagonia?

The above is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brand Bewitchery, on how to identify your personal and professional brand.

But my guest takes exception to the idea of using the 12 Jungian archetypes to define your brand personality.

She says they are too masculine and don’t address feminine archetypes found in most brands.

Jane McCarthy is a brand strategist with over a decade of experience in advertising.

She has collaborated with global and local brands in a variety of categories, working with brands like SweeTarts, Southern California Edison, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Jane’s emphasis is on leveraging archetypes to unlock a brand’s true essence and power.

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