4 rules to help increase your odds of success when trying to shift someone’s perspective so you can sell more, create deeper connections, and have a greater impact on your audience.

Your story, my friend, is part of your perceived value as a person, as a brand, and as a company. But how can you use your story to increase your perceived value? How can you use your journey that got you here to persuade people to think you are better than your competition? Here are 3 ways that a well-crafted story can elevate you and your brand’s perceived value.

Guilty until proven innocent. That’s sort of what it feels like when you’re creating a new company, business, product or service—you sort of have to prove yourself to people before they buy in. How do you do that? You have to architect a story for people to believe in. To do that, you have to understand these three fundamental things.

A parable is a fabricated story that lets you wrap your own story in a cloak of something people more fully understand. It provides clarity, and a “kind of like" bridge between what people know intrinsically, and what you do. Want to learn how to you use it?

As a brand, you have to control the story your customer is telling themselves and reroute it towards your epiphany. If they arrive at the same ah-ha moment, you’ve captured their attention, made an intimate connection, and opened the door to sharing your plan, your solution, your product as the bridge between where they are, and the possibility of what could be.

We spend 1/3 of our lives working, and now, more than ever, people see being connected to the mission and values of a company as a necessity, not a nicety. In that, leaders need to know how to galvanize people, and provoke a sense of belonging and motivation in each team member.

How do you do that? With magnetic, evocative and symbolic storytelling.