The Confidence
Document

Talk it out. We can clean it later.

Turn on the recording software you use and simply talk it out. Let it record. Hop on with a friend of yours and walk through your Origin Story. This document is essentially taking the time to write, say, 500 words per story type.

Most people come back and say, "Chirag, 500 was too little. I started writing, and I couldn't stop." That's great, because we can always clean later on. Start with the questions below and the stories you already have. You can keep adding detail as you go.

Questions to start your eight stories.

Work through one story type at a time. If you're doing this for your own brand, answer as yourself. If you're doing it with a team, talk through the questions together. For the stories about something you've done, include the actual moment, decision or person you're talking about.

What can an answer look like?

Here's a short answer drawn from my own stories. In your document, you can keep the longer versions and combine the sentences you need for the person in front of you.

The small business family is my Origin Story. The work I do as the Brand Historian is my Offering Story. The framework is part of my Mythos, and Madison Square Garden is my Future Story. I know which parts I'm drawing from, so I can change the answer without making up a new story each time.

Go back through and pepper in your echoes.

Once you've written these stories, I want you to go through and pepper in your echoes. The idea is repetition and consistency. Eventually, when someone asks what they think of your brand, you've made it easier for them to find the words.

For your verbal echoes, I use a word-cloud exercise. If I take the document and make the words that repeat most often appear larger, I should be able to point to your echoes without you having to tell me. If an echo is a color, sound or scent, look at the touchpoints where it can actually show up.

Copy and paste from the same document.

Your CEO is going to talk to investors? Copy and paste from the doc. Your sales team wants collateral? Copy and paste from the doc. Your intern wants to figure out what to put on social media or the website? Copy and paste from the doc.

You could have people working in purchasing, marketing, sales and HR, all doing different things. Because they're referring to the same narratives and the same echoes, they're reinforcing the same stories across their unique touchpoints. That's the organizational alignment I'm trying to build.

The goal is internalization.

My confidence comes from the fact that no one on earth knows my stories better than I do. The goal is internalization. I know my stories well enough to pull from them when someone asks what I do, what my goal is, or where I'm headed. I can give an answer that fits the conversation.

Eventually, your team may no longer need to look at the document in the same way. The story travels with the work, from the moment the designer makes a choice to the way someone explains it to a customer. People across different touchpoints are using the same language.

Start with the stories you can tell today.

Once you know your stories, the next question is where and when to share them. That's where Brand Curiosity Theory comes in, matching the story to the question your audience is asking.