Why storytelling matters: an interview with Jay Acunzo

One of the most crucial—and overlooked—parts of modern work is how people communicate. Whether you’re selling a product, teaching a skill, or laying out a strategic picture, success or failure isn’t determined by whether you get the information out, but whether your audience is moved to action.

And according to speaking and storytelling coach Jay Acunzo, making people act begins with making them care.

Jay’s mission is to help business leaders become stronger speakers. His career has taken him from marketing roles for large tech firms to keynote speeches, corporate consulting, and a compelling podcast, “How Stories Happen.”

We sat down with Jay to crack the code of how authentic storytelling can build trust and transform your communication from bland to unforgettable.

Here are highlights of our conversation, which have been edited for clarity:

Let's be clear about this. When we talk about storytelling in business, what is that, exactly? It’s not about making things up, and it’s not about dumbing them down.

I always go back to a quote from Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. In the acceptance speech, he said, “Stories are like one person saying to another: This is how it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

So therein lies the rub for us in the marketing world, the business world, leadership, sales, whatever. It's not just about clarity: Can you understand what I'm saying? It's also about connection: Does it also feel this way to you?

So I could tell you a good story about what I did over the weekend, and you might be delighted by that, but you're not likely to change how you think or change how you act. In the business world, we have to spark action. We earn trust, we spark action. Those are the two jobs of a communicator or a leader.

Can you communicate in a way that ensures others care, taking action internally in their own minds, or externally in their work or their lives? That's an effective storyteller. I communicate in ways that move you.

Just because somebody sees a thing doesn't mean they're responding to it. So what happens when a professional focuses on resonance over reach in communicating their ideas?

Let's define the two terms. Reach is how many see it, resonance is how much they care. I am much more interested in how deeply they care about it, because I know if someone cares, they'll take action. Whether that's subscribe, watch, listen, buy, refer, anything.

Or they align with you more deeply, which makes everything else you want easier.

If you want results, you ought to prioritize resonance. Can you impart the urge to act? If you don't, no results happen. And, I would argue, you also don't feel fulfilled or enriched by the creative act.

So not just “I understand what you're saying,” but “I connect to this.”

Yes. And a story is a vehicle—pivoting around a premise, an assertion, a change—that meets somebody where they're at first. And then hits all the beats they need to hear, not just to feel gripped, but to feel moved forward in the action and then forward beyond the story.

You have to meet them where they're at and make a logical case for your ideas. But I think we're so close to the conclusions and ideas that we make, that we've stopped learning how to align with people. Agitate the problem and pain and introduce some tension, make some kind of assertion that now they're ready to hear because they feel like they're taken care of.

Align with them first, and then invite them to the advice, the methodology, the offers that we sell, the projects that we have.

I think that's a way to re-engineer how we communicate.

Some people may see storytelling as the exclusive domain of ad agencies or people who speak in front of audiences for a living. But you argue that storytelling is a critical skill for all professionals.

It's the operating system for human understanding, and it has been since we were able to communicate.

Have you ever been eager to speak while someone else is speaking? What were you thinking of sharing? “Oh, that's like in my vacation when me and my family did…” You share a story like that and it's effortless. Yet when we put on our business hat, or any kind of stakes are involved, we think we can't.

I think that's because we are taught that a story must be this giant, newsworthy thing: I started a billion dollar company, I was at death's door, whatever. You're not likely to have very many newsworthy stories, if any, at your disposal. But you have a ton of noteworthy things.

A really good storyteller doesn't have to experience anything extraordinary. They know how to find meaning all around them in the ordinary. That's the hallmark of any good creative, or any good scientist. We're noticers.

It's a rich way to live. It's also a much better way to fuel your content and your communications. So maybe I'm going to teach you six tips to become a stronger speaker for your next engagement, but I can open with a tiny anecdote from my childhood and use that as a metaphor, or a story that shows you what I mean instead of telling you.

I like to joke that like AI, people also run on LLMs. AIs have large language models, and people have little life moments. And we do not use them. No one else has access to them. But that's the most powerful way to connect with someone else, because while you're describing yours, they're [mentally] grafting on theirs, and now all of a sudden they're enrolled in your ideas and your experience.

So back to the Ishiguro quote: Does it also feel this way to you? Let me tell you a tiny little story. And that's where you say to me, yes, it does feel this way to me. So I push back hard against this idea that storytelling is just for performers or agencies.

You mentioned that it can just be about noticing. That’s a critical business skill. Being able to spot patterns, to have insights, to notice what's going on and craft an understanding of what it is that you're seeing, and to talk about that in a coherent way.

I think we can take heart in the fact that this is a practice. If you want to get better at it, write every day, or even once a week, and ship it to nobody. Make hitting publish the goal.

A lot of folks who want to speak don't try. Give free talks or book your own. Organize a meetup in your town. Create a project tangential to public speaking like podcasting or videos.

If you want to speak like a personal hero of yours, that is a practice. You're putting them on a pedestal, but I assure you the pedestal is mostly made of crap. It's mostly made of bad work and attempts to do things that nobody saw and the process feels as messy to them as it does to you. It's just that they persisted through the mess. It's a lot of work, but that work is attainable to more of us than ever before.

Let's also talk about where storytelling matters. It seems like the most common setting where an everyday professional might need to rely on storytelling would be in delivering a presentation, maybe to your team, maybe to clients. Is that too narrow a view?

There's storytelling with a capital “S” and storytelling with a lowercase “s”.

Storytelling with a lowercase “s” is just, “Let me illustrate what I'm saying.” It's a narrative. You tell the story in service of an insight you're imparting. That's great, and we need more practice at that. And we need signature stories that we know we can tell and customize everywhere we go.

But then there's capital-S Storytelling. Do you have a big idea that you use as a lens? A story through which you see everything? Because then I can align with you. It’s like: “Here's what we normally do. Do you feel aligned? But actually here's some tension and then here's how I see it.” That leans you in a little bit more because I'm communicating with what I would call generous tension. It's not clickbait. It's me saying there's a question that I'm inserting here and then we will go on together to answer it.

So everywhere you show up, you can communicate like a storyteller, but you have to do the work to figure out what are my lowercase-s stories and then what's my sort of capitalized story, the lens, the premise through which I see everything.

You mentioned signature stories. What do you mean by that?

I have a bag of stories that I can tell about founders, executives, peers, my past self, and my family. And by the way, those are all people. You can't tell a story about a logo because logos don't stand up, move around, make mistakes and learn things. So if you tell a story, it's about a person or a group of people.

A signature story is a story that lives in your bones, not your brain. I can bring it out everywhere, flex it to any container, and arrive at any point I want. And I can sign my name to it. That's the signature part.

It's not that I tell it a lot. You can't just shut off your brain and regurgitate points you've made a million times. You need to be present in the room. You have to react and customize, but you know the shape of it, the beats of the action.

So it's not that you have to act like a storyteller, who's a professional entertainer or an author in the business world, but it does help to have those go to stories that start as anecdotes and over time turn into a list of signature stories that are your old reliables.

You said you can't tell a story about a logo. My first thought was that I know some designers who might dispute that, but maybe that story is not really about the logo.

When people start their storytelling by talking about the organization, that's fine, but you're not connecting deeper. You're not bringing out the personal, because what's receiving your story is not a logo. What's receiving your story is a person and they're going to personalize everything you're saying to judge it: Do I agree with you or not? Do I object to this or not? Do I go forward with you and use your ideas and continue on this journey with you? Whether that's to read, watch, listen, buy, subscribe. Anything.

We object less when a person is involved. It's not, “Here's this brand that started it's called Airbnb and they wanted to start Airbnb. And then they encountered this one problem and then they got over the problem and everything has been great since, and now they're Airbnb.” All I'm doing there is allowing you to erect more objections.

A story about a person helps you sweep away the head trash so that the teachings can come in behind it.

We're also talking now about authenticity. But I'm also wondering about curation. One thing that might prevent people from embracing a storytelling model is that they're afraid of being boring, or irrelevant. Are there things we should exclude?

Storytelling is ultimately an exercise in restraint. I was talking to a client the other day who had a big keynote coming up. And she had a signature story about how as creatives, the more promotions we get, the further from the work we get.

So she tells a story about this guy who's a hobbyist pizza maker. A weekend warrior chef. But then he starts selling his pizzas. Eventually he has a storefront, a restaurant, and a food truck. And all of a sudden, she says, he misses making pizza.

And I said, “No, he doesn't.”

He doesn't miss making pizza. He misses the feel of the flour. He misses the feeling of when he spins the dough. Or when it lands again, and it's like he's being embraced by this craft that he loves.

Okay, maybe you have no idea what pizza dough feels like. Maybe you don't even care about pizza. But you do have moments in your life where there’s that tiny thing, that moment that’s just for you. And now you're thinking of it.

I think that's the best sign you've resonated. It’s not somebody saying, “I love that!” It's somebody rushing up to you and saying, “Oh my gosh, the whole time you were speaking, I kept thinking of this in my life.”

That's a sign you've deeply aligned and resonated. If you want to connect deeper externally, you have to turn deeper internally, find those one or two really specific details and then back away and let the audience fill out the rest.

Our humanity matters now in ways it never has before. There's a flood of AI-generated content. In a world where so much material is being produced by machines, is being able to tell a human story a competitive edge?

I think it's always been an edge. But now it's urgent that you make it your edge.

Here's a perfect example of telling a story to connect. I live in Boston and I go to the New England Aquarium with my kids a lot.
You can walk this ramp around this giant ocean tank. But the staffers who are there to answer your questions, to me they’re at risk, like a lot of content creators are at risk with AI.

The staffers have a microphone and they're answering questions, but there are also touchscreens around the rim of the tank. So if the staffers are busy, then you can just get your facts about the tank. You know, this is a green turtle. They live this long. They weigh this much. They eat this food.

You can get that from a kiosk, and they are definitely coming for those staffers’ jobs because the staffers are doing things that don't uniquely require them. And if you're not doing things that don't uniquely require you, sooner or later—and it's looking like sooner—you might not be required at all.

So what could they do? In addition to doling out basic commodity facts about the green turtle, they could say, “That's Myrtle. She's 75 years old, and she's cranky as hell. Every time we add a new fish, they wander up to Myrtle where she slumbers at the top of the tank, and smack! They learn a valuable lesson. Get off my coral!”

Right? What that staffer is not doing is making me care about the commodity information that any bot or kiosk could have given me.

Bots can help me know, but humans make me feel. And we really don't think that matters much in our work?

I'm here to tell you that that's actually the differentiator between someone you pick and someone you ignore to make a buying decision, to make friends, to wed your partner, whatever it is you're doing. Just three tiny words that have the biggest impact on everything we do: make me care.

That example you gave was so perfect. Your kid's not going to remember the map of the sea turtle habitat, or the average weight or age of a sea turtle, but they're going to remember Myrtle. They're going to engage with Myrtle and want to come back and see Myrtle again. They're going to think about Myrtle's plight in the wild and want Myrtle to be OK.

And let's go to the meta level underpinning this. By giving you the Myrtle story, which by the way, is one of my signature stories, I hope you remember me. I hope you go and subscribe to my newsletter or podcast. I hope you hire me.

I don't want to just show up in front of people and people go, “that's nice.” And then I'm never remembered. I want, as we all do, a deeper level of connection.

And that's the difference between sharing information or expertise and ensuring that you make that information and expertise come alive—to the very literal alive example of that turtle. She really is named Myrtle. She really does have a personality.

So don't act like a kiosk, don't act like a touchscreen and give me yet more facts, make sure those facts come to life because now, not only do I care about this place, this brand, this moment in time, but I might just care about you.

Want more tips and techniques for bringing story into your next presentation? Check out our storytelling hub.