A quick note: We've renamed the newsletter to The Business Storyteller. The content and voice haven't changed — we just wanted a name that's more accurate. These are stories at work, not around a campfire. Though some of them would probably work there too.

In every cohort of our storytelling course on Maven — Success Through Persuasive Storytelling — we ask the group a simple question: tell us a story from your work. Something real; a moment that changed how you thought about a problem.

And every time, at least three people go quiet. Then someone says: "I don't really have stories from work."

When people say, “I don’t really have any stories,” what they usually mean is that they don’t have dramatic, career-defining moments to narrate. Storytelling feels like it requires something extraordinary. And because those moments are rare, it’s easy to assume there isn’t much material to work with.

In reality, professional life generates several usable stories every month. Most of them simply fade because they’re never captured. If you want to become more persuasive and credible, you don’t need more remarkable experiences. You need a way to notice and preserve the ones already unfolding around you.

Detours. Decisions. Disagreements.

Stories often live inside brief exchanges, difficult decisions, unexpected reactions, or quiet realizations. A disagreement in a meeting, a trade-off you wrestled with, a message that didn’t land - these moments carry tension. And tension is the raw material of story.

Look out for the 3D’s - Detour, Decision or Disagreement - at work, and as you capture them you will start to build a rich bank of stories at work. 

Detours. You plan the week. Then someone quits Monday morning. Or you spend three hours on a deck and the meeting gets canceled. Or you think you're solving one problem and halfway through you realize it's a different problem entirely. That gap between the plan and what actually happened? Most people walk right past it. That's the story.

Decisions. The hard ones - the ones where you genuinely don't know. For example - you have to choose between two paths, neither of which are great. But you have to pick one. Then you wonder for three weeks if you picked wrong. That's just what it feels like to be responsible for something. We should talk about those more.

Disagreements. The ones which surface friction. You say something. Someone else says something else. Both of you are looking at the same data and both are being reasonable. You walk away feeling weird, or annoyed, or like you weren't speaking the same language. Something’s actually there that has a nugget embedded in it. 

As you go through the week, pay a little more attention to the moments that usually pass by unnoticed.

When one of these shows up, make a note of it. Nothing elaborate - just enough to remember what happened.

Then, pick one. In your next meeting, instead of starting with an update or a conclusion, start there - with the moment. See how the conversation changes.