How you write the story your public tells about you

While we rightly spend a lot of energy telling the story of our personal brand, the story that really counts is that which the public makes in their mind about us.

That story is made of much more than what we say about ourselves. It includes everything we do, the rooms we enter and in what role, the people we are seen with, the topics we return to over the years, and our public assembles all of it into a narrative without being aware of doing so.

This changes how we think about the work of building a personal brand. We contribute to our narrative in three distinct modes:

• Telling: the articles we write, the talks we give, the positions we take publicly, the way we frame our work in a conversation.

• Doing: the projects we take on, the methodologies we apply, the results that become visible to people who matter to us professionally.

• Showing up: not just whether we attend an event, but whether we speak or listen, whether we lead the conversation or participate in it, whether we are the person who organised the room or the person who was invited into it.

Each of these modes feeds the perception our public forms of us differently, and all of them contribute to what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: the recognised standing that gives a person the right to be heard with weight in a specific field. Symbolic capital accumulates in the minds of the people who observe us, and it forms from the totality of signals we emit over time.

How a narrative crystallises

Roland Barthes, studying how meaning works in culture, observed that myths are created through the elaboration of meaning in the mind of the public: a set of signals gets interpreted, organised and eventually crystallised into something that feels like a fact rather than a conclusion. Psychology, neuroscience and decades of advertising practice have added an important condition to this: repetition is necessary for the public to retain the myth and make it their own.

Luca de Meo's identity as a turnaround champion illustrates this well. De Meo is an Italian manager who has led some of the most iconic brands in the car industry, including SEAT, Audi and Renault, and who is now at the helm of Kering, the French luxury group. He has not built that identity by describing himself in those terms. Thirty years of work at Fiat, SEAT, Audi and Renault produced a pattern of signals so consistent that his public crystallised it into something they experience as a simple fact about him. Each new role is now read through that myth rather than evaluated from scratch.

The condition of relevance

Consistency is not enough on its own, because our public only notices and retains what is relevant to them. Relevance is determined by our public: they notice and retain what connects to problems and questions they already carry.

This is the function of a strategic narrative. A strategic narrative is the overarching story that emerges from the accumulation of everything we do and say, the thread that connects our signals into a coherent whole. It takes shape in the mind of our public through the same combination of cognitive elaboration and heuristics we have explored above: our public processes what we emit, organises it around the themes they find relevant, and crystallises it into a picture of who we are and what we stand for.

For a strategic narrative to hold its shape over time, it needs to be anchored by what I call narrative pillars: the recurring themes and territories of meaning that our signals consistently inhabit. Narrative pillars are the specific ideas, problems and perspectives that our public learns to associate with us, because each new article, each talk, each project is read as a new chapter in a story the public already knows the contours of.

The practical work of narrative is to identify the pillars that reflect our depth and our contribution, anchor our signals to them with consistency, and let the accumulation do what no single moment of telling can do alone.