Your burnt toast is a terrible business lesson.

I know it’s been a while since I last showed up in your inbox. Somewhere along the way, I went from writing one newsletter (this one) to running a few (3). Apparently, I looked at my workload and thought, “You know what this needs? More newsletters.” 😂 But hey, I’d like to think you’d rather hear from me when I actually have something worth sharing than have me show up every day with absolutely nothing to say but a strong commitment to saying it anyway.

Speaking of having something worth sharing, I come bearing gifts. 🎁 Well, one gift, technically. A useful little tool that came to me during a recent 1:1 conversation with a client. I figured, if it could help them, it might just help you too.

It was a fairly ordinary conversation, but it got me thinking about how much useful material we overlook simply because the experience itself doesn't seem particularly significant.

Which brings me to a theory I've been sitting on.

I have a theory that a ridiculous amount of valuable marketing material is sitting inside experiences people have already dismissed as irrelevant.

It could have been an awkward email, a conversation that went sideways, a purchase you regretted, or a decision you made in just five minutes that changed the way you approached your work for the next five years. All of them contain potential.

Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that a story only becomes commercially valuable when something extraordinary happens.

So people start manufacturing profundity.

Your dog ignoring you somehow taught you the secret to audience engagement? Your overflowing laundry basket gave you a masterclass in scaling a business? Your Wi-Fi cutting out somehow taught you the importance of building trust with your audience? Your toddler refusing broccoli gave you a breakthrough in sales psychology?

What in the LinkedIn hell?

The mental gymnastics people perform to turn ordinary experiences into business lessons deserve their own Olympic category.

Ordinary experiences really CAN become extraordinary selling stories.

The difference lies in the quality of the connection you discover.

First, understand what you’re actually selling through a story.

When people hear storyselling, they often imagine someone sharing an emotional personal experience and ending with a convenient invitation to purchase something.

That’s one possible execution. It’s also a painfully limited understanding of what stories can accomplish commercially.

Think about the last time you decided to work with someone because you genuinely liked how they thought.

Perhaps they made an observation that perfectly articulated something you’d struggled to explain. Perhaps they challenged an assumption you’d held for years. Perhaps they described a problem with such precision that you immediately trusted their ability to solve it. Something shifted before the transaction happened.

You developed confidence in their judgment.

That’s one of the most commercially valuable things a story can accomplish: it gives people an opportunity to experience your thinking.

Your expertise becomes observable.  Your values become tangible. Your approach becomes easier to understand. Your perspective becomes impossible to mistake for anyone else’s.

Instead of asking people to believe you’re insightful, you give them an experience of your insight.

Instead of repeatedly claiming you understand your customers, you demonstrate that understanding through the situations you recognize and the details you notice.

The story becomes evidence.

The real asset is your interpretation of an experience.

Imagine two people receiving the exact same frustrating email from a client.

One person sees an annoying interruption. The other notices that the client’s repeated requests for updates reveal uncertainty about the project’s progress. That second person realizes something important: clients sometimes request more communication because they lack visibility into the work. They introduce a simple progress-tracking system, and the number of unnecessary check-ins decreases.

Now there’s a story worth telling.

The experience itself is painfully ordinary, but the interpretation reveals a useful business principle, the action demonstrates problem-solving ability, and the outcome gives the audience a reason to believe the storyteller understands client relationships.

This is why I believe storyselling begins with learning what to notice.

A story becomes valuable when its connection makes sense.

Let’s talk about forced storytelling because, dear, we need to.

Someone burns their breakfast and suddenly discovers five lessons about entrepreneurship.

Someone’s child spills coffee and they somehow produce a philosophical manifesto about leadership.

Someone goes through a breakup and magically discovers the secrets of business development.

Of course, personal experiences can lead to genuine professional insights.

A breakup could change someone’s understanding of trust, and that understanding could influence how they manage professional relationships. The question is whether the connection has a defensible explanation.

Can you explain exactly how the experience led to the insight?

If you need six paragraphs of metaphors to persuade someone that your burnt toast represents business resilience, examine the connection more carefully.

Even when a connection makes sense, consider whether the significance you’re assigning to it is justified. Truth to be told, not every realisation needs to become a revolutionary breakthrough. Sometimes a small observation is valuable precisely because it is specific, useful, and honestly presented.

Good storytelling has an internal logic. The audience can follow how one observation leads to another, and the lesson feels earned because the story provides enough evidence to support it.

I use three criteria to evaluate whether a storyselling connection is genuinely worth developing:

1/ Coherence: Does the connection genuinely make sense?

Can someone follow the relationship between what happened and what you’re trying to communicate? The strongest connections feel intellectually satisfying because the reasoning holds together. Every important leap has an explanation.

2/ Insight: Does the connection reveal something valuable?

A coherent story can still be painfully obvious. Your interpretation should help someone recognize a pattern, understand a problem, reconsider an assumption, or discover a useful possibility. Give your audience something worth thinking about after they’ve finished reading.

3/ Commercial relevance: Does the connection serve a business purpose?

Consider how the story relates to your expertise, audience, positioning, or offer. What does it help potential customers understand about the value you provide? The connection should create a meaningful reason for your audience to associate that insight with your work.

Coherence makes the story believable. Insight makes it worth reading. Commercial relevance makes it worth selling.

For example, imagine a brand strategist who regrets buying an expensive notebook.

The notebook is beautiful, the paper feels luxurious, and the packaging is impressive. However, after just a week, they stop using it.

This is not because the product is poorly made, but because its design makes everyday use feel unnecessarily precious. They hesitate to scribble down messy thoughts on pages that look too perfect to ruin.

That experience makes the strategist reconsider something about premium positioning: sometimes the very qualities that make a product desirable can create friction in how people actually use it.

Now the connection becomes interesting.

The story has COHERENCE because the experience directly reveals a tension between perceived value and practical usability.

It offers INSIGHT because it challenges the assumption that making something feel more premium always improves the customer experience.

It carries COMMERCIAL RELEVANCE because the strategist demonstrates an ability to examine how positioning influences customer behavior.

The story itself remains simple, as the sophistication lives in the thinking.

Notice that the notebook didn’t magically teach someone the secrets of branding. The experience raised a specific question, the interpretation revealed a pattern, and that pattern connected to something the storyteller already understood professionally.

That’s a very different process from attaching a business lesson to an unrelated object and hoping the metaphor sounds clever.

If you’re using storytelling to support a business, consider what you want the audience to understand after reading.

Do you want them to recognize a problem they’ve been overlooking? Understand why your approach is different? Trust your judgment? Reconsider an assumption? See the value of a particular service?

A story can serve several purposes, although one clear objective often gives it greater coherence. The commercial connection grows from the substance of the story.

That’s the difference between telling people you have something valuable and helping them recognize its value themselves.

Your next story is probably hiding inside something you dismissed.

So, I want you to try a small experiment.

Think of something ordinary that happened recently. Maybe you abandoned a purchase halfway through, misunderstood someone’s intentions, or found yourself unnecessarily frustrated by a simple task.

Before trying to turn it into a story, ask yourself what actually caught your attention. What did the experience reveal? Did it challenge an assumption? Expose a recurring problem? Make you reconsider something you thought you understood? Then ask whether that observation connects meaningfully to your expertise or something your audience cares about.

You might discover a useful story, or you might also discover that the experience doesn’t contain a commercially relevant insight. Both are useful outcomes. The goal isn’t to turn everything into content, but to recognize what genuinely deserves to become content.

I’ve been developing Possible Stories, a tool built around a simple conviction: You have more stories worth selling than you think.

The tool helps you examine everyday experiences through guided prompts, identify meaningful connections, and discover story angles that support your business.

It uses structured inputs and predefined storytelling logic, with no AI required.

Rather than generating a random inspirational analogy, it helps you work from experiences you actually had and explore how those experiences relate to what you know, believe, offer, and want your audience to understand, and it also gives you room to examine different possible connections before deciding whether an experience is worth developing into a story at all.

Ready to discover deeper what your everyday life has been hiding?

Access it here

Because the greatest advantage in storyselling comes from developing an eye for meaning, relevance, and opportunity.

Your life has been generating material for years.

The next step is learning how to recognize what deserves to become a story, what makes that story meaningful, and how to connect it to something worth paying for.

The story is sitting right there. The money is in what you can SEE.

If you try it out, I’d love to hear about your experience.

Cheers,
Pearling ♥️