The Heart Of Business Storytelling: How To Show Up And Perform Your Best 

Can you transform a painfully shy person who’s terrified of public speaking into someone whose confidence is so apparent that her supervisor asks you, “What happened?”

Chris McAuley can. He regularly coaches business leaders and transforms their experience with taking the spotlight. With 20 years of acting experience and 35 years of business leadership experience, Chris is helping people and organizations perform their best.

A Level 2 Certified Story Facilitator (CSF), he uses the tools he learned in CSF to help leaders and organizations experience incredible transformations through one-on-one coaching and corporate workshops.

He’s also a Certified Art of Active Listening Facilitator and a Certified Practitioner for 9 Skills for Success and Relational Skills, among many others. Chris is the picture of a life-long learner, using his expertise to help others be their best.

We were excited to get a chance to catch up with Chris and learn more about his work. Here is our conversation, slightly edited and annotated for clarity. Keep reading to learn more about how he supports organizations through effective communication training and leadership transformation.

Leadership Story Lab: How did you end up with both 20 years of acting experience and 35 years of business experience? 

Chris: I wanted to be an actor. But I didn’t want to live the actor’s life, as they say. I wanted a family and a paycheck. I thought, “I do enjoy business, so I started my career in the business — 15 years in the not-for-profit world, then 20 in the for-profit world, working my way through a variety of positions to eventually become an owner of a business.

Whenever I could get on stage I would. I did that for about 20 years, performing in over 50 productions on stage and in film.  When I decided to leave the business world I thought about what type of business I could create where I could leverage my experience of being on stage as well as what I love to do in business. That’s how I have arrived at where I am now.

Chris was in Leadership Story Lab’s fifth cohort, completing Level 1 certification in 2021 and Level 2 immediately following. He is on his way to completing Level 3. He’s also an active member in CSF’s monthly Professional Development Series. Chris always knew the importance of showing up as an actor, he just didn’t know how to coach non-acting clients to show up as their full selves, until he learned the tools from CSF.

Chris, fourth from the left, performs on stage.

LSL: What prompted you to seek out Leadership Story Lab and CSF?

Chris: So I wanted to learn some of the business side of storytelling and how that integrates into an operation because that’s one thing I love to do.

I love storytelling. I’m Irish. I think storytelling is part of the human condition. I guess all cultures really embrace it, and we certainly do. My grandmother, Ella Finnegan, was one of the best storytellers I ever knew, and she inspired me from a very young age.

So I’ve always been so interested in that, and then, of course, performing on stage that’s what an actor does. You’re telling the story. You learn on stage about what it means to speak from your heart.

That’s what an actor learns — how to be so honest and so authentic, and to be able to speak from a deeper place than most. And so I always wanted to learn how to structure the story because you can’t take acting into a business setting.

I’ve noticed when I talk about acting, clients say, “Oh, I don’t want to become an actor.”

I’m not saying they have to be, but I want them to realize that a presentation or telling a story is a performance in one way, shape or another. So I wondered, ‘Could you be a certified storyteller?’

That’s when I first spoke with Reena. I was so glad to find it. And wow, Esther and Reena and the whole group. Talk about finding a treasure.

LSL: What has stood out for you from CSF? 

Chris: The structure, the IRS structure that Leadership Story Lab has put together is so unbelievable and powerful.

Learning that storytelling is not the retelling of facts, as Esther says, but it’s the strategic sequencing of emotions and facts. That was such an important thing to learn. You know, it’s not about talking about your family vacation and what you did last week. It’s a very specific structure. So that was very, very important.

I think the other thing that I found of great value was Passion DNA we did in Level 2. I found that fascinating. It’s something I use a lot with clients now because it’s very helpful to me to help them become better speakers. I want to know who you are. And that exercise we did in Level 2 was all about that.

Like Paired Introduction — that’s another amazing tool because it is so easy to learn about people. As Esther points out in the training, it’s very powerful when a third person looks at you because we’re so hard on ourselves and we downplay ourselves and we don’t see ourselves.

We don’t sound like we think we sound. We don’t come across like we think we come across sometimes. And so with the exercises Paired Introduction and Passion DNA help people understand their passions. For me and my business, it really helps me help my clients develop an understanding of the kind of speaker they’re going to be.

Paired Introductions and Passion DNA are the signature exercises that participants learn to facilitate in CSF Level 1 and 2, respectively. Paired Intro focuses on active listening and the power of asking Crazy Good Questions to help write a intriguing introduction that can be used in conferences, meetings, bios and other professional and personal introduction opportunities. Passion DNA helps people unlock their authentic voice by mining their passions — hobbies and pursuits outside of work — to describe their values using original and metaphoric words tied to their passion. Then, they weave them into a leadership narrative. 

LSL: Can you share a specific story about using one of these exercises? 

Chris: There was one individual that I worked with. She was very, very shy and quite uncertain as to whether or not she could deliver a good presentation, but she had to. It was part of her job. And she found herself to be just lacking the confidence. I would put her in the category of absolutely terrified as quite a few people are.

I went through the Passion DNA exercise with her and a discovery call using some additional questions from the Paired introduction exercise.

It was so powerful. It was very clear to me that this was an unbelievably confident business professional who quite frankly had a very strong speaking voice and had an incredible amount of confidence.

I could hear it, I could see it, and I could sense the power when she was telling me about some of her interests.

So what I often do is I will write a story  — much like we do in Paired Introduction exercises, with an intriguing beginning, the riveting middle, the satisfying end. I also use Esther’s concentric circles of Credentials, Competence, Character. Starting with character first.

The difference in this individual, when I sent her that story. Her supervisor even called me and said, “My God, what did you do?”

And I said, “I simply wrote out what I heard. She’s an incredibly powerful individual.” From that time forward, she was a different person. Just boom. But what really kicked it off was hearing someone else point out some of those things about her.

After I write their story, people often say, “Really, are you serious? Is that me?”

I say, “Yes! That’s what you told me.” It’s that proof that is so powerful.

LSL: What an incredible story of leadership transformation. Is there anything about CSF that has surprised you as you were going through it?

Chris: I think it was more challenging than I thought it was going to be. That was a surprise. Not that I thought it was going to be easy, but I was surprised by what we did because my initial feeling was, ‘Well, I’ve been involved with storytelling for years,’ But I was surprised by the exercises we did, and I found that afterwards just how powerful they are.

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If you’d like to learn how to help others discover their stories and experience transformation so that they can show up and be their best selves at work, Certified Story Facilitation may be for you. Contact us to learn more.

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