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Give us the soul in your data.

Whether you’re selling your work, interviewing for a new position, or running for an office in your professional organization, you need a good story to tell.

The temptation is to offer a lot of information, numbers, maybe a few charts and graphs. You naturally want to back up what you’re saying and drive home the value you offer.

Here’s another way to look at it. Brené Brown famously said, “Stories are data with a soul.”

As a serious academic researcher, she produced a lot of data. Her speaking and writing career took off like a rocket when Brown got clear that she was also a storyteller.

It’s not the data that inspires her audiences; it’s the stories about that data and what it can mean for us.

So how do you tell the story of your business? Your practice? Your product? How do you tell your story?

My first answer is: briefly.

Seriously, most people’s stories go in one ear and out the other because they’re too long, with too much extraneous detail.

They tell us things we don’t need to know, explaining things we already understand. And then just when we think it’s mercifully over, the storyteller says, “In other words …” and starts telling us the same thing all over again. Oy.

I’d get agreement on this from storytelling experts going all the way back to Shakespeare. “Brevity,” his Polonius said in Hamlet, “is the soul of wit.”

On the other hand, really masterful storytellers can get our attention and keep it through their tale’s twists and turns; we get so caught up in what they’re saying we lose track of the time. We want to know more. We’re sorry when the story ends.

So how can we be more like those storytellers? There’s a lot to becoming truly masterful, of course. But here’s one thing that will help whether you’re writing or speaking.

Your story needs structure.

I sometimes suggest a simple three-part structure for clients who need to craft a message quickly. Situation-Action-Outcome works well. Or, as they say in Twelve Step meetings: What it was like; what happened; what it’s like now.

You can fit a story into that framework, even when you’re speaking on the fly, to keep you and your listeners on track.

And if that sounds simplistic to you? Start paying attention to the stories people tell you; you’ll notice how few of them have any structure at all. People ramble and blather and bore you to tears. Even a little bit of organization will make your stories more interesting.

To take it to the next level, try this. Replace “and then” with “but.”

Howard Suber teaches storytelling and structure at UCLA’s film school. He says amateur storytellers string their material together with “and” or “then.” Like this …

I went to a Chamber meeting and I talked to some friends and met a few new people. Then Sue came in and joined the conversation, and she was wearing a leather skirt and it looked nice and I told her … well, you get the point.

A better bet is to go with “but” when you put a story together; it takes your listener/reader on a much more interesting journey.

At Women in Business, I was talking with some friends: the usual “How’s biz” chatter. But then Sue came in wearing a leather skirt. I introduced her, of course. But when I pointed out her “Sexy Dentist” costume that’s when the conversation took off.

It’s the same set of facts. It makes a better story, though, because it has a twist in it. Who expects a dentist to be sexy, after all? (Apologies if you are a dentist or you’re married to one. But you have to admit there’s an image issue there.)

You might play with the way you describe your business. Or how you talk about your clients and their challenges. Or the solution you offer. Tell us a story that has a “but” in it somewhere: it changes direction, it takes us down a surprising path, it grabs our interest and keeps it.

Our interest is your opportunity to create a business relationship.

If you fail to capture our attention, you can hand out business cards, make follow-up phone calls, connect on LinkedIn … odds are it’s going nowhere.

Maybe you gave us data about what you do, but we didn’t hear the soul that might have come through in a story about your work and the results you get.

When you share a story, you can inspire emotion and that’s what moves your audience to hire you, buy from you, vote for you—to take some action.

You can share your story on the blog. Extra points if there’s a “but” somewhere in that story. A leather skirt is optional. Please share in a comment below.