What makes your heart sing? Purpose-led brand storytelling that actually lands
- Story Of Me
- Dec 14, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 8
For years, when people asked what I do, I had a neat answer: “I’m a brand strategist. I help purpose-led founders sort out their messaging.” Technically true. Completely dead. It sounded like a job description, not a heartbeat.
Then I met a better question, the one Steve Jobs used when Apple was still scrappy and unsure: “What makes my heart sing?” Not “What do I do?” or “What’s my niche?” – what makes my heart sing.
For Jobs, it was never “I make computers”. It was “I build tools that help people unleash their creativity”. Same work. Completely different story.
When I sat with that question for myself, my answer surprised me.
It is not “branding”.
It is that moment when someone finally sees the pattern in their own story – when the pieces click, the fog lifts, and they can suddenly put words to why they are here and where they are going. Helping people unlock the clarity that connects their purpose to their mission, and then watching that alignment ripple out into impact, is what makes my heart sing.
The laptop, the frameworks, the workshops are just tools.
The click is the point.
That is Story Of Me in one line: clarity you can feel, not just a tidy sentence. That is also the core of purpose-led brand storytelling – stories that sound like you and move the people you are here to serve.
Your job is not your story
Most founders answer from the wrong part of themselves.
Ask, “What do you do?” and you hear: “We run a climate-tech platform.” “We’re a leadership development consultancy.” “We’re a community for underrepresented founders.”
Important, yes.
But none of those are stories.
Carmine Gallo calls storytelling “the storyteller’s secret” – the thing that turns vision and strategy into something people can feel, remember and repeat. Across the leaders he studies, the most powerful purpose-led brand storytelling follows the same simple structure: a person we can relate to, a struggle we recognise, and a resolution that shifts how we see the world.
“Climate-tech platform” is not a person. “Trying to help renters stay warm in winter without choosing between heating and food” is.
“Leadership consultancy” is not a struggle. “Standing in front of a team who have stopped listening to you, knowing something has to change” is.
Your brand story starts where the job title stops.
It starts where it hurt, where it cost you something, where you realised you could not not do this work.
The gift of your past in purpose-led brand storytelling
One of Gallo’s big points is that great storytellers do not hide the hard bits; they put struggle in the centre of the story. The layoff. The failed launch. The client you could not save. The time you almost walked away.
He calls it the “gift of your past” – the tough experiences that give your current mission emotional credibility.
That is gold for purpose-led founders working on progress for people and planet.
Because your audience is not only buying outcomes.
They are buying belief.
They want to know why this matters to you enough to keep going when it is hard.
In Story Of Me sessions, there is usually a hinge moment where a founder stops talking like a brochure and starts talking like a human: “I burned out trying to hold everyone else together.” “I was tired of seeing good work buried under jargon and politics.” “I realised the system was never going to fix this on its own.”
That is when the room leans in.
Not because the funnel changed.
Because the story did.
Purpose-driven brands that tell stories this honestly do not just get clicks.
They get chosen.
A simple Story Of Me exercise to find your story
If you are bored of your own About page, that is not a design problem.
It is a clarity problem.
Try this three-step Story Of Me exercise, inspired by The Storyteller’s Secret and tuned for brand clarity and purpose-led brand storytelling.
Write the job-answer – then cross it out.
Answer “What do you do?” in one sentence. Then literally cross it out. Underneath, write: “What makes my heart sing in this work is…” and finish the line. Keep going until it feels slightly too honest.
Name the struggle you usually skip.
What is the hardest part of your own story that shaped the work you do now – a failure, a loss, a moment of doubt? That is the middle of your story, the bit people relate to and remember, and the emotional engine of your purpose-led brand storytelling.
Give it a beginning, middle and end.
Describe life before, the struggle, and what changed – in clear, everyday language. No jargon. No drama needed. Just truth with edges. This becomes the narrative spine your brand clarity and content can build on.
You now have something more powerful than any neat positioning line:
A story someone else can retell when you are not in the room.
Ideas catch on when they are wrapped in a story that fits someone’s hopes, fears or identity, not just when they are logically sound.
Why this matters for impact, not just impressions
You are working on progress that matters – climate, equity, wellbeing, systems that make life better.
Those missions deserve more than vague language and generic decks.
They deserve stories rooted in what makes your heart sing – and what broke your heart on the way there.
That is the work of Story Of Me: helping founders and teams see the pattern in their own past, turn it into a clear, simple story, and weave that into strategy, content and campaigns that move people to act.
When you tell the truth about why you are here, with structure and courage, you give your work a chance to travel further – in search results and in people’s hearts. People-first, experience-rich content like this is exactly what search engines are pushing towards: lived expertise, genuine purpose and stories that are actually helpful.
And you give the rest of us something worth believing in.
If your last brand workshop felt more like theatre than truth, you might like this too – a deeper look at why most “brand workshops” don’t work and what real brand clarity looks like in practice.
