I was attracted to the practice of Katie Snapp. Her focus is leadership, and she asks leaders what their leadership story is. She also holds a certification in New Life Story Coaches™ Training, which intrigues me. It’s a pleasure to bring you this Q&A with Katie, which will appear over the next five days:
Bio: Katie K. Snapp comes from a corporate business environment and 
technical production, where the daily grind was less than inspiring, until she found
the hidden secrets in transforming work into creative prospecting. After leaving the engineering world 21 years ago, she became a Leadership Performance Coach and a nationwide speaker. She thrives in interacting with groups and training teams to be more productive while having fun.
Katie’s first book Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in
Leadership has just been published and is a collection of inspiring ideas
and practical tips for women in leadership.
Katie is also the founder of Better-Leadership.com, an online resource for what she refers to as the “Everyday Leader.” This ever-growing website serves as a worldwide outreach to educate leaders in not only the basics of leadership, but how to realize fuller potential.
Q&A with Katie Snapp:
Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now?’ What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?
A: It is definitely growing, but it really has always been there to a large degree. Storytelling has been around since the beginning of time and was critical because it was the primary medium for passing along culture, history, lore, lessons learned. I believe we are simply re-labeling it and deploying it just a little differently.
Now that we have such powerful communications tools, it is still as important, but more massive that we can digest. So, we find those areas that we can relate to. We find the channels (blogs, websites, newsletters) where there are people to which we can personally relate. The stories have always been there, but now we have vast media to broadcast them.
Corporate storytelling is new on the scene though, at least in title. Take anything you might have previously labeled as “rumor” or “bad customer experience” and refine it a little. It makes a GREAT story when told with the key elements of storytelling — which include plot, people, problem, place, emotion, and hopefully the eventual solution.