Most people can tell you where they grew up. Fewer can tell you the stories that came with it.
And it isn’t the official versions which usually come in the history lessons, dates, and facts.
It’s ones that emerge from just under the surface and have shaped how you see the world.
It could be the road you walked every day as a child on the way to school.
The place people avoided, like that dark part of the woods, but never fully explained why.
The landmark everyone “knew something about,” even if no one could quite agree on the details.
Those stories travel with us through time and place.
I dug into this in a recent conversation with Jon the Storyteller, where we explored how stories emerge from the landscapes people live in as a way of dealing with uncertainty.
A deep pool feels dangerous, so something is said to live in it. (Maybe a Dragon!) Or a boundary feels unsafe, so it’s given a name and a warning. The story is functional and helps people navigate what they don’t fully understand.
Over time, the details change. A knight becomes a farmhand or a legend becomes local and so the story adapts to the people telling it. But what doesn’t change is the role it plays.
And that same process is alive and well inside organisations. Every culture is layered with stories that no one sat down to write.
They surface in conversations, get repeated in passing, and over time harden into something that feels like facts. But the good news is they’re not fixed. They’re inherited, reinforced, and, crucially, editable.
That’s where this becomes useful to Leadership. If stories are shaping how people interpret their environment, then changing behaviour in a long term and beneficial way isn’t just about new strategies or clearer communication, but also identifying the narrative people are already operating inside.
Most people don’t resist the change itself. They resist what they believe that change will mean, for them, for their role, for their future.
And that belief is always rooted in a story. So, shift the story, and you change the way the situation is understood. Change the understanding, and behaviour follows.
This is happening all the time.
Which raises a more useful question than “How do we communicate change?”
What’s the story people are already telling themselves about what’s happening here?
The next episode of Stories In Our DNA explores that idea through folklore, landscape, and the stories tied to where we live, and how those patterns still shape us now.
You can listen here:
https://podfollow.com/words-that-change-lives
And I’m curious, what’s a story from where you grew up that still shows up in how you think or lead today?
Need help telling a story?
The stories that matter most are often the hardest to say.
If you’ve got something you can’t quite get out, I hold a private space called The Story Room where we untangle it together and shape it into something clear and usable.
https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/Y7AMM3WAX8HTE
Any questions? Shoot me a DM or email Story Room to hello@helenpackham.com
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