Ideas in the Wild: How Dr. Dennis Rebelo Aims To Help People Tell Their Stories By Connecting the Dots in Their Lives
Each of us has a story to share, a mixture of lived experiences — planned and unplanned — that come together and give our existence shape and identity. But in a world where we rely on screens and images for communication and self-expression, the question becomes:
Do we truly know how to tell our story?
Dr. Dennis Rebelo wrote Story Like You Mean It to help us communicate with ease and connect with others by constructing a self-narrative with intention and purpose. At the intersection of academic theory and practical experience, Dr. Rebelo shares insights he has gained coaching clients on how to build and then share their life-work narratives. Students from the US Navy and CVS Health’s Executive Learning Series for Diverse Suppliers, and even NFL alumni, have used Dr. Rebelo’s Peak Storytelling model to navigate personal history, reflect on influential moments, and compellingly communicate their true value. I caught up with Dr. Rebelo to learn about his favorite idea he shares in the book and how he applies that idea in his own life.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
The book is about building your story, so the ideas are around better understanding self-event connections, which are moments and experiences that echo through the rest of our lives. I call these “blue dots.” Examples might be recovering from an injury, surviving a divorce, moving from Cambodia to Rhode Island, or being the first person in your family to go to college.
As you begin to unpack and study your blue dots, I like to use a tool I call the “Story Stamp.” It’s a circular diagram with four parts: competencies, people, place, and motivations. In life we like to use the phrase “connect the dots” but the dots that are worth connecting are the formative experiences — these blue dots. Using the Story Stamp, you can see the connections between your formative experiences in each of these four areas. What competencies allowed you to go to college, and what motivated you to do so? Same for recovering from your injury or surviving your divorce: what drove you to persevere? Where do these events tend to happen? In nature, in technology settings, on the road in a car? And who’s around you when they happen?
The Story Stamp is designed to help us break things down with precision. The more technical we can be, the more value we can unpack from our blue dot and the more we can do with it.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this lesson in your own life? What has this lesson done for you?
I work with different audiences all the time. Recently, I was teaching police officers and folks who were in prison. Those are two very different audiences, right? My job in both instances, though, was to win them over. To do that, I had to look at my own blue bots.
My dad was a police officer. My grandfather was a Lieutenant in the ACI, the Adult Correctional Institute. I was a BMX rider, but now I’m a professor wearing a bow tie. I’ve owned my own businesses and I’ve helped other people build successful businesses. These are all dots.
The question I have to answer is: which dots do I connect? Not only that, I have to make sure my dots connect in a way that is going to resonate with my intended audience. You want to feed or fashion parts of your narrative — in a way that’s authentic — so that your story still lands in a place that is well-received in the minds of the people listening to it. So, I’ve always used blue dots in my own life to get people to say, “I should listen to the guy with the bow tie.”
That’s how I use the system I describe in the book: collect blue dots, order them up, and put them into play by using the PeakStory map, which is a resource I provide for readers.
