What a 12-Course Dinner Taught Me About Personal Brand Storytelling
Tucked into Betterton, Maryland — where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Sassafras River — is a restaurant most people would drive right past.
Eight seats. One seating a night. A 12-course tasting menu prepared by a chef named Paul Edward, right in front of you. No performance. No theater. Just food, and the stories behind it.
Where the crab was caught. Who grew the herbs. The history behind the figs on your plate.
I left that dinner thinking about personal brand storytelling — which, if you know me, is a sign that something genuinely shifted.
I Used to Think I Had No Stories
My client-turned-business-coach Krista has been nudging me toward storytelling for years. My standard response: "I'm not a storyteller. I don't have any stories."
So I stuck with what felt safe. Education, strategy, how-tos. Useful? Yes. But missing the one ingredient that actually makes people feel like they know you.
Then a few weeks ago I joined a Zoom call about using AI for backend business processes — my kind of topic. The tech stuff was fine. What actually stayed with me was an exercise the speaker walked us through: building a Word Closet.
The idea is simple. Feed the AI your voice, your quirks, your specific details — so it knows how to sound like you, not like everyone else.
So I did it.
I wrote down my favorite words and phrases. Weekend rituals. Morning Pilates that pushes my workday later. Slow lunches by the water. A sourdough starter that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. A garden that's thriving in some corners and chaos in others. Farmers market walks that spark more ideas than any strategy session.
Fun Dip and Sour Patch Kids, if you're curious.
The more I typed, the more I realized: this is what storytelling actually is. Not epic. Not emotional. Just honest and specific.
Here's What That Has to Do With Your Brand
I used to think branding was mostly about the visuals — fonts, colors, layouts. (I know. Ironic, coming from me.)
But the moments that actually build connection with my audience aren't the polished ones. They're when someone DMs me a plant meme, or tags me in a fluffy Samoyed reel with "this made me think of you." Nobody does that after reading a "5 Website Must-Haves" post, no matter how well-designed it is.
The specificity is what makes you memorable. The small, honest, slightly-ridiculous details are what make people feel like they know you — before they've ever booked a call.
That's personal brand storytelling. And it doesn't require a dramatic origin story or a pivot moment. It just requires you to stop filtering yourself out of your content.
The Business Card Moment
Here's how the Sassafras dinner ended.
The woman sitting next to me — a stranger two hours earlier — turned at the end of the meal and asked for my business card.
I didn't have one.
We laughed. Exchanged numbers. I promised to send her my website. And I made a quiet promise to myself on the drive home: fix this.
The next morning I was in Canva. Cards designed by noon. Tiny win.
But it also reminded me of something bigger: your brand needs to be ready for the moments you don't see coming. The dinner party. The networking event. The stranger who wants to know more.
When your visuals, your website, and your presence all reflect who you actually are — those moments convert. When they don't, you're just exchanging numbers and hoping for the best.
If you're ready to bring more of you into your brand — not just the service list, but the actual you — that's exactly what The Styled Brand is built for.
