A Simple Trick For Connecting As A Leader: Heather Sundell Reed (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of storyteller and communications expert Heather Sundell Reed’s talk titled “A Simple Trick For Connecting As A Leader” at TEDxClaremontGraduateUniversity, August 9, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

HEATHER SUNDELL REED: Awesome. I want to start by telling you stories about two different friends I have. One friend is a mom. She’s currently in the throes of trying to potty train her three-year-old daughter who really does not want to. She told me that at her lowest, she was simultaneously crying, screaming, and offering up an entire bag of chocolate chips. Still nothing.

My other friend, she has this great career in advertising, works with the coolest brands, and she was just telling me about this fabulous work trip she took to Miami. She and her team were taking an art walk, and they were just seeing celebrities on the street. So cool.

You might not expect, but these two friends have a lot in common. In fact, they know each other pretty well. They’re of course, just me. We contain multitudes, right? We all have infinite stories to tell.

Leaders Are Made, Not Born

In leadership studies, there’s a common refrain: leaders are made, not born. Anyone can become a leader. Well, the same is true of storytellers. I’m a storyteller. I don’t know that I was born one necessarily, but I definitely carved out a path for myself. From being eight years old and demanding my parents get the camera, because I had something good to share, to blogging about the audacity of adulthood in my 20s. I’ve always been compelled to share everything with everyone.

So it’s probably no surprise that in 2004, I was pretty excited to join Facebook so that I could share every detail of my life on the internet, including everything I ate. I’ve even made a career out of this. People pay me to help them tell stories for themselves and for brands.

Professionally, I’ve seen working with executives and leaders, how personal storytelling can help build trust with followers, persuade ideas. And personally, as an essayist, a blogger, a live storyteller, I’ve seen firsthand just how much the smallest details can make the biggest impact on an audience.

The Problem with Traditional Leadership Development

But that’s not really what leaders are usually taught, to dig into those really rich moments that I’ve seen be so effective. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. Traditional leader development tactics have leaders looking for trigger events, these monumental moments on your timeline that altered the course of your life forever.

And there’s good reason for that. Studies continuously show that this type of transformational storytelling is pivotal for a leader’s self-development, bringing awareness and perspective, helping leaders understand why they are the way they are and why they behave the way they do.

But trigger events stand out in our minds because they’re not the norm. They don’t happen that often. They’re usually fairly high stakes, and they’re not really representative of our everyday behavior. I bet if I asked you to come up with a trigger event right now, it might feel like a lot of pressure, because it is.

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My College Essay About Hair

It kind of reminds me of when I was trying to come up with a topic for my college entrance essay. Remember those? We all do. The most effective ones I remember reading were what I would call pivotal events, pivotal moments. Teens who overcame childhood cancer, prodigies who were already changing the world.

And I remember sitting there in my seat thinking, I don’t have some big sob story that I overcame. I didn’t start a 501(c)(3) in middle school. The biggest problem I had in my life at that time was trying to figure out how to straighten my very curly, frizzy hair so that I could fit into my Orange County high school in the early 2000s. If you did not watch the show The O.C., everybody had stick straight blonde hair except me, and that was a problem.

So write what you know. I wrote my college essay about my hair. That’s it. Just the hair. In fact, I thought that essay was so good, I refused to apply to any college that wouldn’t accept the hair essay. And from what I know about the success of that essay, because I did get into college, so I know it worked.

And from what I know about, from years of storytelling experience, I’ve learned that there’s a difference when you’re using story as a tool to spark inspiration and when you’re using story to build a connection. And it’s a different approach. But like I said, the only storytelling tool that leaders really have are these trigger events. Granted, the stories that come out of them are pivotal for internal alignment, and when they’re told outwardly can be inspirational. But are they all that relatable? What’s the alternative?

The Power of Positivity Resonance

Barbara Fredrickson, who is a positive psychologist and researcher, introduced the concept of positivity resonance, which talks about experiences of positivity between people. Positivity resonance can be defined as a dynamic, momentary, fleeting connection with another individual.

And these positive micro-moments, as she calls them, have the power to build relationships and drive social cohesion over time. And they don’t need to happen with your close friends and family. It can happen with a stranger on the street, the barista who always knows your order, or Dave who always tells a bad dad joke in the middle of a meeting, but everyone laughs anyways. Those are all opportunities for positivity resonance.

So what I’m saying is, leaders, and really anyone who’s looking to better the relationships in their lives, should instead be focusing on these positive micro-moments, because that’s where impactful storytelling lives.

Movies, Plot Points, and Character Development

Think about your favorite movie. Got it? Doesn’t really matter. Okay. If trigger events are the plot points, then micro-moments are the character development. And that’s the stuff that resonates, right?

That’s what has you crying and laughing and thinking about that story long after you leave the theater.

A screenplay that’s all plot might be exciting to watch, a little intense, but I doubt that you could make an emotional connection with that story. The problem with micro-moments is, as the name implies, they’re small, they’re hard to see. So you have to do some work to find them, but that doesn’t make them any less important than those big moments that are burned into your mind.

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Finding Your Micro-Stories Through Cues

View-dependent forgetting is a theory that explains that to remember things, sometimes people just need the right cues. So your inability to recall a long-term memory isn’t because of its lack of importance to you, it’s really a lack of access to that information. Your brain just didn’t encode it correctly.

Let’s say you can’t remember someone’s name, because that happens all the time. But the minute you walk into a coffee shop where you first met, suddenly their name is on the tip of your tongue. That coffee shop was a contextual cue that helped your brain retrieve the information.

What about a sensorial cue? You know the Sex and the City theme song? Millennial women know. You know. That is an auditory cue for me. And I can think of tons of stories from living in my sorority house, because you know we wore those DVDs down.

So how do you tap into all of the micro-stories that you already have? It’s all about recognizing cues. We just got to find your Sex and the City theme song. But this is the wonderful thing about focusing on micro-moments, because they happen literally all the time. So your cues are everywhere.

They’re in your text messages with friends, emails with colleagues, the Thanksgiving dinner table, the literal cinematic films that somehow our phones now create and then serve to you once a week so you can just cry at a random time. That’s all to say, pay attention to the contextual and the sensorial cues around you, and the digital memories littered all over the internet. The last one might just be for me and the Gen Zers, but it’s okay. All I’m saying is, every part of your life is fair game.

And yes, AI may be coming for many parts of our lives, but it’s never going to replace our personal experiences and our stories. So use it as a tool. Get good at recognizing cues. Ask chat for prompts about your everyday life. Take a prompt and write to it for five minutes and see what happens. Maybe nothing. That’s fine. Maybe you’re inspired and you keep writing and you have a cool story to share.

Building an Ongoing Practice

Ultimately, what results out of an exercise like that doesn’t really matter, because it’s not about having an arsenal of neat little rehearsed stories to tell at the drop of a hat. It’s about continuously surfacing these anecdotes to the front of your mind so that when you are given the right cue, you have something meaningful to share. What I’m suggesting is an ongoing practice. It’s a shift in your mindset.

And once you get good at recognizing cues for yourself, it’s time to start cueing others. It’s not hard. I promise. All you have to do is start asking more powerful questions that start with how, why. Make eye contact. Actively listen to the answer. Use the response as another cue to share again.

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Micromoments are one of the most underappreciated drivers of human well-being. I know, that’s a big statement. But they have the power to accumulate. They literally compound over time. So whether you’re in the office or at home, you’re creating a culture of storytelling where sharing personal experiences is the norm. And that’s what builds trust. And that’s what builds relationships. And studies have shown it improves psychological well-being.

Practical Applications

I always start my work meetings by cueing my co-workers, whether we’re online or in person. “Where did you get such a sick hat, Lauren?” Lauren always has the best hats, you just kind of have to know that about her. She does.

And if you have kids, you know that asking “how was school today” is basically like driving full speed into a dead end. Because kids can’t really process the day’s events that quickly, I’ve shifted strategies to create more positivity resonance in my own home. Now I ask questions like, “Who did you play with today? What was the letter of the week? Why didn’t you eat the lunch I packed for you today?”

These more specific questions act as better cues so my kids are able to dip into those positive micro-moments of their day. And I get more colorful stories and a better window into their lives when I’m not there. But what I’m really doing is generating positive emotions between us. And that makes our relationship stronger. I get to be a better parent. And I have a lot of insight into just how much chocolate milk my son is drinking at school every day, which is quite a lot. And it was a little alarming.

The Big Secret

But this is the cool thing about micro-storytelling. I’m going to tell you the big secret. Okay, I’ll tell you the secret. Once you get good at recognizing cues, you literally cannot unsee opportunity for story and really making a positive connection with someone who matters.

Don’t discount your big life events. That’s not what I’m saying. They’re very important. They inform who you are and how you move around in this world. All I’m asking is that you pay attention to and consider all of the minor moments that thread the major events together. Because that’s the connective tissue that really bonds us. And that’s where storytelling lives.

So I’ll leave you by asking, what’s your micro-story? I guess we’ve established your micro-story is because they happen all the time. They’re in your past. They’re in your present as we speak. I guarantee if you’re looking for them, there’s another one about to happen at any given moment.

So just remember, storytellers are made, not born. Everyone can be a storyteller, even you.