Business of Story · Park Howell, Brand Story Strategist

#557: How to Be Heard: Turning Audience Pain into Business Impact, with Dan Manning

March 2, 2026·50 min·4 clips

As a fighter pilot, Dan Manning used stories to teach others how to survive without suffering their pain.

This episode of Business of Story features host Park Howell interviewing professional storyteller Dan Manning, a former fighter pilot and military diplomat. Manning now helps startup founders and executives use storytelling to communicate ideas and drive action, having crafted stories that secured millions in investments and sales. Manning's core philosophy is that effective communication is about "being heard," not just telling a good story, which requires deeply understanding the audience's existing thoughts and pain points. He argues every business exists because someone pays to relieve a pain, so a storyteller must connect to that pain to capture attention. Manning shares a framework he developed over three years and roughly 900 stories, visualized as a triangle split into sections representing a story's transformation. The basic structure is "things used to be like this until something changed, and then they became like that," which he calls a "micro story." He elaborates that a full story adds "challenges" the main character faces before the change and a "resolution" afterward, ending with a clear statement of "meaning." Manning illustrates this with a case study about his first client, Drew, a startup founder with ADHD and a traumatic brain injury who struggled to explain his tech hiring business. After Manning helped him craft a story for $50, Drew used it in a pitch and secured a $10,000 investment within a week, turning his story investment by 200 times. Drew's story centered on being a self-taught tech expert without a formal degree, highlighting the systemic barrier for skilled people lacking traditional credentials. A key insight is avoiding direct "you" language when telling a story to sell, as it can trigger a listener's defenses; instead, using "me" or third-person narratives allows the audience to project their own experiences onto the story. Manning emphasizes that the storyteller only does half the work, with the audience completing the rest by relating the narrative to their own world. He recommends building a "story map" of personal moments of change to have a repository of authentic material, noting that even confident salespeople often feel they lack stories to tell. The conversation is educational and conversational, blending personal anecdotes with practical methodology. Listeners interested in persuasive communication, sales, marketing, or leadership will find actionable strategies here. Those seeking entertainment or purely academic theory might find the focused, framework-driven discussion less engaging.

As heard by us

A practical storytelling lesson for anyone trying to turn audience pain into action.

Dan Manning frames the episode around a plain idea: stop trying to impress an audience and start naming the pain they already live with. The case for audience-first messaging is clear, and it lands through a simple story framework, a concrete example, and the reminder that a…

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Need your pitch to sound like it is about them, not you?

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