Your voice may be your superpower, but how you wield it turns casual listeners into devoted fans. That happens when you reveal character by exercising storytelling skills or drive them away. There’s not much middle ground. One key to becoming more endearing lies in The Novelty Penalty. The idea is simple: People gravitate toward familiarity over the unknown, especially when forming first impressions. Personal Stories can make listeners love you if they connect, but you have to craft them to be relatable, not self-absorbed or internal.

The Thin Line: How Personal Stories Can Make Listeners Love You

Shifting from “what I did” to “what happened” bridges the gap between your world and your listeners’, making them feel seen, heard, and emotionally tied to you. Just as telling your friends a story about what happened on vacation is more interesting than showing photos, an external focus is a key to telling compelling personal stories. But knowing how much to share and how personal to get is hard. The Novelty Gap helps with that. Humans only respond positively to new content when framed in a familiar setting. The same principle is explained when understanding what makes a hit.

Your unique experiences, perspective, and observations are key, but they must be rooted in familiarity, or you risk rejection and tune out. The more familiar (liked) you are, the more your audience will tolerate, expect, and enjoy hearing about you. And vice-versa. Less familiar personalities come with greater risk, which can be mitigated in preparation, particularly if you apply this advice in the Master The Setup seminar. The seminar is loaded with examples of how to start a story with a compelling external hook.

As you plan personal stories, here’s a model to stay on the “good” side of being relatable.

External Perspective

If you launch into a tale about “my luxurious trip to Bali” or “when I scored VIP passes to a Formula 1 race,” you will probably trigger the Novelty Penalty. These personal Stories can make listeners love you only if they share your passion for the things you are talking about. But listeners tune out when your experience feels disconnected from their reality, like showing vacation photos to a stranger. They don’t care, and they might even feel alienated by it.

The fix? Flip the script. Instead of focusing on the event (which may lack relevance), zoom in on the experience—the universal emotions or relatable situations. Use the facts of the trip as props for the emotional story you are telling that is relatable and familiar.

Familiarity breeds likability, and likability is currency. When you tell stories from an external perspective—highlighting what happened around you rather than just what you did—you pull listeners in to connect the dots.

From Relevance to Relatability

Relevance is about shared interests, but relatability is about shared feelings. Your audience might not care about Bali or Formula 1, but they’ve all felt embarrassment, joy, or frustration. Anchoring your story in one of those emotions sidesteps the novelty penalty and builds a bridge. Let’s break this down with an example:

Original (Novelty Trap): “I went to Bali last month, and the beaches were amazing—I swam every day and ate the best seafood.”

Problem: Most listeners haven’t been to Bali, don’t swim daily, and can’t afford fancy seafood. It’s a brag, not a bond. They don’t care and may even resent you for it.

Reworked (Relatable Hook): “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you on vacation? Dying, of course. The second worst? Nearly dying. I misjudged the tide—and within seconds, I was flailing in the water, my sunglasses were gone, and a local kid was laughing his head off trying to fish me out. Not my finest moment in Bali”

The Payoff: Use the story to turn the embarrassment into a reward for the disastrous day, such as treating yourself to an expensive dinner, like comfort food to make it all better. This is also relatable!

Why It Works: The focus shifts from “I went to Bali” to “I made a fool of myself.” Listeners relate to messing up, losing stuff, and that awkward moment when a stranger sees it all. Plus, it creates an information gap: What happened next? How did he get out of that?

How to Apply It

To make this storytelling shift second nature, here’s a playbook:

Prep Starts with the Punchline, Not the Postcard: Open with the relatable moment—“There’s nothing worse than seeing an idiot turn a fancy dinner into a crime scene with one clumsy move”—then fill in details as needed.

Use the Information Gap: Don’t spill the whole story upfront. Start a hook that inspires curiosity—“Life advice: Never celebrate a big moment because there’s a bird coming that can ruin even the best day.”—Curiosity pulls listeners along.

Amplify the Emotion: Lean into feelings, not facts—laugh at yourself, exaggerate the dread, or savor the absurdity. “Your life has sunk to a new low when you find yourself soaked, broke, and depending on a 10-year-old as a lifeguard—send help!”

Tie It to Them: End with a nod to the audience—“Yesterday was one of those days where the universe just says ‘nope’? That’s happened to you, right?” It’s an invitation to connect.

Practice the External Lens: Before sharing, ask, “What happened around me that anyone could feel?” Strip away the “look at me” and find the emotional connection in human messiness.

The Endgame: Listeners Who Feel Like Friends

By dodging the Novelty Penalty, listeners will get to know you better. That’s a giant step toward how personal stories can make listeners love you. Be the personality who gets it, who’s been there, who makes them laugh at life’s absurdity. That’s the magic of relatability over relevance. You don’t need to live their exact lives. You just need to feel their feelings.

Find the spill, the stumble, the laugh. Your audience will lean in, not tune out and they’ll begin to love you more.

Pic from Freepik.com.

Tracy Johnson is a talent coach and programming consultant. He’s the President/CEO of Tracy Johnson Media Group. His book Morning Radio has been described as The Bible of Personality Radio and has been used by personalities worldwide.