Is Anything Real?

Your story is not what happened to you. It is the meaning you pull from the mess.

In this episode of Is Anything Real?, Adam W. Barney sits down with Kyle Gray, founder of The Story Engine, for a podswap conversation about storytelling, trust, expertise, and why smart people often struggle to explain what they do without turning their life into a documentary nobody asked to watch uncut.

Kyle helps experienced experts, coaches, consultants, and speakers turn complex knowledge into clear, sales-driving stories for webinars, stages, conversations, and offers that actually move people.

This conversation explores why “what happened” is not automatically a story, why the polished version is often not the most powerful version, and how experts can use story as a bridge between their experience and the audience’s recognition.

Adam and Kyle get into:
  • why smart experts struggle to tell simple stories
  • why having “too much experience” can confuse your message
  • how stories serve different purposes in talks, webinars, sales, and coaching
  • why the body sometimes remembers the real story before the brain does
  • how client language can help experts find better stories
  • what happens when someone hears their own story from the outside
  • why nonlinear stories often reveal more truth than polished success stories
  • how stories can help overcome objections before they happen
  • why your audience does not need more information — they need a shift in perspective
  • The Story Signal Reset: four questions to make your story clearer
The big takeaway: Your story is not the archive. It is the bridge.

And in a world drowning in content, AI summaries, pitch decks, and personal brands performing expertise, story may be one of the last trust engines we still know how to feel.

Guest: Kyle Gray
Founder, The Story Engine
Storytelling strategist for experts, coaches, consultants, speakers, and founders
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylethegray/
The Story Engine: https://www.thestoryengine.co/
Email: kyle@thestoryengine.co

Host: Adam W. Barney
Transition Leadership Coach
Author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full
Creator of EnergyOS
Book your 20-minute Exploration Call:
https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min

Creators and Guests

Host
Adam W. Barney
Adam W. Barney helps transitioning leaders navigate career and leadership inflection points with clarity and momentum. Author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full and creator of EnergyOS. Based in Boston, fueled by family and music.

What is Is Anything Real??

Is Anything Real? is the Reality-First Leadership podcast for builder-leaders who want outcomes, not optics. Each week, Adam W. Barney sits down with founders and operators to unpack positioning, marketing, community, energy management, and influence - plus the numbers behind what actually worked.

You’ll hear: a quick Reality Check, a practical Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one EnergyOS habit you can run this week. Specifics over slogans; humane systems over hustle cosplay.

New episodes every Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET.

👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min

Here's a myth

that keeps a lot of brilliant people

confusing their audience into silence.

Your story is what happened to you.

That's a clean assumption, but it's the wrong edit

because what happened is not automatically a story.

It's a pile of events, a resume in a costume,

or a documentary nobody asked to watch uncut.

The real story is the meaning you pull from the mess.

It's the moment someone hears you and thinks, "Oh, that's me,"

or "That's what I'm afraid of,"

or "That's the thing I haven't been able to name."

And of course, in a world drowning in content,

AI summaries, sales webinars, pitch decks,

and personal brands wearing matching linen sets on LinkedIn,

story may actually be the last trust engine

we still know how to feel.

Welcome back to Is Anything Real,

the reality-first leadership show

where we test advice,

publish the receipts,

and ship what actually works under pressure.

I'm Adam W. Barney,

transition leadership coach,

author of "Make Your Own Glass Half Full",

and builder of EnergyOS,

where I help leaders rebuild their operating system

when the tools that got them here stop working.

Today's guest is Kyle Gray,

founder of the Story Engine.

Kyle helps experienced experts,

coaches, consultants, and speakers

turn complex knowledge

into clear, sales-driving stories

for webinars, stages, and conversations

that actually move people.

And this one is a podswap in the truest sense.

I'm joining Kyle's show

where he's going to take my very nonlinear story:

corporate marketing,

$100 million plus in paid ad spend,

layoffs, ALS, Canavan disease,

my book, daughters, coaching

and all the chaos there

and distill it into

a three- to five-minute narrative.

Then Kyle is here today so we can ask the deeper question:

What makes a real story?

Kyle, welcome to Is Anything Real?

Adam, thank you so much.

There was such a unique essence of like a almost like an iHeartRadio

or like a non-live recorded podcast to your introduction.

I feel like I'm on a professional like NPR radio show,

so that's like a unique experience,

and I have to give you a hat tip to you.

Thank you.

For, yeah, the opening there.

Well, and I knew this would be fun Kyle,

when you described your process as basically

helping experts experience their own story

from outside themselves

and that's either

storytelling, maybe it's part therapy,

or it's actually legal witchcraft.

It could be all three at once,

but let's\start there.

Why do smart smart experts struggle so badly

to tell simple stories?

Well, I think you actually, in your brilliant introduction,

illustrated one of the biggest problems is,

you had a laundry list of:

I was in marketing.

I have these things.

I have kids.

Ups and downs.

There's so many things in my life.

And I get this very, very often.

And a lot of people there, first of all,

there's a lot of things to choose from,

and there's a lot of emotions

around a lot of things to choose from.

And those emotions we assigned to those things many years ago,

and they have mostly stayed the same.

Right.

And so when it comes to like

searching our own mind for things,

it's like there's so many like

this story is 92% good,

this story is 95% good,

this one's 97% good,

and it's like they all feel so important.

And so, I either have to, like, talk for so long

and just like share what I feel is important,

and sometimes it feels good for me.

But that usually means I go 20 minutes

over the amount of time that I was trying to talk,

and people will often,

in the middle of me telling a story,

say that they need to go to the bathroom

and not come back.

But I thought I was giving my best stuff away.

I felt great when I was talking, but they, yeah,

people end up having to pee for some reason.

We're humans.

Yeah, or so that's one one extreme of it,

and then the other extreme of this problem is like

I don't have any stories to tell.

I'm a really boring person.

And either way, the expression is actually,

I don't know how to tell stories

or I don't know what stories are available to tell.

And when we learn that there are different stories

that serve different purposes,

then when we can start to practice

in those frameworks,

it allows us to make decisions about things that

we've never really had a lens or a process

to make decisions about these before.

Because all stories are just stories,

and a story,

I don't even know what it's for.

It's like something funny to tell to entertain my friends,

or like where we know stories are important,

but we just kind of had this

natural understanding of their existence

and they impact us,

but we don't really,

we just know that they do without knowing how.

And so, by simply creating frameworks and structures

that allow us to start understanding the purpose of things,

first of all,

it allows us to take a new lens to our own life

and find stories and moments

that we might have previously found or labeled as

not a good story,

or a story that proves that I am not a valuable person,

or definitely not a story that I would want to share from stage.

I've had a lot of those before in my in my own life.

But when we can start to see, like,

oh, there's formulas and frameworks

for using this story to reach ideal clients

who aren't feeling seen, who need this,

then some of these moments we might actually

become excited to share things.

We might actually find that moments that

for a long time we thought were things we weren't proud of,

we can actually be proud of those things.

And so simple frameworks allow us to access our past

and also start to listen to people.

When you start to understand

different frameworks of stories.

Instead of constantly, like,

standing in front of somebody and being like,

what should I tell them next

to prove to them that I'm an expert?

Where's the personality, right?

Yeah, we start listening.

Like, what is this person's problems?

What are they saying?

Like, who do I know that's just

like them that I could tell them about?

What limiting beliefs are they bringing to me right now

that I could actually be of service to this person?

Well, and I've heard you say something

that I really love.

And it's when you ask someone directly,

"What story do you want to tell?"

But the brain often doesn't give you the best story.

It gives you polished, obvious, maybe overused ones.

But I love how your process, Kyle, goes a different way.

You ask about clients, you get them into the feeling,

and you ask when they felt something similar.

And that's fascinating because it gets people

out of performance and into recognition.

And that changes everything.

You know, does the body sometimes remember the real story?

Or why does the body sometimes remember the real story

before the brain does?

That's a great question, and yeah,

you're pointing out there's

two different kind of unique processes

happening at the same time,

and the first is experiential.

I like to ask people where they're

went through experiencing of words.

I like to ask people, like,

what's your ideal client's problems?

Okay, so then they'll tell us their problems

and they usually have good answers,

and then I'll ask a level deeper.

What would somebody with those problems say

over at a coffee table with their friend?

They don't know you, and they're not smart like you.

They don't know what Facebook ads are.

So how would they express their problem?

Or they don't know what peptides are, whatever.

And then we go a little bit further.

Like, what would somebody at three in the morning?

They're calling you.

They're in a panic.

They're admitting things they've never admitted to anybody else.

What are they saying about this problem

and not just the problem that you're solving,

but like the implications of what it all happens in their business.

And we get into it, and that's usually some intense stuff, right?

And so, if we, like, engage in this,

there's an energetics

and there's a physicality to these words.

And if we actually start to read them out loud,

we feel them in our bodies.

And so, I'll read them out loud,

or I'll read it out loud with my client,

or help them do it.

And I'll ask them, where in your body do you feel this?

And then you can say,

when else in my life have I felt like this?

Because the brain, I don't know if you've ever experienced this

but this is really easy to experience in a smell,

like if you experience a scented candle

that you haven't smelled since, you know,

your mom had this scented candle,

and it like awakens memories

that's the same thing,

emotions do that same thing;

they're just like a smell.

And we can't search our brain.

Like, we can't search our mind for stories and, like

just have a complete universal,

we remember everything perfectly.

It's unfortunate, but we can't.

And additionally, like, how we search our brain.

Usually, when somebody like wants to write a talk,

even if they don't admit they're searching this way,

they're searching,

what story do I tell

to make myself look like an authority?

And Google is not going to search for the thing

that comes up when we are having this feeling,

talking about this dark 3 a.m. moment.

But, like, usually the person's first response is,

well, I definitely don't want to tell

this story that's just come up.

But it gives us an opportunity to work within it.

Well, and love how you've also said that

in your process around, say, the 30-minute mark,

you actually take everything you've heard

and tell the person their own story back to them,

as if you are them,

and that's a wild mirror.

And I know the goal, obviously, Kyle,

is not just for it to sound accurate,

it's for them to feel what their audience should feel.

What do you think happens when

an expert hears their story from the outside?

Absolutely.

Well, again, one element that we went through,

we like talked about it being experiential.

And I think that's really important for

entrepreneurs and founders and leaders

who are super duper busy.

Their minds are super duper taxed.

They're distracted.

They have to run a growing business,

and now they also have to be

a part-time AI genius just to stay relevant.

So, like, that takes a lot of time.

Then it's difficult to, like, fill in more intellectual things.

And really, like, they come to me

because they're overtaxed intellectually.

So, moving through this experiential

and havingc something that you can feel

allows these ideas to hit you differently

and, like, infuse differently.

If I gave you the perfect script,

somebody wouldn't read it.

But if you can feel it, and know it,

and experience it, and smell it,

like, we kind of described before,

then you can remember it more quickly.

So that's the gift of reading their story back, is

it's such a burden being yourself,

and you have so many judgments of yourself,

and you have so many editing,

and there's so many like voices shaking all of the time

and being able to relieve somebody

of their own perspectives on their story

and just drive through that,

allows somebody to be seen in a way

that they've never experienced before.

And so this is a really powerful process,

and it's kind of a dangerous process for me as a podcast host.

I want to show them this, and it's a great blessing,

and it feels really good.

But I also, like, want this to be

like, this is the, like, you can do this too.

You can't do this yet, but the idea of this show is to show you

that there's a repeatable process and a formula

that you can practice to create these kind of things,

and that's what I want to show people is like,

the people that work with me,

they're able to do this with their own stories

at any moment, at any time

and that's the promise and the offer

that I give for people.

And it's not just about telling a story to open up a talk;

it's about telling a story about your clients

that you've worked with before

to overcome your audience's biggest objections

before they happen.

About your clients being successful

in ways that you couldn't have imagined before

and, like, allowing the audience

to see their possibilities.

There's a great deal that goes into this,

but I think one of the biggest shifts is really, like,

infusing everything in your talk

from trying not to be,

how do I prove myself as an authority

to really, how do I serve this person

and all of the frameworks

really help make that shift.

And even we've seen it in, like,

we find the client's language

and then move into our own body

to find the right story.

But it's in service to them,

and when we reorient all of our talk

around that same idea,

magic results happen.

Well, and that weaves, I think,

into this idea of nonlinearity, right?

It's one of my favorite things in the world.

But you know, a great story doesn't need,

it doesn't need to include everything.

It just needs enough for the truth to land,

and for people to feel it, right?

You know my story, you know,

20 years in corporate marketing,

global agencies, VC-backed startups,

Fortune 500 clients,

$100 million plus in ad spend,

leaving corporate in 2021,

losing my mom to bullbar onset ALS,

getting involved in ALS research.

Close friends' child diagnosed with Canavan, you know,

my father's hydrocephalus,

building a coaching practice.

I could go on and on and on,

and that's not a

neat three-act structure from the inside.

It's a junk drawer with meaning inside of it, right?

And I love how that process helps to find that throughline

when life and business is nonlinear.

What do nonlinear stories reveal

that polished success stories hide?

I'll express that through nonlinear stories

or learning how to interface with your stories.

Like you said, there are so many things,

and so many important things.

And again, like we've assigned a lot of labels to those stories,

and those end up impacting us more than just

when we speak,

or what we stories we decide to tell,

but those labels have a consistent impact.

And I will tell you about one of my clients,

JR,

and the impact of, like,

these kind of stories can have.

He was going through my mastermind last year

and I can remember at our first retreat

he did an opening story

like the one we're about to create.

And he talks about coming home

and kneeling in front of his daughter

in a really tense moment.

He had just gotten in a fight with his wife about traveling,

being away so much for work,

working too hard,

having no availability for them.

And he goes, and he kneels in front of his daughter,

and he says,

"Livy, are you afraid of me?"

And she says, "Yes,

especially when you and mommy fight."

And he's like kneeling down

in front of a group of us,

telling us this story in this moment,

and we can, like, feel a pin drop in the room,

and this was like, he begins telling this story.

He's running a high-end biohacking clinic in Miami.

But his family lives in Minnesota,

so at this time

he's actually traveling three weeks out of out the month

to be in Miami and grow this biohacking clinic,

and he starts sharing this story.

He's moving some doctors to tears,

and they're coming to him,

and things are working.

But at the same time, it becomes increasingly obvious

that him working in this clinic is

living the same problem

that he was in the story, because he's overworking himself,

he's causing the same family problems,

and there's a great cognitive dissonance

that happens when you're telling a story about this

and then you're living it still.

And so, JR's life began to change.

Instead of, like, working double full-time at this clinic,

he started finding ways to being, like,

well, maybe I can work for the nonprofits here,

or maybe I can do this too.

I don't know if I'm going to fit here.

Maybe I can become a fractional, you know,

for several other companies.

And over the course of six months,

had to make a really difficult transition away from overperforming,

like he had been doing for many years and providing.

And I remember him telling me, like, not six months after this,

that he had three fractional things after leaving the clinic, you know,

three months later,

was making more than he was in the clinic,

but he was able to stay home

and coach his kids' hockey,

and gave the same talk and the same thing

that we had developed with the story

and made like $130,000 for one of his companies.

Wow.

And so, the point of that is that, like,

learning and practicing and engaging in these stories,

like, is crafting your identity and your vision

and putting it into effect in ways,

and it will allow you to be in more alignment with your life.

That's a great example of how, Kyle, I would say,

clean stories impress,

but those honest stories truly deeply connect.

Kyle, at this point, you know,

I kind of want to move this into a move

that listeners could run this week,

and I want to call it

The Story Signal Reset.

And I view this, Kyle, as something for anyone

trying to explain what they do,

sell what they do,

or stop turning their expertise into a virtual fog machine.

And it's four just simple questions to start with.

I would ask first:

what does my audience feel before they need me?

The second is:

when have I felt something similar?

The third is:

what changed because of that experience?

Then the last one is:

what's the one sentence I want the listener

to believe after hearing it?

But Kyle,

I know that's a pretty maybe simplified way to look at it,

but what would you add to that to help, you know,

that story move from a performance to become a bridge?

I actually love that.

I think that's really, like, I'm impressed,

and I like the simplicity of that

and really endorse that.

The big thing that I would say,

there's a couple of different uses of stories.

So, like a story at the beginning,

like the one we're going to create on our podcast,

it's like what you were saying,

it's what is my client feeling?

And that leads me.

When I figure out what I want to teach somebody,

I ask myself,

what are the limiting beliefs that are

keeping my client from getting the result that I want?

And then I build my teaching around that.

Instead of whatever is the cool thing that I'm doing right now,

or you know, yeah, yeah.

And so we're always just,

if you can just always be taking it back

to it's even simpler, of like,

what does my client really need right now?

And your client does not need to know more.

They need a change in perspective.

And so I think really good coaching and really good, like, speaking

and selling from the stage is actually good coaching.

A great speaker will be able to know your objections

like a chess player, four moves ahead,

and through the stories,

that he's telling or they are telling

and how they're teaching,

they will open up new possibilities.

Most speakers just teach how to do something,

and they overwhelm people

and leave you feeling the exact opposite experience.

That's great.

That's a great point.

Well, you know, Kyle, you know how we end here:

after all of this,

and especially that myth that your story

is simply what happened.

I have to ask, is anything real?

No, it's all a story.

It is entirely, like, your choice.

I wish I, like, believed it more.

I wish I could, like, fully lean into it,

but it's so clear that this is just my brain,

and the story that I am telling.

That's great.

I mean, what feels real to me here is that recognition, right?

The moment when someone hears a story,

and their body knows

before their brain finishes the sentence,

that's me.

That's the signal.

I see that as what's real, but Kyle,

where can folks find you,

The Story Engine,

and your broader work?

Yeah,

thestoryengine.co

You can also check out The Story Engine Podcast,

which we'll be having you on in just a few minutes after this.

I'm interviewing experts and leaders

from all kinds of walks of life

and helping them create powerful stage-ready stories

every single week on the podcast.

So I highly recommend checking that out.

And if you are interested in building a talk

and making more money with your business with stories,

please reach out whether to be a guest or a client.

There's lots of ways that I work with people

to help them make a ton more money.

Other than that, yeah, I have a few books.

The biggest one is called The Story Engine,

and that's how people can read it.

Anyway, that's what I've got for today.

And we'll, of course, link to those in the show notes below.

You know, but for the listener, I would recommend, you know,

stop making your story carry every fact from your life.

Your story is not the archive.

It's actually the bridge.

It's not a resume.

Well, it's about asking what your audience feels, right?

You know, find the moment in your journey where you felt it too.

Extract that meaning.

Maybe it's say less even, and just land more.

And if this hits, send it to the expert in your life

who explains beautifully for 12 minutes

and somehow makes everyone less sure

what they're actually doing.

You know, we have to help them find this thread.

And if you're navigating a leadership transition,

there's also a 20-minute foundation call with me

linked in the show notes below.

But Kyle, thank you for the story mirror

and the reminder that simple is not necessarily small,

and it's your responsibility.

Even though you're smart

and you're really good at what you do,

if you're not able to communicate

to the people who need you,

then you're not actually as competent in your skills

as you need to be.

And it's up to you because I believe right now,

more than ever,

that we really do need experts like you,

listener, doing your best

and making your most impact.

And it's your ability

to communicate that vision and that impact

and enroll people.

We need people at their very best right now

to usher in this new future

that I think is going to be prosperous and abundant.

But that means you need to be telling your story

and selling more of your products and services.

There are people that need you out there,

so go get them.

That's beautiful.

Well, until next time, stay grounded,

stay human,

and keep questioning the noise.