A rain delay at a charity golf outing becomes the moment John realises connection happens below the conscious level, before anyone decides to listen.
After twelve years and over a thousand sessions, he understood the tools were only fifteen percent of the work.
Storytelling builds trust not through persuasion but through relatability, when people recognise their own struggle in yours, they open up.
The best sessions he has run are the ones where the team didn't feel him there, self-discovery is the gift, and it only comes when he stops talking.
His practice is evolving: fewer session days, more mentoring and coaching, but the same principle underneath it all.
We were at a charity golf outing, rain delay, lunch inside with a few colleagues, the kind of unscheduled downtime that fills itself with conversation. I had been working on a new story, and one of the people at the table called me on it. Said: “well, you've been talking about this new story. Why don't you share it?”
So I did.
About two minutes in, I noticed something in my peripheral vision. Four women at the round table across from us, people I had never met, people who were not part of our conversation and had no reason to pay attention to ours, were putting their silverware down.
They weren't doing it consciously nor deciding to listen. They just were.
I have been an EOS® Implementer for twelve years and have sat in over a thousand sessions. I have watched teams work through hard conversations, avoid hard conversations, and occasionally have the breakthrough that makes the whole room feel different. I thought I understood connection. What I saw at that lunch table told me I had only scratched the surface of it.
What I realized in that moment was that connection is not a technique.
It is not a tactic you layer on top of a business development conversation, it is something that happens below the waterline, as my mentor Scott Mann puts it. Below the conscious level. When it works, people are not deciding to be available to you, they simply are.
And when someone is available to you, when they are leaning in and their defenses are low and they are genuinely curious about what comes next, the obstacles to any kind of influence drop away. In a selling situation, in a session room, anywhere you are trying to move a person or a team toward something.
I came to EOS® as a practitioner who could run a clean session. I knew the tools, I could get a team through IDS™ efficiently and keep the meeting on time and land the session at a good place. What I did not fully appreciate until later in my career is that the tools are only fifteen percent of the work, the other eighty-five percent is human. It is the quality of the questions, the willingness to sit in an uncomfortable silence, the ability to read the emotional frequency of a room and respond to it rather than barrel through it.
Storytelling, as I have come to understand it, is what builds the container for all of that to happen. When you share a real story, something with struggle and texture and honest resolution, people feel it land somewhere. They recognize something of themselves in it. And when that happens, trust accelerates. Not because you convinced them of anything, but because they felt a connection.
This is not soft. It is not secondary to the practice. In a world where attention is fragmented and real conversation is increasingly rare, the ability to create genuine human connection is becoming one of the most valuable things an Implementer can bring to a client relationship.
I have watched my own practice shift as I have invested more in this. I am not chasing a hundred and twenty session days anymore. That chapter has passed. What I am building now is different: mentorship, community, coaching other Implementers, and continuing to develop the craft of storytelling itself. The work has changed shape, but the principle underneath it has stayed the same.
The best sessions I have ever run are the ones where the team did not feel me there. They found the answer themselves. They had the conversation they had been avoiding. Self-discovery, as I have said to many groups now, is the greatest gift we can give a team. We cannot offer it with our mouths open.
The women at the lunch table put their forks down because a story pulled them in before they had a chance to decide otherwise. That is the thing I keep thinking about. Not what to say next. How to create the kind of moment where someone is available before you even start.
