No one else is making you their main character
For a large part of my career as a content writer, I gave the same advice. Make it about your audience. Speak to their pain points, their aspirations, their questions. The moment you start talking about yourself too much, you lose them - they want to feel seen.
And for a long time, I believed that completely.
I still believe part of it. But lately I've been embracing the realisation that I had it only half right.
The thing I noticed
Social media exhausts me. I find it draining in a way that's hard to explain to people who seem to thrive on it, and if it weren't part of running a business, or the thing that stops my mum messaging me every other day asking if I’m still alive, I'd probably opt out entirely.
But I also believe that self-development is never finished, so I kept showing up anyway and putting in work to improve my skills and understanding - attending talks, listening to advice, going to events, trying things, noticing what happened.
Over time, a pattern emerged that I couldn't ignore.
Every time I showed up as myself in my content, telling a story where I was the main character, and sharing something I'd genuinely experienced or struggled with or figured out, it got more engagement. More comments, more messages, more conversations with the people following me.
The posts that positioned me as a guide dispensing wisdom to an audience? Fine. The posts that put me in the middle of a story? Something else entirely.
Being the type of person I am - someone who likes to understand the method behind the madness - I started researching why this was working.
What narrative theory tells us
Storytelling has rules, and those rules exist because of how we’re wired to receive and process narrative.
Many of the stories that stick with us have a clear hero/protagonist at their centre. Someone to follow, to root for, to see ourselves in. That defined lead gives readers a point of focus, and more importantly, a point of emotional entry. We don't connect with themes or messages in the abstract - we connect with people navigating situations, and we find ourselves in their experience.
This is why the advice to "speak directly to your audience" is only half the picture. Yes, your content needs to be relevant to the people reading it. But relevance alone doesn't create a connection. Connection happens when a reader sees their own struggle or journey reflected in someone else's story, and for that to work, there needs to be someone else's story presented in the first place.
Taking yourself out of your content doesn't make it more about your audience. It just makes it about nobody.
The moment the penny dropped
In February, I was at the #SBS Winners' Conference in Birmingham. Amongst a crowd of more than a thousand people, I sat and listened to the fireside chat between Katie Piper and Theo Paphitis. The session was about resilience, and the conversation turned to Katie’s experience of reclaiming her narrative after it had been taken from her.
It had nothing to do with content or marketing or anything I'd normally be scribbling notes about. But I found myself reaching for my notebook anyway.
"This is my movie. I get to choose which actors are in it for just a minute."
I wrote it down because something in it resonated beyond the context it was spoken in - something about how we perceive our own narratives, and how we give ourselves the confidence to keep moving forward. And the more I sat with it, the more I realised it applied directly to what I'd been noticing in my own content.
The most effective storytelling in business does exactly what Katie was describing. It puts us in control of the narrative. It makes us both directors, the authors and the protagonists of our own stories, with the clarity and intention that only comes from knowing it's yours to tell.
The people in your audience aren't looking for a narrator who stands at a distance and describes the landscape. They're looking for someone to follow into it.
What this means for your content
This isn't an argument for self-indulgence. It's not a licence to make every blog post, every newsletter, every journal entry entirely about yourself with no regard for the person reading it. The key - and this is where the real skill of a content writer lies - is learning to take a personal story and make it universal. To find the thing in your own experience that other people recognise, that makes them think, "yes, that's exactly it", or "I've felt that too", or "I didn't have the words for this until now".
That's what transforms a personal story into a piece of content that serves an audience. Not speaking at them. Not removing yourself from the picture entirely. But showing up with real lived insights, drawn from experience.
And it applies everywhere you're building a relationship through writing - your blog, your journal, your newsletter, your socials, your Substack. Anywhere you're showing up consistently over time and asking someone to follow along, the same principle holds. Give them a protagonist, give them a story, give them someone to root for.
The advice I'm revising
So after years of telling clients to make it about the audience and not about themselves, I wasn't wrong, exactly. But I was incomplete.
Make it about your audience, yes. Understand what they need, what they're struggling with, and where they want to go. But then tell them a story. Put yourself in it. Be the main character of your own content, with all the honesty and specificity that requires. That's the most powerful way to do it.
No one else is going to make you their main character. If you want to connect with the people you're trying to reach - really connect, in a way that lasts beyond the scroll - you have to write yourself into the story first. No one else is going to make you their main character after all.
