27 Oct You’ve Changed. Has Your Story?
Good Morning,
A few days ago, during a rebranding session for The Common Sense Network, my team and I found ourselves doing something that felt strangely personal. We were sitting in a meeting room surrounded by notes, drafts, and old campaigns, trying to find a new way to describe who we were. For six years, we had been telling the same story about our company, a story that began with our founding vision and that carried us through countless ups and downs. It was the story of how we started, what we believed in, and why we existed. It was neat, familiar, and easy to repeat. However, as we sat there that day, it became clear that it no longer fit.
We had changed. The world had changed. Our audience had changed. Yet the words we were using to explain ourselves hadn’t moved an inch. That realisation landed hard because it wasn’t just about branding. It was about identity. Companies evolve in the same way people do. What once captured who you were can become a cage when you refuse to let it grow. So we did something uncomfortable. We ditched the old tagline. We stripped away the phrases we had relied on for years and started from scratch. In fact, we went much deeper than that. We reframed and repositioned the whole company. We structured all the divisions to fit this new reality.
At first, it felt like we were betraying something sacred, like tearing pages out of a diary that once meant everything. As we began writing new words to describe what we actually do today, I realised how symbolic the whole process was. It mirrored the way we hold on to old stories about ourselves long after they’ve expired. The narratives that once gave us confidence and coherence can quietly turn into scripts we act out without thinking.
That day taught me three lessons about stories, identity, and the quiet power of rewriting your own.
First, our stories often lag behind our growth.
We evolve faster than we admit, yet the stories we tell about ourselves often stay rooted in who we used to be. Maybe you were the underdog who had to fight for every inch of progress. Or the helper who held things together for everyone else. Or the dreamer who never quite felt taken seriously. Those roles serve us for a season, and they help make sense of our past. But when the season changes, the story has to change too.