Meet Jordan Bower
So. Tell me about yourself.
I mean, you know me pretty well.
That’s true, but it might not be true for the strangers who have just found you on the Internet.
OK. I’m about 5’8. Green eyes. Bald, last time I checked.
This isn’t a Hinge profile!
I wouldn’t do well, considering I’m bald. Anyway, I’m married…
Is everything a joke to you?
That’s a loaded question… OK, let’s do this for real.
Great. Tell the people how you got into this profession.
It’s a story, of course. The short-ish version is that I graduated from business school many, many years ago. For a couple years, I worked in operations for a luxury travel company—called Butterfield & Robinson—based in my hometown, Toronto. Then, I developed itchy feet. I had the great privilege of spending the second half of my twenties as a backpacker, traveling all around the world. By the time I finished those journeys, I had developed the skillset of a storyteller.
When I came back home, I thought at first that I was going to be a famous author. I had so many stories to tell! But, eventually, reality and finances caught up to me. Around 2013, I told the world that I was going to be a business storyteller. People thought I was crazy—when I would go to networking meetings, people would ask me if I intended to read motivational books in libraries. But eventually I got some traction, and my creative career took off from there. Now I really am a busines storyteller.
Hang on a second. You spent five years as a backpacker traveling the world?
Actually, I think it was a little closer to seven.
How did you afford that?
That’s a complicated question. One side of the answer is that, back then, it was possible to travel cheap. I ended up spending almost two years wandering around India—in those days, I could live pretty well in India, including train travel, budget hotels and meals, for about $500 a month. So I would go, spend five or six months having all kinds of adventures. Then I would come back home and live in my mother’s basement as I worked a few odd jobs and saved up a couple thousand dollars before hopping a plane to go back to India again.
The other side of the answer is that I had enough of a family safety net that I felt like I could extend my navel-gazing forever. It was a huge privilege, both in the modern sense and the traditional one. All that travel opened my eyes, I guess you could say…. In more ways than one.
Tell us more about what that was like…?
It’s pretty strange from today’s perspective. I mean, today, I’m a corporate consultant. I’m married, I have a dog… In many ways, my life is normal—at least on the surface. But back then, I was so driven by a hunger for what I would have thought of, in an adolescent way, as “authentic experience”.
In retrospect, more than a little of that drive was based on a fear of growing up. But there also was a real component to it. I wanted to see, I wanted to learn, I wanted to meet people who were different from myself and the world that I grew up in. So in many ways, I just wandered. I mean, I worked a little, I volunteered, I made friends… But every day, I would wake up with no sense for what might happen next… who I might meet, what I might experience, how I might feel.
Can you be a little more practical? Like, what were you doing? Where did you sleep?
It really depended. In India, for example, this was the days of Lonely Planet guidebooks. I had this big thick book, almost as thick as a phonebook. And I would just kind of flip through it and read a description of a place that was intriguing to me. Then I would hop a train and just, like, go. Sometimes I would be on the train for many hours, even days. I would get to the place, I would wander around… Often I would be sleeping in budget hotels or backpacker accommodations. There would always be someone to talk to… Days and weeks and months passed like that. I remember being pretty happy… At least most of the time.
Would you call this “finding yourself”?
From one perspective, sure. There was a backstory, because there always is. From a different perspective, I would say that I afforded myself—and I was privileged to be able to do this—but I afforded myself a “creative journey”. I gave myself plenty of time to write, to read, to think. I found remarkable teachers, I had incredible experiences. I guess you might say that this broadened my horizons… All of these are just cliches, but they kind of point to the real thing underneath.
Maybe the simplest way to describe it is that I came to terms with myself, in a certain way. I had a couple moments where it really felt I was on the precipice between life and death. Eventually, I just realized that if I was going to live, happily, then it was going to have to be on my terms. I don’t mean that in some megalomaniac way—instead, what I mean was that I was not going to allow myself to submit to working a job I hated or doing something in life that I didn’t believe in.
Somewhere in the midst of all this self-discovery, I arrived on the terminology of “storyteller”. It kind of popped into my head—I’m pretty sure I was high—but something about it gave me a tingle. I was like, I’m going to do that. What would that look like, how was I going to make a living, how was I going to explain myself to, like, strangers at networking events or on the Internet… I didn’t know yet. But I made a decision. In retrospect, it was among the most important choices of my life.
It’s strange, because you’re sounding like an artist. But you market yourself as a corporate consultant. Help me connect the dots.
It’s still a mystery to me sometimes. Like I said above, I got to the point where I had spent everything I had—both my savings and also my social and relationship capital. I needed to actually sit my butt down and get to work. Understandably, there aren’t many postings on LinkedIn with the job title “storyteller”. At least, there weren’t back in 2011 and 2012.
At the time, I was writing a book about my travels. I kind of told myself that I was destined to be an author, that one day I would get a call from a New York publisher with a literary advance for, like, a million bucks.
A little delusional…?
Yes, totally. But I was still hanging onto this idea that my calling was as an artist, and this business thing was just something I would do until I caught my big break. So I needed something that would just, like, tide me over until the publisher called. At the time, we were just at the cusp of the social media boom. I don’t even think I had a smartphone yet, but I decided that I would put out my shingle as a digital marketing consultant. Somehow, I was able to talk a few small business clients into working with me. I started making a little bit of money. It wasn’t much, but it was food on my plate. And it was powering my writing. I must have spent hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours writing in those days.
What happened next?
Naturally, I fell into the role of a teacher. I’ve always liked not helping others succeed. A born coach, I guess… I came up with the idea of leading workshops on storytelling. I think I started with the local Chamber of Commerce, charging something like twenty or thirty bucks to business owners who wanted to learn how to be more successful on social media. I did that for a year or two, then I started advertising my “storytelling” workshop on my website.
Then, out of the blue, I got contacted by someone who was booking speakers for an event called The Future of Story Telling Festival in New York City. They had found me online and they liked what they read enough that they wanted to book me. I was shocked. I was like, this digital marketing thing actually works?
Had you given speeches before?
I mean, maybe a handful—but mostly for small, local events. I was living in a tiny city on the West Coast at the time. Suddenly, here I was with an all-expenses paid trip to New York City! I felt like a country bumpkin. I had no money, I remember I went out there wearing West Coast Blundstones. It was quite the prestigious event. Al Gore was one of the keynote speakers. They had Edward Snowden delivering a speech via Skype from exile. I met Margaret Atwood and a few other really high-profile folks. I remember I spent an evening walking down Manhattan with the guy who was the chief animator for Disney, the guy who was in charge of drawing Ariel, the Little Mermaid.
My talk went okay—but I took a lot of confidence away from the experience. I think I would say that I came home seeing myself a bit differently. This was around 2015. After that, I began to get more inquiries through my website. Things just kind of took off…
What happened next?
I’m kind of grazing over the details. There was a lot of experimentation and trial and error. Like I said, this was 2015/2016 and the idea of “storytelling in business” was booming. By then, every business had discovered the power of social media, and there were all kinds of shifts relating to digital transformation and customer expectations. Obama had been the first social media President, and then Trump used social media in an entirely different way to get himself into the White House. Storytelling was a huge buzzword, and I had used my website to help get myself some of that search engine traffic.
All that digital marketing consulting paid off…
Totally.
So you were delivering these storytelling workshops to… who? Marketers?
Sometimes. Then there were all these other use cases… I guess you could call them. Sales teams. Executives who needed to inspire their people. Stuff like that. At the beginning, I approached all these use cases from the same perspective. I thought, I’ll teach these people how to be, like, Hollywood screenwriters. But, pretty soon, I realized that these business people didn’t want to learn how to “tell a story” in the conventional sense. They were actually looking for something else, they just didn’t know how to articulate it. So they called it “storytelling”…
Can you say a little more about that. What do you mean?
Sure. It was like that metaphor about, you know, when a man has a hammer everything looks like a nail. Many of these business people were struggling to achieve what they call “engagement”. Which really means, they were struggling to get people to care about what they had to say. Often this was because they themselves didn’t much care about what they were trying to say… as I like to say, the plot thickens… They were just using this concept “business storytelling” to suggest to themselves that if they said the same boring thing that they really didn’t believe in using some kind of secret storytelling language, then that would be the key to actually achieving their engagement.
Eventually, I started to realize what people were really looking for. I saw that it wasn’t about storytelling at all… at least, not storytelling the way that they defined it. Instead, there was something more fundamental about communication that they were yearning to articulate, even to themselves. I started re-imagining my workshops to angle towards that.
That being that deeper level of engagement.
Exactly. The inquiry went deep, because as it turned out many of these people were horribly bored with what they were trying to do. They didn’t like their work, they didn’t feel like they had what would come to be called “psychological safety” or “belonging”. The truth was that there was this whole worldwide shift in how people thought about what work was that was just sort of bubbling beneath the surface.
It’s easy to look back now, post-pandemic, and see some of this stuff. Like the desire to work from home, or more flexibility, or digital nomadism, or the call for belonging, and DEI, and so on. It can be really shocking to remember that, even as recently as 2016, 2017, 2018, that this stuff was really, really cutting edge. Back then, the dominant narrative was still very hierarchical… There was this idea that the boss was in charge and that everyone else had to do what he said, no matter whether it made sense or not, because he was the boss and he had an MBA from Harvard or worked at McKinsey or whatever...
The world seemed so stable back then…
I mean, Trump had just been elected, so there were some cracks in the old foundation. Then, #metoo happened. And then, of course, COVID. Pretty soon, it became obvious that we were working in a much different context.
Or to put it in my terms, the overarching narrative had changed.
Were you talking about this stuff in your workshops?
I was starting to. But I was still very scared to address it in a meaningful way. I remember, I used to have a slide that I would put up, with a play on that Marc Andreesen quote about there being two types of jobs in the future: “people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” I added a third category: “storytellers who help people cope”.
That’s funny.
See, I told you.
But besides that gentle warning, I was still a little afraid to get out of my lane. I was working with some big companies at the time, and I felt like it was my obligation to teach them to be storytellers, because that’s what they had hired me to do. I was kind of caught between teaching them storytelling “skills” or frameworks or whatever, and also helping them become more engaged themselves… which of course is what you really need if you are going to be an effective storyteller. So I was a bit frozen, because I was trying to accomplish two very different things in not a very big chunk of time… sometimes only a few hours. In retrospect, I wasn’t accomplishing either goal very effectively. On top of that, I felt like a bit of a fraud, because I felt as if I had to sneak in the deeper, more emotional stuff into my workshop content, rather than addressing it head-on. I didn’t have the confidence or the courage at the time… or even really the capability.
The irony was that, in 2018, 2019, my bookings were booming. I was flying around the world, delivering workshops in places like Paris, Bangkok, and all over Canada and the US. I didn’t really have the time or headspace to really address this fundamental dilemma that was happening within me.
Define that dilemma for us.
Was I teaching business people how to “tell a story”—meaning storytelling tools, tactics, frameworks and son on? Or was I teaching business people to be more honest and authentic about what they really thought, because the truth is that it’s that honesty and emotional engagement that is the quality of a storyteller…
I really didn’t know. And in truth, I didn’t really want to think about it much. This was late 2019, early 2020…
Duh, duh, duh.
Totally. Then the world shut down, and finally I had some time to reflect.
And you totally transformed your business?
Not all at once. It took time. Looking back it was at least two or three years. I went through that familiar caterpillar-butterfly cycle, where my business went to mush before becoming something much different. My revenue plummeted. In 2020, I was down something like 75%. It was a real crisis—in a flash, the whole world seemed to have moved on past storytelling. Budgets were being cut, every business was in crisis. There were many, many moments when I didn’t think I would make it through.
There were plenty of points when I thought that I had to go out and find a “real job”. But then I was like, who is going to hire a storyteller? It was yet another huge dilemma. I would say that the turning point was really deciding to, I guess you could say, bet on myself. There was yet another moment where I was like, how do I want to live my life? And when I asked myself, the answer became obvious.
Now here you are, out the other side…
I think that’s an exaggeration. Certainly I’m much more confident in what I’m doing today then I was even a few years ago. It’s been a very, very meaningful process. I don’t think it’s over yet, I’m still young, and my business is going to change over the coming years. But I’m in it, I guess I could say, much more than I was before. Now at least I am going straight to where I want to go. It’s much more authentic, and the results are much more satisfying to me than ever.
OK, final words. What’s your message to the strangers who are reading this?
That’s a big question…………….