The people getting the rooms you've earned are not better than you.
They just tell their story better.

Both programmes are private 1:1 via video call — no group calls, no recorded modules, no assistants. The Storytelling Intensive is five sessions, each 75–90 minutes, typically spread across three to five weeks. Each session builds on the last: presence, story extraction, narrative architecture, deployment frameworks, and delivery practice. The Full Narrative Advisory is three months. Approximately two sessions per month, plus asynchronous support between sessions for live material — pitches, posts, keynote drafts. The custom AI Storyselling Assistant is built and handed over in month two.

The Founder Narrative Architect is a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system powered by the most powerful Claude models. RAG works by feeding a knowledge base—in this case, all my storytelling frameworks, hook formulas, narrative structures, and founder data—into a searchable index. When you ask a question, the system retrieves the most relevant material from that knowledge base and the Claude model generates responses grounded in it. Think of it as a sparring partner between sessions: it draws on the same methodology I teach in this programme, including the hero vs guide framework, origin/value/customer story architecture, and the neuroscience of audience persuasion, so you can draft, test, and sharpen your narrative on your own time.

Yes. Many of my clients expense this programme through their company's L&D, executive coaching, or professional development budget. I provide a professional invoice that's easy to process. If your company requires a specific procurement flow, reach out and we'll make it work.

If you're an executive or senior leader who is brilliant at delivery but invisible outside your organisation, this programme is built for you. If you're a founder between Seed and Series A whose pitch isn't landing despite a strong product, this is also built for you. If you're unsure, book a free strategy call and we'll figure it out together in fifteen minutes.

It means I review every enquiry before we begin. This isn't a course you purchase and consume passively. It's deep, focused work. I want to make sure we're a good fit and that I can genuinely help you before we start. The application is short. You'll hear back within 48 hours.

Storytelling is the act of using narrative structure to make someone feel something. Not just understand something. Feel it. In a business context, that means taking your expertise, your company's value, or your personal experience and shaping it into a sequence that creates emotional resonance. A beginning that hooks. A middle that builds tension. An ending that resolves. It's the oldest communication technology humans have, and it's still the most effective one.

Business storytelling is the practice of using narrative to communicate strategy, values, and vision in a way that actually sticks. Most leaders default to data, logic, and bullet points. Those tools inform, but they don't persuade. Storytelling bridges the gap between what you know and what your audience feels. It's how you turn a pitch into a conviction, a strategy update into a rallying cry, and a LinkedIn post into something people remember tomorrow.

Because people don't follow data. They follow people who make them feel understood. Research shows that when someone hears a story, their brain releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Neural coupling occurs, meaning the listener's brain waves start to synchronise with the speaker's. That's not metaphor. That's neuroscience. A leader who can tell a story doesn't just communicate information. They create alignment, trust, and emotional buy-in that no slide deck can replicate.

Show, don't tell. Don't say "I'm passionate about innovation." Tell the story of the night you stayed up until 3am rebuilding a prototype because the first version wasn't good enough, and what happened the next morning when your team saw it. Specificity is what makes a story land. The moment you can see it, you can feel it. The moment you can feel it, you remember it.

Make the audience the hero. Not you. The most common mistake in business storytelling is putting yourself at the centre. But the audience doesn't care about your achievements until they feel you understand their problem. When you position yourself as the guide and your audience as the hero, everything shifts. They stop watching and start feeling seen.

Character, conflict, context, climax, and closure. You need a person the audience can root for (character). That person needs a problem that creates tension (conflict). The problem needs to exist in a specific, vivid setting (context). There must be a turning point where something changes (climax). And there must be a resolution that delivers meaning (closure). Miss any one of these five and the story falls flat.

Authenticity, emotion, structure, and relevance. Your story has to be real, because audiences have a radar for anything that feels performed. It has to trigger emotion, because emotion is what drives memory and decision-making. It needs clear structure so the audience can follow without effort. And it must be relevant to the person hearing it, or it's just a nice anecdote with no impact.

Start with a specific moment, not an abstraction. Show the struggle before the solution. Use sensory detail so the audience can see, hear, and feel the scene. Create contrast between where you were and where you ended up. Keep it simple. And always, always end with a truth that matters to the listener, not just to you.

There are three stories every leader needs. The origin story explains why you started, the moment of frustration or insight that set everything in motion. The value story shows what you stand for by grounding a core belief in a single, specific moment of pressure. And the customer story is social proof done right: a vivid account of someone's life before, during, and after working with you. Together, these three stories form the foundation of your pitch, your brand, your content, and your keynote.

Because they've been rewarded for rigour, not resonance. Twenty years of being promoted for analytical depth trains your brain to reach for charts and data when it's time to persuade. But persuasion doesn't work the way analysis does. Stanford research found that only 5% of an audience remembers a statistic after a presentation, while 63% remember the stories. Smart people aren't bad at storytelling. They've just never been trained in it.

Because investors don't fund logic. They fund conviction. Your data says "here is what exists." Your story says "here is what's possible." And possibility is what investors are buying. The founder who opens with a vivid origin story and a painful customer problem makes the investor feel the opportunity before they see the spreadsheet. That's the founder whose deck gets forwarded with a note that says "you need to see this."

Most executives are the best-kept secret in their industry. They deliver results, lead teams, and drive strategy, but nobody outside their organisation knows who they are. Storytelling changes that by giving you a repeatable narrative that communicates authority, humanity, and point of view. When your story is sharp, LinkedIn posts write themselves. Keynote invitations follow. Board seats open up. Visibility isn't about self-promotion. It's about having a story worth repeating.

Personal branding is what you want people to think about you. Storytelling is how you make them feel it. Most personal branding advice focuses on positioning, taglines, and content calendars. That's the surface. Without a real story underneath, personal branding is just packaging with nothing inside. This programme works on the story first. The brand follows naturally.

Yes. Storytelling is a skill, not a personality trait. Every client I work with says some version of "I'm not good at this" in our first session. By the end of the programme, they have a narrative that makes rooms go quiet. The story is already inside you. It's in the moment that changed how you see your industry, the failure that taught you more than any success, the customer whose life shifted because of what you built. We just need to find it and shape it.

This programme is built specifically for VP, C-suite, and founder-level professionals. The people I work with have fifteen to twenty-five years of experience. They don't need motivation. They don't need a framework poster. They need someone who understands both the boardroom and the deeper patterns that keep brilliant people invisible. This is not an introductory programme. It's a precision intervention.

When you hear a list of facts, only two areas of your brain activate: the language-processing centres (Broca's and Wernicke's areas). When you hear a story, the motor cortex, sensory cortex, and emotional centres all fire. Your brain doesn't just process a story. It experiences it. On top of that, stories trigger the release of oxytocin, which fosters trust and bonding, and cause neural coupling, where the listener's brain waves begin to mirror the speaker's. That's why stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone.

Kama muta is a Sanskrit term meaning "moved by love." Researchers at UCLA and the University of Oslo identified it as the emotion you feel when there's a sudden intensification of human connection, warmth in your chest, goosebumps, the prick of tears. It's triggered by vulnerability, shared struggle, and moments of unexpected tenderness. It cannot be triggered by a success story alone. It requires contrast and depth. Leaders who understand this don't just inform audiences. They move them.

Because audiences trust people who are real, not people who are polished. When a leader shares a moment of doubt, failure, or fear, something shifts in the room. Guards come down. Attention deepens. The audience stops evaluating and starts connecting. This isn't about oversharing. It's about strategic vulnerability: choosing the right moment of struggle to reveal so your audience sees their own experience reflected in yours.

It's a storytelling concept where the protagonist hits bottom. The old version of themselves has to die before the new one can emerge. In leadership storytelling, the Dark Night is the moment everything fell apart: the failed pitch, the company crisis, the personal reckoning. Most leaders hide this moment. But it's the most powerful part of your story. Because when an audience sees you at your lowest, they trust you at your highest. The story you're afraid to tell is the one your audience most needs to hear.

Most coaching works on either strategy or mindset. Never both at the same time. The strategy coaches give you frameworks, but they can't touch the nervous system pattern that keeps sabotaging your visibility. The mindset coaches work on beliefs, but they can't connect any of it to a boardroom or a pitch. This programme sits at the intersection. We release the subconscious pattern that keeps you small and build the narrative architecture that makes you visible. Both engines, inner and outer, across five focused sessions.

The outer engine is your narrative strategy: your origin story, your pitch, your LinkedIn presence, your keynote. The inner engine is the subconscious operating system that determines whether you actually deploy that strategy or freeze when the stakes go up. Most executives have a fully built outer engine that never fires because the inner engine is running an old programme that says "who are you to take up space?" We fix the inner engine first. Then the outer engine works the way it's supposed to.

It's the process of identifying and replacing the deep patterns your nervous system has stored, often since childhood, about who you are and what you're allowed to have. These patterns show up as anxiety before presentations, a compulsive need to over-prepare, difficulty being visible online, or a persistent feeling of being a fraud despite a track record that says otherwise. I'm trained in clinical hypnotherapy and use subconscious reprogramming techniques to release these patterns. It sounds abstract until you experience it. Then it becomes the most concrete thing you've ever felt.

Because this isn't therapy and it isn't a twelve-month engagement. This programme is designed as a precision intervention. Session one: release the pattern. Sessions two through five: extract the story, build the system, and deploy it so it lands. Most clients report a fundamental shift after the first session. By the end of five, they have a new baseline and a deployable narrative. No retainer. No subscription.

Co-founder of GrowthHub — one of the Netherlands' most awarded growth hacking agencies. Co-founder of a link-building AI company, built and exited by selling the technology. Managing Director at 29. Mentored tech scale-ups across fifteen countries. Lectured at Beeckestijn and Nyenrode business schools. For most of that career, she was invisible in the rooms that mattered. The people getting the board seats and the funding rounds were not smarter. They just knew how to make a room feel their story. When she figured out why — and what was actually blocking her — she built a system to close that gap for others. She works from Mallorca. She still thinks in P&Ls.

Character, Context, Conflict, Climax, and Closure. These are the structural bones of any story that works. You need someone the audience cares about, a setting they can picture, a problem that creates tension, a turning point that changes everything, and an ending that delivers meaning. Whether you're telling a ten-second anecdote or a forty-minute keynote, these five elements are non-negotiable.

Setup, tension, turning point, and resolution. The setup establishes who and where. Tension introduces the problem and raises the stakes. The turning point is the moment of transformation, the insight, the decision, the thing that shifted. And the resolution shows what changed as a result. This four-part structure works for investor pitches, LinkedIn posts, team presentations, and keynotes alike.

Clarity, conflict, and connection. Your message must be clear enough that a twelve-year-old could repeat it. There must be a struggle or tension that makes the audience lean in. And the story must create an emotional bridge between you and the person hearing it. Without clarity, they're confused. Without conflict, they're bored. Without connection, they've already moved on.

People, place, problem, progress, and payoff. Start with a real person. Ground them in a specific place. Give them a meaningful problem. Show the messy progress of working through it. And land on a payoff that resonates with your audience's own situation. The 5 P's are especially useful when structuring customer stories and case studies.

Character, conflict, change, and communication. Every story needs a person worth caring about, a problem worth solving, a transformation worth witnessing, and a message worth carrying out of the room. The fourth C, communication, is the one most people forget. If the audience can't articulate what your story meant to them, the story didn't do its job.

Who, what, when, where, and why. These are the journalist's foundation, and they work just as well for business narrative. Who is this about? What happened? When and where did it take place? And most importantly, why does it matter? The "why" is where most business storytelling falls apart. People describe what happened but never connect it to why the audience should care.

In a business context, the four types are: the origin story (why you started), the value story (what you stand for), the customer story (proof that your work transforms), and the vision story (where you're going and why it matters). Each one serves a different strategic purpose. Together, they cover every context a leader needs: pitch rooms, stages, content, and conversations.

Visual storytelling uses images, design, and visual metaphor to communicate a narrative without relying solely on words. In a business context, it shows up in your slide design, your website imagery, your social media presence, and even your physical appearance on stage. The principle is the same: show, don't tell. A single image of an empty boardroom communicates isolation more powerfully than a paragraph describing it.

Data tells you what happened. Storytelling tells you why it matters. When you hear a list of facts, only the language centres of your brain activate. When you hear a story, the motor cortex, sensory cortex, and emotional centres all fire. Data informs. Story transforms. The best leaders use both, but they always lead with the story and let the data confirm it.

The Hero's Journey is a narrative structure identified by Joseph Campbell across thousands of myths and stories. It follows a protagonist through three phases: Separation (leaving the familiar world), Initiation (facing trials and confrontation), and Return (coming back transformed with new wisdom). George Lucas used it to build Star Wars. In this programme, we teach executives and founders how to use this arc as the backbone of their origin story, so audiences feel the full weight of their transformation.

Freytag's Pyramid is a five-act story structure rooted in Aristotle's principles: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The critical element is peripeteia, the reversal of fortune where everything flips. In our coaching sessions, we use Freytag's structure to help founders and executives identify the turning point in their story and position it for maximum impact in pitches and keynotes.

William Labov studied how people tell stories in everyday conversation and found six essential parts: Abstract, Orientation, Complication, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda. The part most people miss is the Evaluation, the "so what" that gives a story meaning. Inside this programme, we run every personal narrative through Labov's six checkpoints to make sure nothing is missing before a client takes it to a stage, a podcast, or a boardroom.

CART stands for Context, Adversity, Resolution, Takeaway. It's a structure for telling clear, powerful stories in under two minutes. Context sets the scene. Adversity introduces the conflict. Resolution shows what you did. Takeaway delivers the lesson. This is the first framework we teach in this programme because it solves the most common problem: executives and founders who have incredible stories but no structure to tell them in.

PAST stands for Place, Actions, Speech, Thoughts. While CART structures the story, PAST brings a single scene to life by zooming in with sensory detail, physical actions, direct dialogue, and raw internal monologue. We use PAST extensively in our coaching sessions to transform flat business anecdotes into vivid moments that audiences can see, feel, and remember.

PREP stands for Point, Reason, Example, Point. It's designed for impromptu speaking, the moments when someone puts you on the spot and you need to sound articulate without preparation. State your point, give your reason, share a specific example, restate your point. In this programme, we practise PREP until it becomes instinct, so our clients never freeze in a board meeting or investor dinner again.

This three-part structure is the simplest way to explain a situation and drive action: What happened, So What does it mean, Now What do we do about it. It works for crisis communications, team updates, and investor emails. We integrate this framework into our coaching sessions because leaders face this communication challenge more than any other, and most of them wing it instead of structuring it.

SCQA stands for Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. Barbara Minto developed it at McKinsey in the 1970s after watching brilliant consultants lose the room by burying their recommendation at the end. SCQA flips the order: lead with the answer, then support it. Paired with Minto's Pyramid Principle, it's the gold standard for board presentations. In this programme, we rebuild pitch decks and strategy presentations using SCQA so our clients command the room from the first slide.

Donald Miller's StoryBrand framework has seven parts and one core insight: your customer is the hero, not your brand. The brand should be the guide. A Character has a Problem. A Guide enters with empathy and a Plan. The Guide Calls them to Action, leading to Success or Failure. We teach StoryBrand positioning in our coaching sessions because it's the most common mistake we see: founders and executives who accidentally make themselves the hero instead of the audience.

Star-Story-Solution is a copywriting formula that works for case studies and sales pages. The Star is a real person who got the result. The Story is the struggle they went through before. The Solution is how your product or approach changed their reality. We use this framework in this programme to help clients build compelling customer stories and investor case studies that lead with a human, not a product.

The simplest structure for business anecdotes. Give us a Character (a specific person), their Goal (what they wanted to achieve), and the Challenge (what stood in the way). It turns dry data points into human stories in seconds. We teach this inside our coaching programme as the go-to tool for the middle of a presentation, the moment when a client needs to humanise a statistic without losing momentum.

Jenny Hoyos developed VIRAL for short-form video content. Visual Shock stops the scroll. Immediately Start skips the intro. Rising Action states the problem. Anticipation teases the answer. Lasting Payoff delivers it. For our clients building visibility on LinkedIn or creating video content, we teach VIRAL in combination with CART inside this programme, because the hook and the structure need to work together.

The ABT Method comes from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Their rule: connect story beats with "And," "But," and "Therefore" instead of "and then." "And" sets the context. "But" introduces conflict. "Therefore" drives the consequence. We use ABT in our coaching sessions as a rapid rewrite tool. When a client's LinkedIn post or pitch feels flat, ABT almost always reveals where the tension is missing.

A minimalist story blueprint in five beats: Situation, Desire, Conflict, Change, Result. Five lines. That's a LinkedIn post, a sixty-second video, or the opening of a keynote. We teach the 5-Line Method in this programme as a constraint exercise. It forces founders and executives to find the emotional core of their story and cut everything that doesn't serve it.

The Dopamine Ladder is an attention framework that cycles through four psychological triggers: Stimulation (a sensory hook), Captivation (a curiosity gap), Anticipation (delayed resolution), and Validation (the payoff). It explains why some openings grab attention and others don't. In our coaching sessions, we use the Dopamine Ladder to audit the first thirty seconds of a client's keynote, pitch, or video to make sure every trigger fires in the right sequence.

Pixar builds emotional arcs on a single insight: every great character wants something external but needs something internal. Lightning McQueen wants speed but needs connection. Woody wants to be first but needs to learn that love isn't a ranking. We apply this framework in this programme to unlock the deepest layer of a client's personal narrative, the gap between what they chased and what they actually needed to learn. That gap is where the story that moves people lives.

Will Storr argues that every compelling character starts with a flawed belief about how they keep the world safe. "I am only valued if I am productive." "I am only safe if I am perfect." The story stress-tests that belief until it breaks, and the character is forced to change at a fundamental level. This is the framework we work with most deeply in this programme, because the belief that used to run your life is the story your audience most needs to hear.

It depends on the situation. CART for a two-minute story. PREP for an impromptu answer. SCQA for a board presentation. VIRAL for a LinkedIn video. The 5-Line Method for a quick post. The Hero's Journey for a keynote. Inside this programme, we don't just teach the frameworks in isolation. We train you to match the right tool to the right moment, so you always know which one to reach for when the stakes go up.

The Storytelling Intensive is €1,490 excluding VAT. Five private sessions. No retainer, no subscription, no upsell. The Full Narrative Advisory is €9,990 excluding VAT. Three months of private coaching including the custom AI Storyselling Assistant. Both programmes can be expensed through executive coaching, L&D, or professional development budgets. A compliant VAT invoice is issued. If your company requires a specific procurement process, contact Tanja directly and it will be accommodated.

All sessions are conducted via video call. I'm based in Mallorca, but my clients are everywhere. Time zones are never a problem.

The Intensive runs across three to five weeks — five sessions at a pace that fits your schedule. Most clients complete it in four weeks. The Advisory runs across three full months, typically two sessions per month with support in between. The AI assistant is delivered in month two.

The Intensive is five sessions — not three. Each one builds on the last in a specific sequence. Presence before story. Story before frameworks. Frameworks before deployment. Most clients report a clear shift after session two. By session five, they have a deployable narrative and the physical presence to deliver it. The Advisory runs three full months for clients who want deeper integration, ongoing strategic support, and the custom AI assistant.

Nothing formal. Come as you are. The first session is designed to surface what's underneath, and that works best when you're not over-prepared. If you have a pitch deck, a keynote draft, or a LinkedIn profile you'd like to sharpen, bring those along. But they're not required.

It sits at the intersection of executive coaching and narrative strategy, with a subconscious reprogramming layer that most programmes don't offer. It is not therapy. I don't diagnose or treat mental health conditions. What I do is identify the patterns that are blocking your visibility and replace them, then build the story architecture that makes you impossible to ignore.

It depends where you are starting. Founders typically report their pitch lands differently within the first two sessions. The room changes before the deck does. Executives describe a shift in how they show up in high-stakes meetings — less over-preparation, more presence. Some clients close funding rounds. Others receive their first keynote invitations. Others simply stop feeling like a fraud for the first time in a career that, from the outside, looks impeccable. The consistent result: the gap between who you are and how the world sees you gets dramatically smaller. Permanently — not motivationally.

Absolutely. A strategy call is free and takes about fifteen minutes. We'll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and whether this programme is the right fit. No pressure. No pitch. Just an honest conversation.

This programme is designed for individuals. However, I also deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and organisations on storytelling, executive visibility, and leadership communication. If you're interested in a team engagement, reach out and we'll design something that fits.

Then you've probably been exposed to bad storytelling. Manipulative, overproduced, performative. That's not what we do. The stories we build in this programme are yours. They come from your real experience, your real turning points, your real values. When a story is true and well-told, it doesn't feel inauthentic. It feels like the first time someone finally sees the real you.

Some of my best clients are introverts. Storytelling isn't about being loud or charismatic. It's about being clear, specific, and real. Introverts often have a natural advantage here because they tend to be more observant, more thoughtful, and more attuned to nuance. This programme doesn't turn you into someone you're not. It helps the world see who you already are.