A storytelling mindset is the habit of treating the story you tell yourself as something you author, rather than something you inherit. It's the working belief that self-talk isn't background noise but the operating system underneath a leader's decisions, behaviour and results.
That's the short answer, though the term gets used loosely enough that it's worth unpacking.
The story that sits underneath the strategy
Every leader is running three storytelling tracks at once. There's the story they tell the world. There's the story their organisation is endlessly recreating in the age of AI. And there's the quiet one running underneath both – the story they tell themselves.
The third one is the least examined and the most consequential. It's the narrative that decides whether a leader reads a difficult quarter as a setback or as proof they were never up to the job, and whether ambiguity gets held with steadiness or passed to the team as anxiety.
Mark Jones calls the capacity to notice that story, and change it, a storytelling mindset.
From the stories brands tell the world, to stories leaders tell themselves
The idea started with brands, not leaders.
In Beliefonomics (2020), Mark made the economic case for belief. Customer beliefs, not reach, drive the real value of a brand story, and that value shows up on the balance sheet. It was built for the outside-in view: what a market already believes, and what it's worth.
Then the lens turned around.
Across three decades of interviewing leaders, and through his own burnout experience in 2019, Mark kept meeting the same problem in a different costume. Organisations with an impeccable external story were being quietly undone by the internal one – the beliefs their leaders held about themselves. The economics of belief work at the scale of a market. They work just as well at the scale of one person on a hard day.
The Story Code (2025) is the result. The official bridge between the two books is deliberately short: Beliefonomics™ makes the economic case for belief as the hidden engine of performance. The Story Code™ is the framework that puts it to work.
Same principle, running from the global down to the hyper-local.
What a storytelling mindset is not
It isn't positive thinking, or wishful thinking.
Positive thinking bypasses the story and sometimes, the evidence. It papers over an unhelpful narrative with a more cheerful one and hopes the join between the story and reality doesn't show.
A storytelling mindset goes at the story directly. It names the thing and tests it against evidence, then rewrites it from real experience rather than affirmations, specifically from evidence that proves a counter-narrative is not only true, but justifiable, purposeful and reliable.
There's a difference from mood here too. A mood will shift on its own. A story has to be found and challenged before it'll move at all.
The research underneath it
Narrative psychologist Dan McAdams established that identity itself is a story – one people construct and continuously update from their experiences, their roles and the meaning they assign to both. Jerome Bruner says: "Self is a perpetually rewritten story."
Carol Dweck's work on mindset, built on Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy, made the same point from another direction. Beliefs are constructions, not fixtures, and they can be reconstructed with intention.
The organisational case is newer. found manager engagement has fallen from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025, while engagement among individual contributors stayed relatively stable. The people holding culture together are the ones coming apart. Gallup also found that when managers actively champion AI adoption, their people are 8.7 times more likely to say AI has transformed how they work.
The multiplier is the leader's story about the technology, not the technology itself.
How it's taught
A storytelling mindset must be practised. The Story Code™ turns it into four stages – Challenge, Overwrite, Decide, Encode – that move a leader from naming the limiting belief to living a different one that bridges the Vision-Reality Gap. It boosts their Narrative Intelligence Quotient (NQ).
Inside the skillset of being a high-NQ leader are a few techniques I teach in my keynotes and workshops, like the Mirror Moment: Catch. Flip. Hold, and how to measure the Vision-Reality Gap.
Why it's on the agenda now
Restructures, AI transformation, culture resets, shrinking resources and expanding spans of control. The pressure is real, and no amount of reframing will make it go away.
But the narrative a leader builds around that pressure either closes down possibilities or keeps them open, and it won't stay in their head. It shows up in how problems get framed, and the driving beliefs that motivate behaviour toward leading positive change – and that makes everyone happy.
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If you want your professional audience invigorated with optimism built with an evidence-based storytelling mindset, consider as a keynote at your next event, and applies it to AI transformation. Mark works directly with event organisers, in-house programs and bureaus – .
Change your story. Change your future.