Brand Storytelling: Doing it Right With the Founder of Story Fuel, Melanie Deziel

The whole life of Melanie—the origin story. It was a September day in Waterbury, Connecticut. That’s where I grew up, about two and a half hours north of where I live now, in the New York City area.

I joke that I didn’t make it very far. I grew up in Connecticut, went to school in Connecticut, went to grad school upstate, and then I settled here in the NYC metro. So I’ve basically stayed along the same series of highways my entire life.

Well, it’s funny too, because I think Connecticut has a bit of a branding issue. People tend to think all of Connecticut is just country clubs and lacrosse teams. But there’s a significant portion of the state that’s below the poverty line, and it’s very industrial.

You know, Bridgeport is mentioned so often it became a joke on Family Guy—like, “Bridgeport, Connecticut, the number one producer of abandoned factories.” So, there’s a lot of diversity in Connecticut that people might not realize if they didn’t grow up there.

As much as I love Connecticut, it was always my goal to get to New York. Being so close, it felt like reaching for the stars—like, “That’s where I want to be.” That’s where the action is.

If there’s someone out there whose lifelong dream was to move to Connecticut, please reach out and let us know! I’m not sure if those people exist… maybe they do. But New York definitely takes the cake.

But that’s your superpower, right? That’s part of what makes you who you are—and what lets you do what you do. You’ve always got at least one gear turning, something marinating in the background.

Growing up in Connecticut, my immediate family was small—just me, my sister, and my parents, who split when I was really young. But both of them came from big families, so my extended family was huge. My mom is one of eight.

So yeah, once you start counting aunts, uncles, cousins—it was a full house. Christmas parties were wild.

Well, you know, I guess we would if we all lived much further apart. But I’ll be honest—most of my mom’s family, like, we’re 20, 30 minutes from where I grew up in Connecticut. So, you know, reunion is birthday parties, weddings, you know, graduations—everything’s there. It’s big.

We were thinking about it—my husband and I are expecting our first child, any day now, really. And as we were looking at the baby shower guest list, it was like, just a small baby shower… with just aunts and uncles. And we were like, “Yeah, that’s gonna be 60 people.” Like, when both sides of the family are big, it adds up fast.

You know, I remember when we were younger, because there were so many of my cousins, my aunts and uncles were like, “Man, I’m gonna go broke if I have to buy 47 Christmas presents.” So they devised this system where all the adults would put their kids’ names into a hat, and you drew as many kids as you had. So if you have three kids, you draw three kids, and you get a bigger gift from all the aunts and uncles, as opposed to everyone having to buy tons of tinier gifts. So it worked out well. We developed a system.

Well, it works really well for me. I am also—I really like the idea of gift-giving. I think it’s one of my love languages. You know, it’s like a way that I show that I appreciate people. But similarly, I often have a hard time figuring out what this person wants or needs.

So I actually have whatever your task management or your note-taking system is, I keep track, and I make note of when people mention certain things. So someone has a favorite team or a favorite TV show, or, you know, some new food item they’re just obsessed with—I’ll keep track there so that when it comes time for gift-giving, it’s like, “Oh yes, that person has a new hobby. They’ve just started knitting. Okay, I’m gonna get them this fancy yarn.”

So you can, kind of like, have those notes to refer back to, because otherwise, I mean, how are we supposed to remember all these things?

Yep, there we go. So now I know what to get, and artists in it.

I mean, I think I got a couple. Like, what are those—like, two truths and a lie? Or, like, the unexpected fact about you, right?

So you can’t see me, those of you who are listening, but I’m a fairly small person. I’m five-three. I’m a small, small person. I was at one point in the top five javelin throwers in Connecticut when I was in high school. It was just like one of those random “nobody at my school throws javelin” things, so we would always lose the points in the meet. And I was like, “That seems like fun. I’ll figure out how to do that. I’ll just appoint myself javelin thrower at school.”

And I just, you know, taught myself how to do it. I got really into it. I had no competition, so I could own that area of the field and had all the equipment to myself. And by the time I graduated high school, I was an all-star javelin thrower—which is a skill I’ve not used since I’ve, obviously…

It may be, because if he’s less than 110 feet from me and I’ve got a javelin, he’s in trouble.

I mean, that being said, if anyone were to turn up having been brought down by a javelin, I mean, the list of potential people is probably pretty small.

Yeah. So I’m just across the river from New York City, on the New Jersey side. In Jersey City, quick access to the city, which is amazing, but I get a little bit more, we talked about, like, the pace and the space that you would get in Connecticut.

So I feel like, you know, Jersey City offers us kind of the best of both. It’s about 10 minutes for me to get into New York, into New York City, but we’ve got way more space. We’ve got, you know, there’s greenery outside. The rent is a lot cheaper. So a nice compromise there.

Well, it’s funny, and I’ve got to ask you, how often do you actually take advantage of that, or is it more the perception of like “I’m close to the city, I could go if I wanted,” because that’s where I’ve realized I’m at at this point in life.

Yeah, and that’s what how it is for us. I mean, like I said, we’re about 10 minutes—10 minutes on the subway gets us right into World Trade Center, right downtown, right.

So when we first moved over here, we were both moving from in Manhattan or in Brooklyn. So we were like, oh, we’ll be so close, we’ll still go to the same places. And now it’s like, if I get in once a month and it’s only 10 minutes, but we just—I don’t have the need for it anymore, as you solely transition out of that and at the same time, the idea of moving further away, so that I’m no longer 10 minutes from the city seems terrifying for no reason. It’s just weird.

She might! It’s a she.

She just might want to go on adventures in the city. You know.

So I studied undergrad at UConn—University of Connecticut. There we go, the Huskies. Yeah, Huskies—probably because of our women’s basketball team, right? When we were talking about “What does Connecticut have?”—it has no professional sports teams of any kind except for UConn women’s basketball. That’s our thing. That’s our state official, state team.

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I didn’t go too far from home. It was nice. It was a great school. I studied journalism there. It was a fairly small program with a lot of really dedicated professors, and I was really involved with the student newspaper. But it was also an under-resourced program—tons of love, not a lot of facilities.

So I actually went to grad school up at Syracuse, at the Newhouse School. They have an amazing communications program. For me, I had the most amazing professors and such a close-knit community at UConn. It was a small program. And then to go up to Syracuse, which was a much bigger school that had just state-of-the-art facilities and all this technology—it was kind of like a good marriage of both sides.

I got to see what both were like and build these two different networks that helped me get to the city. So I think they complemented each other really well.

And I think it’s good, because at least when I look back on it, I feel like it marked different periods of my life. You know, you look back on your life and you—well, I don’t know, for everyone, it’s different. Maybe it’s where you lived, or who you were with at the time.

You know, all those different things—the city, where you were—but for me, I can clearly see the growth that happened at those different points. Like the person that I was, the skills that I learned, the people I knew in that one place. Then I moved to this other school. I was only in Syracuse for a year, but it was a different community, different mentors, learning different skills.

It’s kind of like it’s different chapters in that life that kind of lead you up to the next point. And so having those clear markers, when you can go away, I think definitely helps you recognize that you’re in a new stage.

So yeah—and it’s also easy. I mean, there’s this fun game—I forget the name or where I picked it up—but it’s about thinking how long ago something really was, and what the real meaning here is: how recently your life changed in a big way, right?

So if you can look back and say, “Wow, six months ago, I hadn’t started this new health regimen,” or “Three years ago, I hadn’t met my partner,” or “I hadn’t gotten this job”—for everyone, it’s different.

But thinking about when your life was substantially different, and it helps you see how interconnected all those parts of your life are. Because even that job you hated, that partner you thought you didn’t want—it might’ve served you well. You know, all those things, they take you one step closer to wherever you end up.

Well, yeah. And I look back and I think—at the time when I was choosing colleges, just like we were just talking about—it seems like this huge, amazing decision of like, “Where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do?”

And I remember being somewhat disgruntled at the time that I was going to UConn, like I had other schools that maybe would have been my higher choice for me, or a higher priority.

And I think back and I’m like, “Gosh, I have no idea what that life would have been had I gone out of state at that age.” Had I not met the friends that I met or had the experiences and the professors that I did, your entire life trajectory could be different.

Same thing like you said—for a job, or a partner, or moving to a new city. It’s wild, like how all those different fractals take off and all those different paths that could have happened.

It’s so funny—and honestly, so on point with the discussion we were just having about going with the flow and not knowing where things will take you. Like I said, I studied journalism. I focused on investigative journalism as an undergrad. I wanted to be one of those serious, old-school reporters uncovering injustice.

Then for my master’s, I studied arts and cultural criticism, because I realized I was leaning too far into science and structure and needed more art, more voice, more creativity. I was trying to balance both sides.

But then I graduated—and this was right when newsrooms across the country were digitizing and downsizing. Layoffs were everywhere, and we still hadn’t fully recovered from the recession. There just weren’t many investigative teams still around, never mind any that were hiring. And the same thing was happening on the arts side—art critics were disappearing from newsrooms.

So I had all these skills, and I had no idea what I was going to do with them. I couldn’t find a job doing what I had imagined I’d be doing.

And then, a recruiter I’d previously contacted about a job that no longer existed reached out and said, “Hey, I’ve got this job at The Huffington Post. It’s sort of like a reporter job, but you’d be in marketing. You’d create content for the sponsors, the advertisers. It’s not exactly what you were looking for, but it’ll get you to New York.”

And getting to New York was a big goal of mine. So I thought, okay—HuffPost is a great brand, and this could be a good foot in the door. I took the job. My title was something like “Native Ad Product Manager”—which, at the time, meant nothing to me and sounded totally unrelated to my degree.

But really, I was doing content strategy. I was coming up with ideas for HuffPost’s advertisers and executing them on their platform. Eventually, our team figured out that “native ad product manager” wasn’t a real job title and didn’t reflect what we were actually doing. So we rebranded as the HuffPost Partner Studio, and we all became content strategists.

It was early days for branded content—digital and print publishers were just realizing there was revenue in creating content for brands. And because it was such a new space, the talent pool was moving fast. After three months on the job, I suddenly became the most senior person on our team—just three months out of grad school—because everyone else had been hired away to other publishers starting their own branded content teams.

So there I was: leading projects for Citigroup, AmEx, Johnson & Johnson, Cheerios—these huge brands. It was a wild opportunity. But at the same time, I was asking myself, “Is writing a listicle about Greek yogurt recipes really fulfilling me creatively?”

Sure, it fit the brand message and the audience, but I wasn’t in love with the work. And while that’s not always the most important metric, I was still hoping for more creative joy.

Around the time I’d been there about a year, we’d grown the Partner Studio team to about 15 people. That’s when the New York Times announced they were launching a branded content team of their own.

I made the move and became the first editor of branded content at the New York Times. I helped build what eventually became T Brand Studio—a 150+ person in-house agency team that creates branded content for the Times.

That role got me closer to the kind of work I’d always wanted to be doing. Even though it was branded content, it fit better within the context of the Times. It had more journalistic rigor. It was closer to the kind of stories I’d imagined myself telling when I started this journey—certainly more so than listicles or native blog posts.

So yeah, that was a huge transition. Totally unexpected, but really pivotal.

Yeah, lightning fast—and it was a little terrifying, to be honest. At the time, I got this job at the New York Times. I think I was 24, and I was the first editor of brand content at the Times. I felt so much pressure to make sure we were setting good standards. There were a lot of people who were very skeptical about a legacy news organization like the New York Times doing branded content, which I fully understood.

I think part of the advantage—and the reason that job was such a good fit for me—was that I came from the world of journalism. I had this tremendous respect for the brand, and I was also willing to fight for our independence and keep everything that needed to be separate, separate. I was a New York Times fangirl. From the journalist’s perspective, I respected it so much. I wanted to protect it—even from myself, you know?

Yeah, that escalated quickly, yeah.

Yeah, so I had one more step, actually, before I started my own company. I had been at The New York Times for about a year, and then Time Inc.—which, at the time, hadn’t yet been broken apart or acquired—reached out. They had 35 magazines in the U.S. like Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated—really amazing, big brands.

They were looking for someone to build a content studio at the corporate level that would service all of those magazines. So they brought me over from The New York Times to do that. My title was Director of Creative Strategy, which was a big, open-ended title. But essentially, my task was to create the infrastructure for this content team that would serve all the different publications.

Around the eight- or nine-month mark, I started noticing a pattern. I realized I was in the same situation I had been in twice before: I get brought in during the early stages, I build the infrastructure, set the product, build the team, put the processes in place—and then it’s working well, and it’s time for me to move on. And I had this moment where I thought, “I’m starting to look like a job hopper… but I think I’m actually a consultant.”

My strength is coming in for a limited period of time, assessing what’s broken or what needs optimizing, getting branded content up and running, and then moving on to the next challenge. And I realized that if I’m doing a good job, it requires me to keep changing jobs. So maybe I needed to formalize that—put out my own shingle and make that my objective.

At first, the company was called M. Deziel Media—because you have to write something down on the paperwork when you file an LLC, and I hadn’t thought it through yet. But we’ve since rebranded as StoryFuel. Our mission is to work with brands, publishers, and marketers to help them adopt the tools, best practices, and editorial processes that are second nature in journalism, and bring those into brand content teams or internal newsrooms.

More recently, I actually launched a mastermind group. It’s meant to help individuals—authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, small business owners—people who might not have a whole team, but who still want to use those storytelling best practices in their own work. So, I’m really trying to take what I love about storytelling and share it with as many people as possible.

Yeah. Well, I think for me, it came from realizing that most of my work up to that point with StoryFuel—like the first three years—had been with big brands. I’ve been lucky. I got to work with finance brands, insurance companies, diamond retailers—all these big companies with big budgets and big teams.

But the realization for me was that I could have an even greater impact working with smaller teams. Like a two-person marketing team at a mom-and-pop shop—if they could just learn a few small things, it could make a huge difference in their business and in their lives.

At the time, I just didn’t have a way to do that. I didn’t have packages or a scalable system to reach smaller teams. So I thought, “If I can get a group of 10 to 12 of these folks together, I can help them all at once.” That way, I could still have that impact, but in a more scalable way, without needing to work one-on-one with everyone all the time.

It became this journey of realizing—okay, if I can get folks from different organizations, different backgrounds, even different countries, and have conversations about content strategy, about repurposing, about content ideas—we could all grow together. That’s been super exciting for me because I think you really start to see the results of that work much faster.

With a big brand, we were just talking about this before—it can take a year and a half and 16 rounds of legal review just to change copy on a website. But when you’re a small, agile team—or a solopreneur—you can make changes so quickly.

Exactly. I was very lucky on a few fronts—and I say “lucky,” but I don’t want to discount the hard work, the performance, the networking, and all those other things that play into it. But I came from a series of roles where my entire job was to interact with people at different brands and with their agency teams. So I already had a pretty solid network built from working in the journalism world and connecting with people across different media organizations. Many of them were dealing with the same challenges—trying to set up a brand content team or a native ad team.

So once I put it out into the world that I was starting my own thing and offering this kind of help, I was really fortunate to get a lot of inbound interest from people I’d worked with or stayed in touch with over the years. I didn’t have to do a ton of cold outreach, which made a huge difference.

The other advantage I had was that I was already doing a good amount of speaking. In many of those previous roles, I was the one out on stage representing the work our teams were doing at industry conferences. I had experience speaking, and I understood the power of it—not just for marketing your business, but for making an impact.

So when I launched what eventually became StoryFuel, my model was both speaking and consulting. And that was very intentional. Speaking allowed me to reach audiences that might not have the budget to become consulting clients, but I could still educate and help them. Other times, I’d speak in front of rooms filled with potential clients—and that would create inbound opportunities. So it worked from both a mission standpoint and a business development standpoint.

Over the last few years, the balance has definitely shifted toward more speaking. Like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. You learn the systems, how the industry works, how to deliver more impact in less time. And I’ve really fallen in love with it. The fact that I can stand on a stage and reach 750 people in an hour—it’s amazing. Not everyone will act on what I share, but the emails, the DMs, the social posts from people who took one idea and ran with it—that makes it all worth it. Knowing that what I shared made a real difference for someone… that’s the best part.

So one of the first things I always try to clarify is how people define these terms—because in marketing, everyone uses terms like “brand story” or “content” a little differently. When I talk about content ideas and brand stories, I’m not talking about your overall brand messaging or positioning. I’m not the person who’s going to walk in and say, “This is who you are.” That’s more of a branding exercise.

What I do help with is communicating that identity to your audience through content—through your blog, videos, website copy, social media. So if you already know who you are as a brand, I help you figure out what to say and how to say it on your various platforms. Sometimes I have to make that distinction early, because I’ll get people saying, “Hey, we have a logo, now we need a brand story,” and I’m like, well… that’s not quite what I do.

Now when it comes to creating actual content—say you’re launching a blog, a YouTube series, or trying to keep up with posting three times a day on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter—it gets overwhelming fast. It can feel like you’re feeding this endless machine, and it’s always hungry. I’ve had a lot of clients feel completely stuck, like they just can’t keep up.

What I realized early on is that I love coming up with content ideas. At first, that was my value to clients: I’d walk into a room and say, “Here’s 100 content ideas,” and people would be blown away. But that’s not scalable. I couldn’t do that forever. And I realized—okay, if I’m really going to help more people, I need to teach them how to do this for themselves. It’s the classic “teach a person to fish” scenario.

The challenge, though, was breaking down how I came up with ideas. A lot of it was instinct—skills I’d built over time without realizing. So deconstructing my own thinking process took a while. But once I did, I realized what I’d been doing mentally was creating a matrix. A grid. On one axis, I was thinking about different lenses or approaches to storytelling. On the other, I was thinking about the format—how that story would come to life.

So I created what I now call the StoryFuel Content Idea Matrix. And it’s exactly that: a grid. On one side, you have formats—things like audio (like this podcast), video, written content, infographics, etc. And on the other side, you have focuses—the “angles” for your story. Are you telling a story about a person? Sharing an opinion? Curating ideas or resources? Exploring the history of a topic?

When you start combining those—like “curated + video” or “history + infographic”—you end up with all these different possibilities. You don’t have to use them all, but it gives you a wide range of content ideas to start from. That way, you’re not just going with the first idea that pops into your head—you’re choosing the best one for your goals, your audience, and your format.

It does. It does. That’s exactly where the book’s going. The process I was talking about—it took me a while to come up with it. And once I did, I thought, “I wonder if this is how other people think too. Does this make sense to anyone else?”

I presented it a little over a year ago in a workshop and said, “Let’s try this out. Here’s what I think. Can you think this way too?” And I tested whether I could teach people how to use that process. And to my absolute delight, people loved it. They started adopting it and adapting it to fit their own teams and industries—adding their own rows and columns. And I thought, “Okay, there’s something here.”

The reaction was so strong that I kept sharing it, running workshops, gathering feedback—what worked, what didn’t. I kept refining it over the course of several months. And eventually, I thought, “I think this is a thing. I think I made a thing.” And once I felt that, I knew I had to share it with more people. The easiest way to do that? Put it all into a book.

So that’s what I’ve spent the better part of probably three to six months doing—in bits and pieces, between everything else—pulling the manuscript together. And actually, just yesterday, as we’re recording this, I got the revisions back from the editor. So it’s officially on its way to being a very real book, and it should be coming out around February or March of 2020.

It’s a great deadline. I’ll tell you that.

So it’s a little bit different. The matrix I talked about earlier is really helpful for coming up with ideas—especially when you’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t know what to say,” or “How do we tell this story?” Maybe you’ve got a product, an event, or something you need to communicate, but you’re not sure how to approach it. That’s where the matrix comes in—it helps you fill in the blanks and figure out how to tell the story to your audience.

But if you already have the idea, and you’re trying to figure out how to bring it to life—how to actually create the thing—that’s a slightly different process. I definitely talk about that in my consulting and on stage, but it’s not something I covered in this particular book. You might be picking up on hints for what the next book will be about, though!

When it comes to executing a piece of content, the very first thing I always ask is: Why are we making this? And right alongside that: How will we know if it’s successful? Those two questions should guide everything else—your message, your format, your distribution. If you don’t have clarity on the goal and the measurement, it’s easy to create something that looks good but doesn’t really do what you need it to.

Once that’s clear, I have a kind of mental checklist I run through. It’s not always a step-by-step process—more like a set of tools you can apply depending on the project. One big one is: What’s unique about this story? Especially in marketing, we tend to default to “Here’s our product” or “Here’s our event,” and that’s fine, but it can be tough to cut through the noise. So I always recommend digging into what’s actually special here? Why should someone care? If you can answer that, it usually gives you some creative direction.

Another one—this comes from my journalism background—is looking for multiple sources, whether human or not. It’s always more compelling if someone else says what you believe, instead of you saying it about yourself. So instead of, “Our product is amazing,” maybe it’s a customer testimonial. Instead of, “This report is groundbreaking,” maybe it’s a researcher or industry expert validating your insights. Those supporting voices add credibility and help your content resonate more.

So yeah, there are definitely little tactics like that—questions to ask yourself and strategies to make the content stronger. And I do think there’s room for a full process there. Maybe that’s what I’ll tackle next.

Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple. I think there’s like, the darlings, right? You know, we have, I never want to say Red Bull or Apple or Coke, or, like, any of those big brands, if you can avoid it, right?
Yeah. I think Blue Bottle Coffee is a company that I think has done some really cool and creative stuff. They were actually one of the first brands I became aware of. I remember hearing Anne Handley, a fellow speaker in the content space, talking about them. They created a course on Skillshare about how to brew the perfect cup of coffee. So that was my cue of like, Wow. They’re really thinking about educating their consumers. Not many brands put together a free course to teach their audience how to do something.
But Blue Bottle also put out things like a coloring book for kids, and a coffee table book with beautiful photos from the coffee industry. So they’re a great example of a brand that thinks differently about what form content can take. You know?

It was Nestlé. Majority stake is Nestlé. So there you go. That was your first example. And turns out, it was right.

I really like Twitter. I know that’s not special or unique in any sort of way. That’s where I think I’ve just curated a group of people and organizations that I really enjoy, and so it’s a place that keeps me informed. I laugh all the time. I find so many things that I want to share with others. So I really just like the access to information that it gives me.
So that’s usually my go-to if I’m, like, waiting for the bus or, you know, waiting in line for coffee. I’m like, let me just—let’s just see what’s happening on Twitter, you know? So that’s a big one.

I don’t know if this is necessarily the sexiest answer, but the Gmail app—I’m all about doing things on the go, especially if you’re speaking a lot or traveling. It actually took me a long time to find the right mail app, and I finally realized that the Gmail app is just the one I love the most. I think it’s the most intuitive, and it helps me get a ton of stuff done.

But my other app—the one that’s basically managing my entire life—is Todoist. It’s like “to-do list” but with no “L.” I use it as my task management system. So if you’re familiar with tools like Trello, Wunderlist, or Asana, it’s in that same sort of family.

I’ve been using Todoist since 2013—like, early days, beta mode. And now, my entire freaking life is in there. I’ve got reminders for my health and wellness, like when to get a new prescription for my contact lenses, or when to water my plants. Birthdays are in there. Projects and tasks—everything.

If they ever shut it down, you all may never hear from me again. I’ll just be hiding under a rock somewhere, because my entire life is managed through that app.

Yeah, well, and that’s—people sometimes ask me for a recommendation and I say, “Look, I like Todoist,” because I’ve used it for so long I figured out how to make it work for me.
I don’t know what the right tool is for you, but the most important thing is just that you have some sort of system that you use and trust and rely on. And for me, Todoist is that system. Because I’ve just—you know, when you have it for so long, the switch cost is so high to, like, move your whole life over to…

I don’t know if this is the book you’re talking about, but Getting Things Done by David Allen? He talks a lot about the cost of remembering—how even a tiny part of your brain is constantly trying to remember every single day: Did I water the plants? Do I need to water the plants? I did water the plants, right? So by just freeing up that space and outsourcing it to someone—or something—else, you free up those micro portions of your brain.

I was an adjunct for the online program at Syracuse. You know where I’d gone to grad school—that came about because a former professor of mine was going on sabbatical and said, “Hey, can you take this class? You do this for work, you could probably fill in for me.” And then I sort of played that role for several other professors over the course of time, teaching online courses.

Then fairly recently, Dickinson University here in New Jersey actually came to me and said they were creating a Master’s of Science in Marketing, and one of their gaps was content marketing. So they asked, “Could you develop a curriculum for us for a content marketing master’s-level course?” That was a whole experience in and of itself.

I didn’t study education, so I had to go through some learning myself—university training on creating curriculums and education theory, all these kinds of things to do it successfully. But it was really helpful and really interesting. I’ve stepped away from that course at this point. There’s someone else teaching it for me while I’m on maternity leave.

But yeah, it was a really interesting process to create a course like that from scratch. And a lot of what I learned, I can take and apply to my own work—or help others apply to their work. Whether it’s developing courses or just thinking about education in a more strategic, theoretical way.

Or even just all the things you never thought about. Like, of course there’s thought put into it, but then you’re like, “I came up with this cool project,” and someone goes, “Great. Now, what’s your student-centered rubric philosophy for evaluating it?” And I’m like, “I don’t know what that means yet. I’ll get back to you.”

But it’s like—you need to have a clear, strategic way to evaluate every assignment. And it has to be clearly articulated, which of course makes sense. You think of your experience as a student. You want to know how to do well and what’s being graded and all that. But man, when you’re building it from scratch, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of work. Teachers—we’ve got to pay them more.

Well, it’s funny. My husband is an entrepreneur as well, so your joke about, like, Saturday, maybe you’re working? Yeah, we’re 100% working. The two of us all the time. We help each other with projects.

But in an ideal world—you know, all of our finances are taken care of, and the world is our oyster—we could do as we please. I would love to sleep until I wake up. And I just—I really hate alarms. The whole thing just makes me grumpy. I’m not a morning person. I like to sleep until I wake up.

I like to have a cup of coffee outside, like on a deck, on a balcony, on a path somewhere—just outside, with nature. I’d like to have some conversations with my husband. And then I’d like to read and write. Those are the things I really enjoy doing for myself that I don’t get enough time to do.

I think it’s always easier to find work to do instead. You know, I’ve got a collection of books I passionately want to read but never find time to read because there are always other things to do. So I think that’s what I would do if I had the time. That’s actually part of what I’m planning during this maternity leave—work my way through some of those books. Now that I don’t have as many clients or travel and all these things on my plate, I’m hoping to make a dent in that sadly dusty bookshelf.

I mean, I’ll share some with you that definitely—I think you’re an angel. I don’t think it would change much. I mean, I think the place where I’m doing all this would probably be a little bit nicer, right? Like, you upgrade where you live. That’s probably my first route. I’m an extremely practical person, so I’m probably the worst for this, right? No helicopters, no craziness happening. I’m like, I’ll buy a slightly larger, more practical home.

Well, the good news about being the infamous Melanie Deziel—which I just discovered that I am a few seconds ago—is that there’s only one of me.
So if you were to search for Melanie Deziel you will find me, whatever social platform you happen to be looking for.

Our website is storyfuel.co—like the fuel story. You can find out all about the mastermind, the book, speaking, consulting—all the things we talked about today.

And you can actually download a version of the matrix we talked about. So if you want to check that out, the content idea matrix, and learn a bit more about how to use it, there’s a free PDF download there. You’ll find it at storyfuel.co as well.
So wherever you’d like to find me, you can find me.

Thanks for letting me share my story.