STAR method felt robotic until I stopped treating it like a template and started just telling the actual story

Every behavioral prep guide has you fill in Situation Task Action Result like a form, and mine all came out sounding like a form. Stopped trying to hit the labels explicitly and just told the story the way I'd tell a friend at dinner, structure ended up being there anyway because that's just how stories work. Interviewers started actually reacting instead of nodding politely.