Listening Now Blog

Telling stories, other than those that are tall, has long been used as a compelling way to convey content that sticks.  We remember stories.  Stories stir our emotions, engage our senses and activate our imaginations.  We learn from stories – the best stories have a moral or punctuation point that has us metaphorically smacking our foreheads and going A-ha!  Now I get it!  Stories and listening have long held hands – if nobody’s listening, what’s the point of telling the story?

One of my favourite stories is an illustrative, lesson-learning, emotional sucker punch story.  It starts with a man going on a journey.  He’s sold up everything he has to pay for the passage.  He boards the ship with all he owns in one small bag, and settles himself in his humble steerage quarters.  Over the course of the ships journey – several weeks – he sustains himself on dry biscuits and water.   You see, he has no money to buy food.  By the end of the journey, he’s weak in spirit and body as he packs his small bag and prepares to leave the ship.  The ship’s captain stands on deck to farewell each passenger.  As the young man shakes the captain’s hand, he looks into his eyes.  In that small moment, the captain is compelled to speak for a moment to him.  He asks “Young man, how is it that we never had the pleasure of your company at dinner during your voyage?”  The young man replied “well, sir, I didn’t have the means to purchase any food on the journey.  I spent everything I had in the world on the fare”.  The captain’s heart is heavy and full  and his voice is thick with meaning as he replies “Young man, did you not know that all meals were included in the fare?”

The point of the story is that for so many of us, we do not know what is included in our fare.  We limit ourselves to dry bread and water, when a fresh and sumptuous buffet is there’s for us to partake of.  We live life small.

When we use stories, we ask our conversation partners to listen at a different level.  When we tell stories, we give our interlocutor choices that no other format provides.  There’s virtually nothing that a good story will not do. 

 There’s been a movement in the last few years to bring storytelling into the corporate world.  Stories are used in everything from uncovering the corporate culture, diagnosis and discovery, through to corporate branding.  One Australian company on the leading of corporate story is Anecdote.   My respected friend Shawn Callahan is one of the architects of bringing stories and storytelling into the corporate world.  Anecdote not only helps people in corporate tell better stories, but helps them listen to them as well.  Story Listening is a strategy to help those on the receiving end of stories make meaning out of what they hear. And not just any meaning, but meaning that sticks.

Noel Tichy in his leadership coaching book The Leadership Engine refers to winning leaders as “portraying the future as an unfolding drama” by telling stories that weave together ideas, values and modes of behaviour.  None of that is possible without listening – how do you hear those ideas?  Tune into those values?  Effect those modes of behaviour?  These things are impossible unless there is effective, two-way listening.

We know the power of stories.  How can you use stories more to help others listen better?  To listen more deeply.  More meaningfully.  To remember more of what is said.