The story listener

If someone tells a great story, but nobody is around to hear it, was the story ever told?

A couple weeks ago, Aria asked me to write a blogue post on “effective storytelling.”  A Google search of the same will render over 23 million results in a third of a second.  

There’s a lot of content out there.  But here’s the deal: I’m going to write this blogue post anyway.  I don’t have a degree in communication studies, I just happen to be a badass communicator (I can brag about that, right?).  I also happen to be an evidence-obsessed lawyer, so adding my voice to the topic without referencing any peer-reviewed studies is taking a bit of courage. 

People regularly ask me how I became a great communicator.  And really, it’s the sum of 28 years of life experience: I’ve had lots of serious boyfriends who forced me to reckon with myself (driving up my self-awareness), a mother who is always enrolled in a self-improvement course (and force feeds me everything she learns – thanks, mom, really), books upon books on the same subject (and the related courses I took in law school), and of course, a bunch of intelligent and demanding friends (and colleagues) to practice on. 

With my caveats now posited, I’ll go back to the opening line of this post: a good story requires a good listener. 

And listening is hard.  I took an “Effective Lawyering Skills” course in my last year of law school (you know the kind).  As part of the course, we split into groups of three after class and practiced listening to each other tell stories. Sounds easy enough, right…?

I learned that it was impossible to fully listen while simultaneously focused on anything else (even eating a sandwich is a distraction). 

Good listening is meditation.  A good listener releases internal dialogue or tension, and focuses their energy on the storyteller.  And if the listener is distracted, they consciously and gently return their focus to the storyteller.  A good listener can resist the need to nod, ask questions, or interrupt with “mmm, hmmm” (or worse, interrupt with their own story).  Oftentimes, I ask people how they like to be listened to (personally, I like people to listen without any interruption, but I’m okay with a nod or small sound).

A good listener will not assume that a storyteller’s pause is an invitation to talk, but will patiently wait to see if the storyteller can think of anything else to add.  And, once the storyteller is truly finished, a good listener will push the storyteller to go on by saying something like:

“Interesting.  What do you make of all this?”

A good listener is desperate to understand the perspective of the storyteller.  They make no assumptions, except that each human has a unique and complex context behind the decisions they make.      

Over the past few years, I have become obsessed with the art of listening.  We are all storytellers and surrounded by storytellers, and if you can manage to shut your mouth for a second and listen, you will hear stories; stories that are rich with humanness and build context and empathy between individuals.