You Need to Listen First: Why StoryTELLING Isn't Enough

If you’ve surveyed most of the books available on storytelling, most center on the speaker, the act of constructing stories, and delivering them to audiences. Most focus on how a speaker can use stories to influence others, emotionally resonate with them, or otherwise use storytelling for their own ends. The other side of the storytelling equation, listening, gets overlooked too often.

Listening to Stories Isn’t a Passive Act

However, storytelling is a two-way street. A storyteller doesn’t share into a vacuum. (Perhaps the philosophical thought experiment should be: if a story is shared with no audience, is storytelling really happening?) Even though it gets short shrift in the collective conversation, listening is just as critical as telling in the storytelling process.

Listening to stories is an active process. When the brain hears a story, it doesn’t simply accept it as-is. The brain must process the story and assign meaning to it. Imagine the brain as a file cabinet: if it ever hopes to retrieve a file (story) again, it has to decide where it fits in the broader schemata, or configuration of thoughts and memories. Simply by deciding where it goes, the brain adds to and interprets the story by assigning this additional meaning.

Externally, a good storytelling audience engages with the speaker, even providing feedback and shaping the direction of the story. This can be done overtly by asking questions or making interjections, or more subtlety by body language and facial expressions. An engaged audience is vital; storytellers feed off of audience interaction.  

Storytelling Demands Empathy from the Audience

When a story is shared from one person to another, a process called neural coupling occurs. If a speaker shares a story about a hot summer day, the same brain activity occurs in the listener’s brain as if the listener were actually experiencing the hot summer day themselves. The more vivid the story, the stronger the neural coupling. In this way, sharing a story is like planting one’s experience in another’s brain. Because of neural coupling, storytelling demands empathy from the listener. A colloquial definition of empathy is “putting oneself in someone else’s shoes,” but in reality, empathy is created by putting yourself in someone else’s skull.

There is much to gain from eliciting and listening to the stories of others. There is a tremendous amount to be gained by empathizing with others. That’s why in my storytelling workshops I challenge participants to specifically listen to the stories of others with a fresh ear. Multiple studies have demonstrated that children who have read more fiction have better social skills. Listening to stories is a first step to empathizing.

The ability to empathize with others is a critical component of many skills for the future of work: emotional intelligence, managing people, servicing others, and cultural intelligence. Don’t overlook the power of listening to stories.