To be very honest, I am not the greatest listener. Especially to my husband. One of the ongoing issues in our marriage has been my poor listening. As an introvert, I often live in my inner world. He’ll be talking, and a tiny part of me will be listening, but the rest will be having “deep thoughts.” Even when I ask him a question, I’ll often zone out quickly instead of listening to his response. My wonderful yoga teacher used to say during savasan (relaxation) that we should listen to her guided meditation with just 10 percent of our consciousness; in many situations I think my listening capacity is at only about 10 percent.

I’ve read several pieces recently about the importance of listening when working with stories.

One is by Dr. Kevin Cordi, a performance storyteller and educator, who writes:

Story is about listening. We need to take the time to value each story we hear and listen attentively when we are not telling. … Tell often but listen more.

Kevin recalls the person who attributed his good storytelling not to his ability to tell 100 stories, but “because he listens to 1,000.”

For Ed Thompson of The Pedowitz Group, “listening” is a bit more metaphorical. He writes:

Marketing has to be listening on all channels in order to communicate on all channels. Simply telling the story isn’t good enough anymore.

He’s talking about, among other things, “listening” via social media to what the audience — customers — are saying about the stories marketers tell.

In addition, some of the rock stars of the applied story world emphasize storylistening — Gabrielle Dolan; Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, the authors of the wonderful book The Spirituality of Imperfection; and Terrence Gargiulo and Shawn Callahan, especially in a webinar they presented a while back. Shawn noted in that webinar that he spells “storylistening” as one word for the same reason one of his professors spelled “prehistory” as one word — so the word represents a real discipline.

Some clear messages emerge:

• To be good storytellers, we must truly listen to the stories of others.
• To refine our stories and understand their effectiveness, we must listen to our audience.
• Listening contributes to community. From The Spirituality of Imperfection: “… whenever and wherever there is a storyteller, there will also be a storyhearer. In the communal act of telling and listening, listening and telling, the sense of belonging begins.”
• Storylistening is — or should be — a real discipline.
• Storylistening can help embed stories into an organization’s culture (see Gabrielle Dolan’s explanation).