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How Storytelling Challenges Narratives and Gives You Back Your Power

Updated: Sep 20

"Stories, yours, mine, ours – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them."

— Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination


A silhouette of a woman wearing a red dress and red headscarf scarf looking into the distance.
Image: Canva

I have been collecting stories for a while now. The storytellers vary. They are veterans, immigrants, small business owners, university students, and parents, but they have something in common. When I ask them to tell me about their experience with something or an event, whether it's working or studying overseas, changing jobs, or surviving a crisis, their first response almost always is: “I don’t think that would make an interesting story.”


These people may be modest, but consider this: some time ago, when someone approached me for a story, I also said, “I don’t think that would make an interesting story.” I was not being modest. At that time, I genuinely believed I had no story worth telling. It should come as no surprise then that this quote from Robert Coles is one that I treasure dearly: "Stories, yours, mine, ours – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them."

Are you feeling disempowered? Check your narratives.

Narratives are autobiographical accounts of how people conceive and interpret cultural, interpersonal, and linguistic influences. When I collaborate with individuals to bring their narratives into public view, they are often surprised by my decision to inquire about something mundane. For example, when I ask a soldier, “What does it feel like to go into a community?” they are usually surprised. He is more accustomed to answering questions that reinforce meta-narratives – those ingrained grand narratives that shadow our acceptance of the world as it is. These meta-narratives tell us, for example, about the role of the sovereign state, and it fuels the soldier's narrative as a legitimate agent of the state.


There are other kinds of narratives to be aware of. 

  • There are conceptual narratives. These are the narratives constructed by social researchers when they try to explain an individual’s behaviour from observation. 

  • There are public narratives. These are the narratives of the institutions and social formations within which we embed our sense of self and community understanding.

  • There are also ontological narratives, which help us make sense of who we are.


During my research, I discovered that soldiers must repeat the public narrative. They recited their roles and identities in keeping peace or waging war until I brought them back to the ontological space. Like many other professionals whose work is embedded in a grand narrative, soldiers are accustomed to telling stories about themselves that work to reinforce public and conceptual narratives about who they are and what they do. There is no shame here. It takes a different mindset to grasp the power of ontological narratives. 


Ontological narratives help you make sense of who you are. When you engage with your ontological narrative, you begin to see the connections and relationships between the public, conceptual, and grand narratives that determine who you are and how you relate to other individuals. Ontological narratives often come through in the act of lived experience storytelling. When you tell a lived experience story, you separate your experiences from stock narratives' cultural and social frames. Nearly everyone takes these frames for granted. More importantly, the stock narratives tend to go unchallenged until we look inward and express what we discover through experiential storytelling.   


Storytelling is how you take your power back.

Stories, like myths or art, reflect how human beings represent and reflect upon themes like hope, rebellion, drive, victory, or despair. Personal stories, even fictive ones, help you organize life events into meaningful accounts. They also help you make causal connections among different events you’ve experienced. People often talk about their disruptions and departures from the expected stock narratives. As a result, our most exciting and memorable stories are the ones that celebrate our ability to overcome grief or setbacks, depict our desires for a change, or convey our regrets for a path we did not take.


The more I ask people to share their stories, the more I recognize that it takes time for people to understand that I am asking them to engage in an open conversation with someone who wishes to learn about their true identity. People need lots of time and encouragement to understand that their stories have weight. They need time to appreciate that their story gives them a solid identity and a strong voice and that those called to listen are now part of their sense-making journey.


When I work with clients, I explain it this way: your narrative, which is your autobiographical account, always comes from your perspective. As a narrator, you create my context of understanding because you get to choose what cultural, linguistic, or interpersonal influences apply to your account of events. There is an asymmetry of power here in that the narrator is now the author of a tale; she controls what story is told and how it is told. As a storyteller, she weaves her storyteller own agency by creating the conditions for understanding and interpreting the events she has experienced.


Tips for sharing the power of storytelling.

The story listener or audience plays a crucial role as well. Storytelling is a two-way process that involves a teller and a listener. The teller has the power to either reinforce or challenge narratives, but the story listener is much more than a passive observer of the process. Her role is to ask questions and solicit answers that encourage the storyteller to be a speaker yet still be separable from what is spoken. The listener must divide her attention between what is said and the person saying it. Her job is to perceive what she hears as an experience being described by a narrator, not as the personification of the narrator themselves. The result is a beautiful thing called discourse.


Whether or not a story offers resolution, the circle of dialogue and introspection the teller and listener create between themselves puts a human face on a problem or experience. Listening is an act of recognition, which leads to empathy, dialogue, understanding, collective action, and community. This is how storytelling helps us create a shared identity and establishes a basis for diversity and belonging.


So, when I speak with my potential collaborators about sharing their stories, I explain that I am the listener, an audience that is there to be taught by their experience. I introduce them to Robert Coles' quote and remind them that it is not the story's content that matters; it is the lens you bring to the things that may be taken for granted that is most interesting and valuable. 


The bottom line.

Your stories represent how you order and sequence events in your life and speak volumes about your readiness for future challenges. Listeners may align themselves with the storyteller’s view or refute and question it. Either way, it is a delicate dance of trust, power sharing, and recognition. When I listen to people's stories, I learn more about their values, goals, and perceptions of themselves and the world around them. This teaches me how to be myself, and I feel called to honour my own stories. That is the power of storytelling.

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