Storytelling and Compassion

In this week's study we hear how the Prophet Nathan told a story to King David in order to call the King out on his sinful behavior. Nathan's story had a much more powerful effect than confronting King David about his behavior. It made David step outside himself and see the situation from another point of view.

Stories are incredibly powerful tools. According to education and neuroscience studies, stories facilitate leaning and memory, and they help people organize their world. Check out this article featuring Michael Gazzaniga: Your Storytelling Brain.

Gazzaniga suspects that narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world – to know where we're coming from and where we're headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why. One reason we may love fiction, he says, is that it enables us to find our bearings in possible future realities, or to make better sense of our own past experiences.

Not only does storytelling help us to navigate the world, hearing the stories of others build empathy and compassion in us. Researchers at Staffordshire University in England have been studying the Superpower of Storytelling.

Our findings suggest that arts and culture can convey stories that have a superpower to connect people by striking a chord, enabling us to identify with individuals and challenge stereotypical ideas of the ‘other’ – a truly remarkable thing in a world that sometimes seems overwhelmed by social and racial tensions.

In fact, stories are so effective that they're used in marketing all the time, and businesses are capitalizing on the power of storytelling. Leadership Story Lab teaches business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs how to tell effective stories to run successful businesses and market their products:

Using only classical storytelling elements, we blend our creative coaching, training, and consulting with cutting edge social science insights. The results? You are able to translate your data, relate your ideas, and persuade your audience to act.

We call it: storytelling with business impact.

What this tells us is that stories are possibly the most effective tools at our disposal for teaching and learning, for correcting, for changing attitudes/behaviors, and for building compassion. Have you ever heard of Humans of New York? It began as a photography project and morphed into a storytelling project...and, as a storytelling project, it has become wildly popular all over social media. And then there's Upworthy, whose byline is: Because we're all part of the same story. From their website:

We believe that stories about important issues can and should be great stories — stories for everyone, stories that connect us and sometimes even change the world.

"...even change the world." Nathan's story changed David's world. When we stop to listen to the stories of others, those stories change us. I look forward to hearing about the stories that have shaped your life, the stories you tell again and again.