How to Enter a Story: A Listener’s Guide

Every story has a threshold, and we rarely notice when we cross it. It isn’t the first question or the moment the recorder turns on. It happens earlier, in that small, unremarkable space where two people decide whether this conversation will be routine or sacred. To enter a story, you begin with stillness. You let your body arrive before your thoughts do: the phone out of sight, your shoulders soft, your attention no longer split between windows, tabs, and tasks. Presence is the first signal you send, the quiet way of saying, I am not here for the headline; I am here for the whole of you.

Listening, in this sense, is not a technique but a willingness to surrender control. Most of us carry an invisible script into every exchange: what we expect to hear, the advice we plan to give, the moment we’ll step in with a solution so we can leave feeling useful. Entering a story asks you to set that script down. You allow the narrative to wander, to double back, to contradict itself. You resist the urge to clean it up. A life, when spoken aloud, is rarely linear. It arrives in fragments, in scenes, in repetitions. Your work is not to arrange those pieces for the other person, but to trust that what needs to surface will surface if you give it time.