You Can't Fully Listen Until You Feel Heard

Why do so many people feel unheard, and how does that affect their ability to listen to others?

Thaler Pekar has spent more than three decades helping leaders and organizations uncover the stories shaping their cultures, decisions, and relationships. In this episode of 100 Stories, Thaler and Paige explore Narrative Intelligence as something far greater than storytelling. It is the ability to ask for stories, listen for what is missing, welcome contradiction, and recognize the narrative landscape we are already living inside.

Through stories of civic action, a near-drowning, organizational myths, and gathering 178 oral histories for Atlantic Philanthropies, Thaler reveals how stories shape individual identity, institutional culture, and our sense of what is possible.

In this conversation:

• Why we make meaning after an experience, not necessarily while it is happening

• Why leaders must hear the stories beneath the official organizational narrative

• How false stories can quietly control workplace behavior

• Why contradiction is evidence that deeper listening is working

• What it means to listen with curiosity, generosity, graciousness, and courage

• The ethical responsibility involved in holding another person’s story

• Why stories are “input and output, process and product”

• How feeling fully heard changes our capacity to hear others

Learn more about Thaler Pekar and her work:

https://thalerpekar.com/

Discover your story archetypes, hidden patterns, and Narrative Quotient at StoryKeys:

https://storykeys.co/

00:00 Welcome to 100 Stories

01:23 Thaler’s path into story and communication

05:58 Discovering the power of being heard

09:31 The stories that shaped Thaler’s life

10:43 Surviving a near-drowning

14:56 How we make meaning after an experience

19:31 Are we born storytellers?

21:32 The stories organizations tell about themselves

23:20 Why strategy cannot simply be announced

29:12 When a false workplace story controls behavior

31:31 Gathering 178 oral histories

35:50 How to become a better listener

36:34 Why we must feel heard before we can fully listen

39:52 Curiosity and the “doorknobs” of conversation

40:33 Listening as a Narrative Intelligence capacity

41:36 The courage to hear contradiction

47:49 How story sharing creates connection

50:24 The ethics of telling someone else’s story

53:46 Thaler’s definition of Narrative Intelligence

57:00 What Thaler learned from the Narrative Quotient assessment

58:42 Paige’s closing reflection

Subscribe to follow 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project as Paige Williams speaks with 100 thinkers, creators, researchers, leaders, and healers about one central question:

How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

#NarrativeIntelligence #Leadership #storytelling

Music licensed through Soundstripe.

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