I first met Dr. Paul Browde as part of a multi-month intensive men's work program we were both part of. We were just about to break out into a few parallel sessions about various elements of running men’s groups when Paul raised his hand and said something to the effect of “would it be useful to have a breakout session about our personal narratives and how we use them to lead?”
I watched as the heads of 40+ men swiveled to focus on this one unassuming gentleman and witnessed nearly half of the group switch over from whatever session they were planning on going to and instead, go to sit around Paul to listen to him tell his story and share his wisdom about how to share our own stories. That’s the power of story!
Paul is a doctor of psychiatry and a TedX speaker. He has shared the stage with luminaries like Esther Perel, has taught Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and co-founded a storytelling company called Narativ.
Paul has some profound wisdom to share about how to become aware of a different type of story - the stories that tell us, as well as the power of sharing our own stories, and examining the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and to others.
As Paul writes on his site:
We are born in connection, we are wired for connection, and it is through connection that we heal and experience our true aliveness.
I have always felt that stories can be the most powerful elements of communication - indeed, they are the thread that holds together each and every conversation.
Stories are how we connect, heal and come alive.
Listen onward to learn about Paul’s mental models of how to become a space for others to share their stories - to shape your listening as a vessel, a bowl, to receive stories generously.
Narrative is powerful medicine that we can give to ourselves and to the people around us.
Enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources
Paul Browde: Healing through connection
The Power of Two: How Listening Shapes Storytelling
Two Twosomes, Not a Script in Sight
The Masculinity Paradox: Warmup with Paul Browde - Sessions Live by Ester Perel
Minute 8
Paul Browde:
If you express an opinion and say, "Racism's bad," well, you can be agreed with or not agreed with. But if someone tells you their story about their wife and their child and a little story of life, we can't help but empathize and really understand that person's experience. They become a human being for you.
I'm getting back to narrative medicine, which is that I eventually, with a friend, performed my story as a performance for many, many years in theaters, in churches, in funeral parlors. We performed a story in which I told this HIV story. It was seen by one of the people that was launching the narrative medicine program at Columbia, and she invited us and said, "Could you teach what you do? Because if doctors could learn how to listen to the stories of others and to have some fluency with their own stories, that's going to enhance their empathy." And so we taught a course for many years called Co-constructing Narratives, where people learned how to tell an illness story of their own or someone they loved.
Minute 9
Paul Browde:
Once you've told your own illness story or the story of someone you've loved, it really changes how you listen as a doctor. I believe that strongly. A lot of my work has become that. So this HIV, which was at one point such a terrifying and dismal prospect of a future for me, has become for me, the source of so much, what feels like meaningful work in my life. It's such a paradox, the thing that once felt so unthinkable is now, honestly feels like a gift in many ways to me.
Minute 12
Paul Browde:
I think stories can be a very powerful access to emotion. But I think that, talking about Men's Work, one of the ideas that I think about a lot is that our lives are shaped by the stories in the background. There are these meta narratives or larger stories that we don't even see or know exist that we become part of from a very young age. One of them, I felt it very clearly as a boy, was what is a real boy, and then what is a real man? That was there in the background and it affected how I spoke. It affected how I stood. I don't know if I've ever told you the story, but I was once told by a group of boys that I stood like a girl, because I used to cross my legs as I stood, my one foot went in front of the other. The boys at break at school said, "Oh, you stand like a girl." I became hypervigilant about standing in a different way that didn't feel natural for my body and I believe caused me back pain for many years, but it was an imperative that came from the story about what it is to be a real man or a real boy.
There are these stories that tell us. We don't tell them, they tell us. We are unknowing participants in the story arc. We can become present to them. So if I can become present to, oh, there's a story that says that boys have to stand a certain way, boys have to hold their body in a certain way, then I can start to think, do I choose to live with that story governing me or am I okay with being a different kind of boy who doesn't stand that way and then starts to open up a relationship with myself and what I really want?
Minute 17
Paul Browde:
And it's also about what is the story that you tell as a person interacting with the healthcare profession? People with AIDS changed the narrative. They changed the story of what it is to be a patient, because in the 80s this virus came into being, which nobody knew how to deal with and nobody knew how to treat. And because of what we've spoken about already, no one cared to treat. People didn't mind, or seemed not to mind that people were dying. What happened was that the patients themselves started doing the research and thousands of people sat in libraries and taught themselves virology and taught themselves about these drugs and began to understand what needed to happen. The patients educated the doctors. Patients knew way more about AIDS than doctors did in the late 80s, early 90s. It began to change when doctors took on learning it and eventually it became an incredible specialty with some extraordinary doctors who agreed to learn from their patients and agreed to try folk medicine. Because at that time we just didn't know what worked and so people tried everything.
So being an empowered recipient of healthcare, or being someone who leads your own journey or your tells your own story as someone who uses the healthcare system is also part of narrative medicine, not just for the providers to be better teachers, better communicators. Yeah. So, that's part of it.
Minute 20
Paul Browde:
I think where we find ourselves now is in a situation where we really don't know what's going to happen. We don't know how things are going to unfold, both with viruses, is there going to be another variant, but with climate change and with culture, with the way that we interact with one another, we can all feel that we are in a transition and we don't know where we're going. So I think leadership now requires leaders to be vulnerable and to let it be known that they don't know either. It's rather than saying, "I know where we are going and you're going to follow me," is to be able to say, "I don't know where we're going, but I will lead us in the not knowing and I'm right there alongside you in the not knowing."
Minute 25
Paul Browde:
I know that I think I've talked to you about the listening bowl, but it's something that really informs my thinking and my work, which is if you think of listening as a container, like a bowl, and that the speaking of another person takes the shape of the container of your listening. So as I'm speaking to you, my speaking is taking the shape of the bowl of your listening and your listening is generous and it's open and it's expansive. As a result, I find myself feeling free to speak with you. What happens is what comes out of me is actually shaped by how you listen to me. I think this is very important in all relationships, including with couples who I work with a lot, which is, rather than looking at what someone else is saying, to be able to ask the question, how am I listening so that this is what's coming out of their mouth?
Minute 36:
Paul Browde:
I think it's counterintuitive, the kind of listening that it really requires. I think we are so trained to listen as experts. We listen to help. We listen to fix. We listen to change. I think those kinds of listening get in the way of really allowing something new to emerge. And perhaps the best kind of listening we can do is to bring absolutely nothing, literally bring nothing to what the person is speaking, but that doesn't mean not listening. You're bringing presence.
More about Paul
For the past thirty years, I have worked as a clinician. As a doctor, therapist and couples’ guide, I have been trusted with people’s deeply personal experiences; their despair, their joy and their dreams.
I have performed my own personal life story for diverse audiences across the globe, guiding others in how to listen and tell their own stories.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman:
Paul, I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, really. Welcome to the Conversation Factory and thanks for making this space in your life.
Paul Browde:
Thank you, Daniel. It's so great to be with you. I'm really excited about this.
Daniel Stillman:
So for me, the term narrative medicine came across my life because of you, and the putting of those two words together, sort of put my head back, and then the conversation that we had, I guess, a couple of months now to talk about story medicine. It's a really beautiful topic and I want to unpeel as many layers of the onion as we can. So for those folks who don't know anything about narrative medicine and story medicine, can you put it in context? It's a big ask, I know, but I know you're up to the task.
Paul Browde:
I'll try. What's interesting about it is it's a field that is evolving. Anything that I say it is, it won't be tomorrow, because it'll have changed already because it's a new field. People have brought together the field of medicine and the field of narrative and the field of story, and have them talk to one another. I first came across it when I was asked to teach in the Columbia University Narrative Medicine master's program. The intention of the master's program was to teach healthcare professionals how to listen to the people that consult them. You could say to teach doctors how to listen to patients, but it was broader than that, and the idea being that medicine has swung so far into the technical, into checklists.
Paul Browde:
As a doctor, you literally have tens of checklists in your mind as you go through asking questions and you may even have a checklist these days on a computer. So for many people, when you go to your doctor, they sit and look at the computer, ask you questions and then check off yes or no in front of you. While that may be effective in getting to a particular problem, it doesn't really give you a sense of the whole person and the whole person's story and what may be informing the health situation that they're showing up with.
Paul Browde:
So the metaphor of narrative is really, how can we bring, a way we might approach a book, for example. How would we read a book? You read a book with an open mind. You are willing to be taken along on a journey of the teller that takes you to all kinds of different places in the teller's story. Can you bring that kind of listening to a patient?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Paul Browde:
And really be curious about who this person is and what is their story. I had spent many years, I am a doctor, so I'm a psychiatrist and I'm a doctor. For many years I've worked as a doctor, but early in my career, I also discovered myself to be a patient, and at the age of 25 was diagnosed with HIV, much to my absolute horror and shock at the time. This was 1986. At that time it was a death sentence. It was a really terrifying place to live, and in fact, the way that I was treated early on by doctors was very much a checklist, and they didn't know what checklist to use even because AIDS hadn't been treated very much. I felt reduced to this condition that was living in my body and I couldn't talk about it to anyone. So obviously to cut a long story short-
Daniel Stillman:
For people who are listening who do not realize, who were not either alive or part of the conversation back then, it was...
Paul Browde:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
... incredibly... there was so much fear around it and fear of the gay men's population. There was revision. So there was a sense of total rejection of this. I heard you talk about this in your TEDx talk, this idea that the patient with this disease is beneath or below us. It's hard for us to imagine. I think it's hard for somebody to imagine now that that was the attitude, but it was not a whole person. You were a disease and that made you... look, I've watched, and we've talked about this before. I've watched two of my great mentors die slowly and terribly of that disease and it was such a scary thing at the time because we knew so little about it.
Paul Browde:
Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel Stillman:
For you to feel like you had to hide that part of you as a professional, I understand. I understand in the sense of empathize with. I can empathize with how hard that was to hide that wholeness of yourself.
Paul Browde:
Yeah, it was very painful and it didn't even occur to me at that time that there was anything unfair about that or wrong about it. It's just the way it was. I think the fact that it was a virus that was transmitted either sexually or through drug use further stigmatized it. And then there were some people who received it through blood transfusions, and that, it was as if those were the people who were considered harmless, or what's the word? They were innocent, whereas the others had somehow done this to themselves and those were actually words spoken. People spoke the words that these people are doing it to themselves. It's God's wrath. Talk about a story shaping how people felt about themselves.
Paul Browde:
But for me and in my personal journey, I came to a point with a lot of support and great privilege actually, that I was never thrown out of my family. I was never thrown out of my friendship group. I was able to speak publicly about it. What that allowed me to do was to talk about, tell my story, just tell my story publicly to people. That became a source of power for me, being able to tell my story, and what I mean by power, was that it allowed me to really use my whole self to make a difference to other people. Once my story had been heard, I was invited to come and speak to people with AIDS, living in Africa, in Senegal and then in South Africa, and to just tell my story. The telling of a story of being a doctor who has HIV and who is alive and here to tell the tale, was really the story that needed to be told because people were feeling so hopeless and many, millions of people have died of this.
Paul Browde:
I began to learn not only the power of my own personal story, but the power of people telling their personal stories. I was very lucky to be able to work with various groups of people who were marginalized by the world. So sex workers, IV drug users, people with AIDS, these are all... and the Roma people, who are otherwise known as the gypsies in Eastern Europe who are very poorly treated and it's still acceptable to be racist about the Roma. We ran workshops with people using storytelling as a way of breaking down that stigma so that through your story you become humanized. If you express an opinion and say, "Racism's bad," well, you can be agreed with or not agreed with. But if someone tells you their story about their wife and their child and a little story of life, we can't help but empathize and really understand that person's experience. They become a human being for you.
Paul Browde:
I'm getting back to narrative medicine, which is that I eventually, with a friend, performed my story as a performance for many, many years in theaters, in churches, in funeral parlors. We performed a story in which I told this HIV story. It was seen by one of the people that was launching the narrative medicine program at Columbia, and she invited us and said, "Could you teach what you do? Because if doctors could learn how to listen to the stories of others and to have some fluency with their own stories, that's going to enhance their empathy." And so we taught a course for many years called Co-constructing Narratives, where people learned how to tell an illness story of their own or someone they loved.
Paul Browde:
Once you've told your own illness story or the story of someone you've loved, it really changes how you listen as a doctor. I believe that strongly. A lot of my work has become that. So this HIV, which was at one point such a terrifying and dismal prospect of a future for me, has become for me, the source of so much, what feels like meaningful work in my life. It's such a paradox, the thing that once felt so unthinkable is now, honestly feels like a gift in many ways to me.
Daniel Stillman:
There's another paradox of the story that I want to unpack, because you and I met through Men's Work where I feel like the ask is to be present with emotion almost without story and the stripping away of story. I feel like with narrative medicine, it seems like story is about humanizing ourselves and empowering ourselves by sharing our story and to enter into other people's stories. In Men's Work, there's this idea that we strip away the story and we come into the present. Then there's a third aspect, which is the stories that run our lives. Not all of the stories that we're telling about ourselves are helpful stories. I don't know if there's a triangle of narrative that I'm seeing in my mind of there's this powerful aspect of story and then there's limiting aspects of story.
Paul Browde:
Interesting. Yeah, I think it's so true. It is a paradox. I think that at different times we need different things. I think there is a way of telling a story in which you are not present for the telling. It becomes habitual and you may as well be reciting it off by heart. I know that for certain stories, particularly when they've been very painful, you can detach from the story and you can hear someone tell a story about the most terrible things that happened to them with absolutely no emotion. It feels really disconcerting to listen. If someone brings emotion to the telling of a story, so they allow themselves to really feel the experience of the telling of the story, sometimes what happens is emotion arises. If emotion arises, you don't just dampen down the emotion and plow through with the telling. Then there's a really good time to stop and allow the emotion to be there.
Paul Browde:
I think stories can be a very powerful access to emotion. But I think that, talking about Men's Work, one of the ideas that I think about a lot is that our lives are shaped by the stories in the background. There are these meta narratives or larger stories that we don't even see or know exist that we become part of from a very young age. One of them, I felt it very clearly as a boy, was what is a real boy, and then what is a real man? That was there in the background and it affected how I spoke. It affected how I stood. I don't know if I've ever told you the story, but I was once told by a group of boys that I stood like a girl, because I used to cross my legs as I stood, my one foot went in front of the other. The boys at break at school said, "Oh, you stand like a girl." I became hypervigilant about standing in a different way that didn't feel natural for my body and I believe caused me back pain for many years, but it was an imperative that came from the story about what it is to be a real man or a real boy.
Paul Browde:
There are these stories that tell us. We don't tell them, they tell us. We are unknowing participants in the story arc. We can become present to them. So if I can become present to, oh, there's a story that says that boys have to stand a certain way, boys have to hold their body in a certain way, then I can start to think, do I choose to live with that story governing me or am I okay with being a different kind of boy who doesn't stand that way and then starts to open up a relationship with myself and what I really want?
Paul Browde:
So those stories, that story of being a real man, a real boy, I think are so present in men's lives and I think shut down a lot of freedom around feeling. When you think about it, the fact that certain human emotions are taboo for men to feel, it's absurd if you think about it. Men are allowed to laugh, but not to cry. They're equally part of our physiology. They're just there. So I think for me, the getting away from the story in the Men's Work that you and I have been together in, has been a wonderful relief as well. It always starts with a bit of a story and then into the emotion and then allowing myself to inhabit my body. I call these physical. There are stories from the body that are not necessarily told in words. They are told in bodily sensations, the way one holds one's body, and the freedom with which one is allowed to move one's body. These are all, I think of them as stories as well.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. They're patterns that we live in. And as you say, they're stories that tell us. We're just actors in the stories until we choose and choose a different path. So in a way, if we're building this architecture, narrative medicine has this heritage of being for doctors to become more human and relating with their patients, but story medicine, it seemed in the conversations we've had, feels like it's for everyone.
Paul Browde:
Yes. I think that narrative medicine, there may just be different words to describe a field, which is a very large field. There are narrative medicine programs now all over the world, interestingly enough, that arose at the same time. There seems to have been this simultaneous arising of a field, even though the people who ran those different programs didn't necessarily know each other, because it was a need. It is a need.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Paul Browde:
And it's also about what is the story that you tell as a person interacting with the healthcare profession? People with AIDS changed the narrative. They changed the story of what it is to be a patient, because in the 80s this virus came into being, which nobody knew how to deal with and nobody knew how to treat. And because of what we've spoken about already, no one cared to treat. People didn't mind, or seemed not to mind that people were dying. What happened was that the patients themselves started doing the research and thousands of people sat in libraries and taught themselves virology and taught themselves about these drugs and began to understand what needed to happen. The patients educated the doctors. Patients knew way more about AIDS than doctors did in the late 80s, early 90s. It began to change when doctors took on learning it and eventually it became an incredible specialty with some extraordinary doctors who agreed to learn from their patients and agreed to try folk medicine. Because at that time we just didn't know what worked and so people tried everything.
Paul Browde:
So being an empowered recipient of healthcare, or being someone who leads your own journey or your tells your own story as someone who uses the healthcare system is also part of narrative medicine, not just for the providers to be better teachers, better communicators. Yeah. So, that's part of it.
Daniel Stillman:
The thing we were talking about right before we started recording, this question of what does it mean to take story medicine into the workplace? Because we're talking about like this, narrative medicine is working at a very, very raw juncture. It's life and death and it's people taking responsibility for their healing and doctors becoming more human. I can really see the power of telling your own story and of owning your own transformation seems to me to have myriad applications for leadership development, I think. But I'm curious how it shows up in your work now and as your edge as you're leaning into this.
Paul Browde:
Yeah. It's really interesting. In the last several months from many different sources, I've been approached with people who would like to learn more about story medicine in the workplace. How can we bring this into the workplace? I think part of it is, as the pandemic has happened, first of all, the distinction between work and home has been blurred. People are literally in their homes working. And you couldn't say to people during the pandemic, "That doesn't belong at work, keep that for home." The child is literally running through the room while you're at a work meeting. You can't tell people to not do that. Everybody seemed to understand that during the pandemic. That boundary of work, home began to break down somewhat. While that was challenging, for some people, it was actually very helpful.
Paul Browde:
I think where we find ourselves now is in a situation where we really don't know what's going to happen. We don't know how things are going to unfold, both with viruses, is there going to be another variant, but with climate change and with culture, with the way that we interact with one another, we can all feel that we are in a transition and we don't know where we're going. So I think leadership now requires leaders to be vulnerable and to let it be known that they don't know either. It's rather than saying, "I know where we are going and you're going to follow me," is to be able to say, "I don't know where we're going, but I will lead us in the not knowing and I'm right there alongside you in the not knowing." It's a very different place to speak from, and I think once you start saying that you don't know what, what immediately emerges are emotions. It feels scary to say that. It feels vulnerable. It may feel shameful for a person who leads a larger organization to say, "I'm not sure," or "I don't know," might feel shameful.
Paul Browde:
So to be able to just recognize that and know that even those feelings are valid and acceptable in the workplace, and I don't think people are going to settle for less. People don't want to be treated anymore like objects that get told what to do. They don't want that. They're going to leave and find other jobs. This whole idea of the great resignation, people are leaving because the workplace doesn't work for them anymore.
Paul Browde:
Interestingly enough, I just led a workshop this morning with a group of people in South Africa who run an organization that feeds starving children. We spent four weeks with all the people that work for that organization sharing their own personal stories with one another, stories where they came from and stories as to why they felt moved to work in the sector that feeds starving children. Each person had a personal story to tell that linked them to the work they were doing. Some people had grown up very poor and didn't have food. Some people had grown up on farms and had to milk a cow. These were stories which really showed them aspects of one another that they didn't know. And then today, what we did was have them just tell a story about the future of that organization, how they dreamed it would go. You can also tell a story about the future that is different from the same old story based on the past. The future could be an invention of something new.
Paul Browde:
Given the environment that had been created through the sharing of personal stories, what they came up with for the future of their organization was so beautiful and powerful. And the number one idea that they came up with as a whole group, I said nothing about this, it came from them, was love. We bring love into our workplace and we bring love into our communities, which would've been my hope for them but I could never have told them that. I might have been told that was woo woo. But once the personal story is present in the listening, what starts to happen is people are creative and vulnerable about how they speak the future.
Daniel Stillman:
Say more about that. I feel like there's a little bit more, before I...
Paul Browde:
Yeah. Well, I would like to just, I know that I think I've talked to you about the listening bowl, but it's something that really informs my thinking and my work, which is if you think of listening as a container, like a bowl, and that the speaking of another person takes the shape of the container of your listening. So as I'm speaking to you, my speaking is taking the shape of the bowl of your listening and your listening is generous and it's open and it's expansive. As a result, I find myself feeling free to speak with you. What happens is what comes out of me is actually shaped by how you listen to me. I think this is very important in all relationships, including with couples who I work with a lot, which is, rather than looking at what someone else is saying, to be able to ask the question, how am I listening so that this is what's coming out of their mouth?
Paul Browde:
If something is emerging from their mouth that you don't like, that feels confrontational or aggressive, think how can I shift the way I'm listening? Because that bowl can become obstructed, it can be filled with obstacles. So agreeing or disagreeing, are you listening to agree or disagree, really narrows down the listening. Am I listening to like or not like what the person says? A lot of times we listen waiting to speak. It's really waiting for an appropriate moment to just bat in and start speaking that, we all do that. So when you notice that's what you're doing, you can actually say to yourself, okay, I'm just listening right now. You did it a couple of minutes ago. When you said to me, "I think there's more for me to listen to before I have something to say," and you allowed yourself that space, which then allows me the space to keep speaking. I think it's a useful metaphor. All these are metaphors, but they do help us become better listeners and then help the people around us become better storytellers because we are listening more openly.
Daniel Stillman:
This is so interesting. And by the way, I feel like 90% of the reason why I have this podcast is it puts me on my best behavior to be a better listener and learn more and have a more open space. One of the things I heard in one of your talks, which maybe I want to unpack. You said stories are what happened. And in one sense, I think that is true, that stories are, these are the facts. But the other thing that I'm hearing you say is stories are what we hear, and stories are what we construct from the meta stories that are happening. It's hard to know that another facilitator facilitating that workshop, would they have constructed, well, this is just about love? Would they have gotten there? What would their meta story have been without you there listening for that?
Paul Browde:
I think that's... no, go ahead.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I guess this becomes what is story based leadership? What are we listening for? How are we shaping the stories that are happening around us?
Paul Browde:
Yeah. It's so complex. I think that when I say stories are what happened, what I'm trying to do is to separate the story from one's interpretation of the story, which of course you could think of as a story in itself. But the idea that something is good or bad, or something is right or wrong, is not a story. It's an opinion, and it's a judgment. Yes, it may be shaped by some meta story that's in the background, but in terms of as you're listening to somebody speaking, if you notice yourself wanting to argue with them, I have found it to be very unlikely that they're telling you a story. Can't really argue with someone's story. I think there are different kinds of narratives, and one of them is the personal story.
Paul Browde:
When you tell me your story, you don't say, "Someone treated me abominably, they were absolutely terrible." We might all agree, but it isn't what your story is. What I'd like rather is to hear you describe in detail what they did, that you came to the conclusion that it was abominable or terrible. In fact, I co-founded a company some years ago and we created a methodology, which we call the what happened method. It tries to keep people very close to describing telling a story with only describing what happened in terms of the senses. What could you see here, smell, taste, or touch, and anything else is interpretation. What's interesting about doing it that way is that people start to feel far more than when they give these sweeping interpretations or tell the moral of the story. They actually start to feel and then the feelings can emerge and be present.
Daniel Stillman:
Because they're skipping so many steps. This feels like two things. One is aspects of nonviolent communication, the ability to distinguish between facts and feelings, and between feelings and needs, and needs and requests. But also, in our Men's Work, I've facilitated several of these. I've been in several of these where you have a charge with someone, and I feel like we're doing the what happened and really getting, well, this is what happened for me, and getting the other person to say what happened for them and holding space for both of those and really putting it all out on the table.
Paul Browde:
Yes, absolutely. It's always about what happened for you or what happened to you. It's not some understanding that something really happened. We know that when there's conflict there's two very different stories that each person might tell. I think the Men's Work that we've done, which is so powerful, is when you've got a group of people supporting the teller, literally standing behind them, holding them if necessary, as they allow their bodies to fully express the emotion that goes along with the story and something transforms when that happens. Then you allow the other person to do the same thing and together come up with some shared space.
Paul Browde:
Another piece of, my mind can go in a million directions, but another piece of another metaphor that I love to work with is that our relationship lives in the space between us. It doesn't live in your experience or in my experience. There is actually a relational space between us that we contend and that we can feed, or that can become polluted and cluttered. Then what we need to do is find a way to clean out that space. I think of the work we see in the men's groups where people have a charge with one another, is in fact a way of de polluting the space, de polluting the relational space between them.
Daniel Stillman:
And that space is filled with stories. If I think about a team and when there's challenges on a team, the challenges, people holding different stories about each other and about themselves and what people think of me and what I can or I can't do.
Paul Browde:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
When it comes to this. Sorry, go ahead, Paul. What did that [inaudible 00:33:13]?
Paul Browde:
No, I was going to say, and I think the hardest thing about that is being willing to accept that another person's story is different from your story, because, and I think this is where the Men's Work tries to get away from story, is that we can identify so much with our story that we think of it as who we are. Then if someone else has a different story, we feel threatened. Our very survival can feel at stake if our story isn't received in the way we want to tell it. I think part of the listening, there's always a process of listening and telling that when we are listening, we are letting go of any attachment that we have to our own stories and how things should turn out.
Paul Browde:
This is really interesting in the health space, so that people, for example, who have illnesses, a particular kind of cancer for which there is a lot of information. There's already a script for how you're supposed to live with an illness. Sometimes I think most people want the script to be that you have a terrible illness, you go through really difficult treatment, and you come out on the other end and you're okay and you learn a really powerful lesson and you're grateful for being alive. That's the story that is expected of people and people feel like failures if they don't adhere to that particular story arc. That's not the usual story art for a lot of people. For a lot of people the story feels utterly chaotic. It feels desperate. It doesn't necessarily have a good ending, and some people really don't want to learn from it at all. They just want it out of their lives and never to think about it again. As the listener, you don't want to impose on a teller a particular narrative arc, a particular outcome, and it's complicated.
Paul Browde:
So when you speak about the workshop that I led this morning, was I listening for love, and that's how someone spoke it? Possibly. It's possible that it was there. I wasn't consciously listening for it. I think it's what I try and listen for everywhere I go. I think it's in the background of how I want to live, but yeah, but I don't want to impose that on a group of people because it doesn't work either, to tell an organization, "You need to love one another, be a loving organization." It's just words and tomorrow it's gone.
Daniel Stillman:
That's just telling.
Paul Browde:
The role of listener and the role of teller, exactly. That's just imposing, and just being aware that everybody has a different way, different story, and it's okay.
Daniel Stillman:
For people listening who want to be able to create more of a space, I feel like when we talk about emergence, this is what we talk about. There's this third body between the two people, this space of relation, which is filled with stories. To create a space where something new can emerge requires maybe a different type of listening than we know how to do right now.
Paul Browde:
I think so. I think so. I think it's counterintuitive, the kind of listening that it really requires. I think we are so trained to listen as experts. We listen to help. We listen to fix. We listen to change. I think those kinds of listening get in the way of really allowing something new to emerge. And perhaps the best kind of listening we can do is to bring absolutely nothing, literally bring nothing to what the person is speaking, but that doesn't mean not listening. You're bringing presence. I'm trained a couple's therapy work, which my teachers taught us about a metaphor, which is that there is a bridge that crosses the relational space. Between you and me, there is a space in which our relationship lives and coming from each of our hearts is a narrow bridge to the other.
Paul Browde:
What we can do is we can walk one at a time, so one is the listener and one is the teller, one at a time we can walk over the bridge and visit one another. The visitor is the one who listens and the host is the teller, and there are certain rules, principles for what it takes to be a good host. So if someone's coming into your world, you want to be slow and careful about how you introduce them to your world. You want to be res respectful, the fact that they're a stranger in your world. You become a very different kind of teller. You have compassion for your listener. Then as a listener, you want to agree to leave your preconceptions behind. You are not coming into another person's world to try and fix or change anything about them. You are just there, full presence with this other person.
Paul Browde:
I think that when you ask what can people think of? I think if you sit and listen to someone and you just imagine that you're visiting, there's nothing to do. You're like a tourist in a foreign land. You don't have to do anything when you walk around Florence. You just observe. You're just in Florence. You see the food, you smell the smells, you see the light, and you experience Florence. We can do that with one another too, and just experience what it's like to be you in your world and there is nothing I have to do.
Daniel Stillman:
This visual of this narrow bridge that maybe is so narrow that I can't bring anything with me, I can only bring myself, I have to leave everything else behind on the other side. Something I often ask people to do is, they have a choice with the next turn. When somebody stops and takes a breath, we can say, oh, and come over to my side of the bridge, or we can stay on their side of the bridge for a little longer and ask for a little bit more.
Daniel Stillman:
I don't think I've ever really thought about the, there's this art of hosting for those people who are listening, who have been exposed to... it's a way of thinking about facilitation and meetings and a gathering, but to think about one conversation at the conversational level, that two people are having a gathering and that when I'm speaking, I'm hosting, is a very, very interesting narrative. It changes the story of what's happening in that moment.
Paul Browde:
Yeah, and it's really helpful to practice it when you're not in a state of conflict with one another, because when you are in a state of conflict it's very difficult to surrender trying to be right, or trying to fix or trying to change the other person. But if you practice just talking about good things, if I wanted to host you into a precious moment of my life that has nothing to do with you, but that happened to me... When I was on safari and saw this incredible troop of elephants walking through the wild, and you just come in and listen, then you can get good at it. You can get good at listening to me in that way. Then when we are having conflict, I can say to you, "Can I host you right now? And let me tell you how you are occurring for me, what's happening for me about the way you've treated me. Then you can come over." It's challenging, but you can actually just listen and get it. And all there is to say when you come over as a visitor with a host is, "Thank you. Thanks for letting me know." That's all there is.
Paul Browde:
I know it's difficult. I would hate anyone to think that when I say this is something that I can just do all the time. It's a practice, just like going to the gym as a practice. Listening is a lifelong practice. I think you can probably become more conscious and maybe better at it, but you never get there. The minute you think you're there, you're not there anymore because now it's not about the unknown. It's about what you now know and that changes it.
Daniel Stillman:
But the flip side, the art of hosting, I feel like there is a, maybe it's your background in performance where you really bring an heightened state of being. I've told you this story many times, like at the end of the program we were in together, when you said, "Oh, and maybe we could talk about our personal narratives," and you talked about the importance of a personal narrative, and everyone just sort of, just settled in and perked up, and not everyone has the capacity to create a dramatic present. I don't know if it has to do with the musicality of your voice or the variance of the tones that you use naturally, or your ability to describe things as they happened with clarity, but there is something in your ability to host a story that I think is really powerful. When you're helping people with story, is it important to do work on that side of the bridge, on the hosting side?
Paul Browde:
Yeah, very much so. You can learn. I appreciate what you're saying about me, and I hear that. At the same time, I believe there are principles that can be taught about what makes a story. Just the idea that you are a host and you're leading someone, it's not just that they're there and you can go wherever you like. If you're going to tell a story, I like to think of you as an airline pilot, who's going to take off and know where you are headed. Most important thing is have a direction that you're going, and even to know you are ending, so that as you start to tell a story, you do know where you're going. Yes, there may be turbulence along the way. You may be pulled by something that arises that takes you into a different direction, but eventually you come back and safely bring your listeners into land.
Paul Browde:
One of the problems I see with stories often is that people end a story too many times, or that people end a story and then give a moral and then give a whole lecture about why the story taught what it taught, which isn't necessary. I think there are some basic principles. Then of course, connection to your own body as you tell, the use of your voice, the use of breath, the use of pause and silence, tone, volume, all these things, they're learnable and can be really helpful for people to use in learning how to really be good hosts. I love that you're seeing this as the art of hosting, because I have I've thought of the art of hosting, but I think the art of hosting is much greater than just being sensitive to your listener. It's also what kind of teller are you.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. One thing that folks who are listening to this won't be able to see is, when you were bringing the airline pilot's mindset in, you touched the temples of your forehead and you drew the arc from the beginning to the end, the holding in your mind of the whole journey. I think there's something really powerful and profound about holding that whole arc.
Paul Browde:
When I work with people around telling their stories, one of the exercises is to come up with a last line. You don't need to know what the whole story is, but you do need to know your last line. When you speak your last line, that's it. Now that's going to be your last line. Now start and see where we go, but bring us to your last line, bring us there. There's a directionality, there's a vector in telling that really makes it more compelling, makes it more interesting to listen to.
Paul Browde:
But I'll say something more about that is, choosing a last line of a personal story is painful, because it means that you have to accept that the story's going to end and all the other possible last lines are no longer available. They're not yours. Those are different stories. I think there's sadness in that. I actually think there's grief in that, because I think that ending a story is in some ways a rehearsal for our own mortality, that we have to accept that it's going to be over. I think that's why so many of us struggle to choose the last line of the story.
Paul Browde:
I once went through a transcript of me speaking. I transcribed me leading a workshop. I was so shocked that at the end of almost every sentence, every block of speaking, I said, "And." I would speak for a while and then I would go, "and" and then I'd breathe. But the and, I realized, was a way of keeping open the possibility that I would continue. Once I was aware of it, it took a lot to stop saying that.
Daniel Stillman:
Can we tell our personal narrative when we don't know where it is going to be going, when there's so many untold chapters of our lives?
Paul Browde:
Yeah. I think to start off with, we do. We have no idea where we're going and that's where I think the listener just being present, and just the listener can also bring encouragement and just saying, "Tell me more. I'm so interested. Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more." And we start to discover our own personal stories. They don't live always at the level of consciousness. I think I'm talking about finally, when you have a story and you want to craft it and work with it and tell it, then I'm talking about some of these principles. B
Paul Browde:
ut when you're excavating a story, you're actually just trying to see what is this story, what is it about, there are no rules. All there is is just speak. The one thing I would say notice is if you keep saying the same thing over and over again. There may be something deeper if you find yourself doing that. There are phases to telling a story and the first phase is excavation, and then there's construction, and then there's mapping, and then there's delivery.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. Paul, I'm shocked to look at the time to realize that we're coming up against our time together. I want to be...
Paul Browde:
Wow.
Daniel Stillman:
... I want to be respectful of your time and of all of our mortality. Is there anything I haven't asked you that is important to be said? What remains unsaid?
Paul Browde:
Well, no, I mean, I would love to, if anyone, I'd love to hear from people who listen to this. I'm working at the moment in three areas. The one is what we calling purposeful leadership. I'm really beginning to see that leadership is not about the role of the leader. Leadership is a way of being that is our birthright. Every one of us leads our own lives and we lead other people, and so how we are with ourselves and with other people really is the kind of leader that we are and doesn't mean standing up and being a big, powerful speaker and extrovert. It can be very quiet and it can be very internal. So purposeful leadership.
Paul Browde:
The other is the idea of bringing one's whole self to work. How do you bring your whole self into the workplace? It doesn't mean sharing every single thing that's ever happened to you, but it is about allowing your whole self to enter the door and not having to leave parts of yourself at the door because they've banished. Then the third is this idea of story as medicine.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Paul Browde:
And so if anyone has anything to say, I don't know if you could say my website, but...
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, of course. Yes.
Paul Browde:
... or my email, I'd love to hear from people.
Daniel Stillman:
Where, if people want to find more about you, should they go to?
Paul Browde:
More about me is my website, which is Paul Browde, P-A-U-L B-R-O-W-D-E.com. My email is PBrowde, P-B-R-O-W-D-E @mac.com. I'd love to hear from people.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I hope at some point we can do a part two. I feel like we literally just scratched the surface of this very vast and important topic. I'm really grateful, Paul. I'm looking forward to finding the hidden threads in this conversation.
Paul Browde:
Well, I thank you and I really appreciate your listening. I really learned something today. So there was something about your listening that allowed me to see and to hear myself in new ways, which I really appreciate very much. Love to be listened to by you more. Thank you.
Daniel Stillman:
That is such a crushingly large compliment coming from you. I really appreciate that. I'll sit with that. We'll call scene. I'll stop recording.