The Stories That Stay With Us: Belonging, Courage, and the Meaning We Find Later

Why do some stories stay with us long after the moment we first hear them?

In this week’s Leadership Story Talks debrief, Jerome Deroy and Julienne Ryan reflected on Narativ’s latest Stories That Shaped Us LIVE event, where Carlo Odicino, Anna Vafeiadou, and Dr. Sona Sherratt each shared a personal story about an experience that shaped who they are.

What struck both Jerome and Julienne was something that seems to happen every time these live storytelling events take place: a common thread emerges. The storytellers do not plan together. They do not know what the others are going to say. Their stories are prepared individually, and the event is not curated around a predetermined theme. Yet, somehow, the stories begin speaking to one another.

This time, the thread was belonging.

When Stories Define the Words We Overuse

Leadership, transformation, belonging, change, courage — these are words we use so often that they can begin to lose their meaning.

Jerome reflected that one of the most valuable things personal storytelling does is bring those words back to life. Instead of talking about belonging as an abstract concept, the three storytellers defined it through lived experience.

Carlo’s story explored what happens when someone on a team feels excluded or disconnected from a leader, and what that feedback can teach us about the gap between intention and impact. Anna’s story approached belonging from a different direction. She was leaving an organization where she had built a career and was deeply valued, and her decision to start her own practice disrupted the expectations of the people around her. Their reactions, in different ways, reflected the idea that this was where she belonged. Leaving required her to redefine that for herself.

Then Sona brought the theme directly into focus through her research and personal experience. Her story explored the ways we adapt ourselves when we enter a new culture or environment and try to understand what is expected of us. Taken together, the stories asked the same human question from different directions: where do I belong, and what do I have to do to belong here?

That is what stories can do that abstract language often cannot. They give a word like belonging a face, a voice, a setting, and a consequence.

The Meaning Changes With the Listener

One of the things Jerome emphasized in the debrief is that these connections are not fixed. Belonging was the theme that stood out most strongly to him, but another listener might hear something entirely different. That is part of what makes storytelling so powerful. Stories do not arrive with only one interpretation.

Julienne, reflecting on the same event a week later, found herself thinking about journey and courage. She heard the courage it takes to receive difficult feedback and remain open to it, the courage to leave a career and step into something unknown, and the courage involved in moving across countries and cultures while continuing to reshape a sense of self.

Those themes were always present in the stories, but they became more visible to her with time. That is an important distinction. We often assume the impact of a story happens at the moment it is told. Sometimes it does. But sometimes the real meaning begins to emerge days or weeks later.

A story keeps working on us.

The Right Story for the Moment

Julienne also reflected on the way the LIVE event is prepared.

There are technical checks and rehearsals, but the storytellers are not asked to memorize scripts. They are not coached into polished, fixed performances. The preparation is deliberately light enough for something alive to remain in the telling. That means there is always an element of risk. The stories are personal, they are going live, and there may be small changes in wording, emphasis, rhythm, or emotion depending on the moment. Yet again and again, the right story seems to show up.

Even when someone has told a version of a story before, it becomes different because it is being told now, to this audience, in this context. That is something easily lost when we think of storytelling only as performance. A story is not a fixed object. It changes according to who is listening, what the storyteller has lived since the last telling, and what the moment itself asks for.

Stories Continue After the Event Ends

Jerome reflected on something else that had happened during the week after the LIVE show.

The stories stayed with him. A week later, he was still making new connections. A different conversation might remind him of one of the stories. A situation might suddenly illuminate something that one of the storytellers had said. That, he suggested, is part of the deeper value of listening. We often focus on the benefit of telling a personal story. Telling helps us reflect, make meaning, connect with others, and understand ourselves differently. But there is also enormous value in being the listener.

A story can enter our memory and become available later, sometimes when we need it most. We may hear a situation differently because we remember someone else’s experience. We may recognize a pattern in our own leadership because a story gave us language for it. Sometimes we carry the story before we know what we are going to do with it.

Listening Is Not Passive

That idea returns to something central to Narativ’s work: listening is not a passive activity. The listener helps shape the experience of the storyteller, but the storyteller also leaves something with the listener. There is an exchange. When we give a story our full attention, we are not simply waiting for the ending. We are making meaning as we listen. We are connecting what we hear to our own experiences, memories, values, and questions.

That is why the same story can affect different people in completely different ways. One person may hear a story about belonging, another may hear courage, while someone else may hear identity, leadership, failure, reinvention, or loss. None of those interpretations necessarily cancel the others out.

The richness is in the overlap.

Stories Give Us Something to Use

Jerome also suggested that a story may become useful long after the event itself. Weeks later, we may find ourselves in a conversation about someone struggling to fit into a team, and Sona’s story comes back. We may be coaching someone through a career transition and suddenly think of Anna. We may be working with a leader who cares deeply about their people but whose impact does not match their intention, and Carlo’s story becomes a way into the conversation.

Julienne joked that she had already been “talking about people behind their backs” and using the stories in her coaching sessions. That is exactly how stories travel. They move beyond the person who first told them. They become reference points. They create language. They offer examples we can carry into other rooms.

Belonging, Courage, and the Story That Finds You

One of the pleasures of the LIVE storytelling format is that the themes are not decided in advance. There is no agenda saying: today we will explore belonging. Instead, three people arrive with three personal stories, and the connections emerge naturally. This time, belonging became visible. So did courage. So did journey, reinvention, identity, feedback, and change.

And perhaps another theme will only become clear later. That may be one of the most compelling reasons to keep listening to personal stories. We do not always know what we are looking for when we hear them. Sometimes the story finds us first.

What Are You Still Carrying?

A week after the event, Jerome and Julienne were still thinking about these stories.

That alone says something. The most powerful stories are not always the ones that produce an immediate reaction. Sometimes they are the ones that linger quietly, then surface later in another conversation, another decision, another moment when we suddenly understand why we remembered them. So perhaps the question after hearing a story is not simply, “What did I learn?”

Maybe it is: what stayed with me? Which image, sentence, moment, or feeling is still there, and what might it be asking me to notice now? Because stories do not end when the storyteller stops speaking. Sometimes that is when their work begins.