Blog post reflecting on our intentions
Trying to be an antidote to everything corporate, formal, or superficial
Over more than 2 years, our intentions for Stories Across Borders have been through a few evolutions.
It began with just one idea: We wanted a space to talk openly about human, complicated and controversial questions, and still remain friends.
We wanted to gather people around this mindset – and to be really clear about what should happen if there are disagreements in the room. Because we believe that some of the most important, life-and-world-changing conversations are the ones where deep honesty and openness aren’t radical, but normal. And when we are all truly honest, all people being different, we are definitely going to disagree on some things.
Since the first session we shared this “house rule” which was to treat any disagreement as separate from you and me, as a third entity in the room… as something we can look at together and try to understand in a collaborative way, without allowing it to come between us. (I don’t know where this concept came from exactly – let us know if you know where I might have read about it?)
Over time, our intentions haven’t really changed – but we’ve realised what makes Stories Across Borders different from other spaces, and what makes the difference between a great Stories session and one that is “only okay”:
Speak to your personal experience. The best Stories sessions are the ones where everybody feels safe to share openly, not just what their opinion is or what they’ve read about (there are plenty of spaces to do that!), but to share something from their own lived experience.
Something magical happened when we hosted a session on perspective and judgment, and a guest had a sudden “epiphany” (their words) about the generational wounds which still impact their relationship with their parents today. In a room where we talk human to human amongst strangers, connection goes much deeper than any intellectual debate ever could.
Listen with loving curiosity. On personal or controversial topics, if someone has a different point of view than me, my first instinct is often to get defensive – or to back away from the conversation altogether. When we practice curiosity, with love and compassion at its core, it might still feel a bit uncomfortable, but it’s also a great opportunity to learn and grow from how the other person experiences the world.
In one Stories session on the topic of gender roles, two guests with very different personal viewpoints stayed in the room with loving curiosity towards each other, trying to understand the other person’s point of view. I (Hedvig) was one of those two, and that conversation still shapes the way I think about the topic, 2 years later.
Be open to radical (un-)learning. Stories is a space where we plant seeds for change: New ideas, viewpoints, movements – who knows? We’ve deliberately been very open-minded about where these conversations will take us. We purposefully stay with the questions that come up along the way, rather than try to jump quickly to a solution. We’re often surprised by how topics and questions are interwoven, even though they might seem like unrelated tangents. Too many spaces demand that we have all the answers. But the most important questions are not neatly resolved in 2 hours or less – they take months, maybe years or even decades to mature.
These intentions aren’t just “pretty” slogans like the ones corporate companies might put on posters around the office… we try to let them guide our process in everything we do with Stories Across Borders.
If you light up from talking human to human about life’s big and small questions, this space is for you. Welcome.
– Beatriz and Hedvig
