I was with my co-trainer who had recently arrived in Morocco, where we were getting ready to do a workshop on coaching and communication together. He was trying to get the SIM card for his phone working and had been in line waiting while I did some shopping in a nearby store. When I got back to the phone store, this is how our conversation went:

Did you get it fixed?

No, not yet.

Were they unable to unlock the old SIM card?

No . . . (with little more explanation)

Did they look it up to see if it had been deactivated?

No . . . (shared a bit more)

I asked a few more yes/no type questions and then finally asked . . .

Are you going to have to buy a new SIM card?

I don’t know, I haven’t talked to the lady yet.

Dumbstruck, all I could say was, “I should really attend a communication workshop and learn how to ask open questions, like, ‘How’s it going with your phone?’”

A new family invited us to have dinner at their home recently. Because we didn’t know each other well, they asked us questions about our life in North Africa.

Their genuine questions invited us to share our story.

Afterwards, we mentioned to them that it had been a long time since we had told our story to someone. It felt good!

We all have stories to tell—fun and not-so-fun stories from our daily lives, encouraging testimonies of changed lives, tough stories of loss and grief that have built up over the course of years, and sometimes, traumatic stories and crisis experiences that we have been forced to walk through.

Whatever story we carry, there are multiple benefits of telling it to others.