Every Story Matters

This is an article from the Listen series

I want to tell you about a point guard's eyes.

In my first years back at Episcopal High School, this time as a boys' varsity basketball coach rather than a student, I coached a young man named Anthony. He wanted to run our offense. He wanted the ball in his hands as the starting point guard, and anyone who has played the position knows what that job actually requires. It is not the shooting. It is the listening.

I can still see him in the gym: locked in on the coaching staff, absorbing where he needed to be, tracking the other four players on the floor, and holding plan B in his head the whole time, in case plan A broke down. His eyes gave him away. That was not a kid waiting for his turn to talk. That was a kid taking everything in because he intended to be responsible for all of it.

I did not know it then, but I was watching the thing I would spend the next chapter of my life studying.

July 2020

Years later, in the summer of 2020, I started something I did not yet have a name for. I began writing and posting the stories of Black alumni from Episcopal, the school that had shaped me.

I will be honest about what that beginning was and was not. There was no framework. There was no research plan. There was no five-pillar anything. What I knew was simple: Black alumni of the school that shaped me were out there living remarkable lives, and their stories were not being told. So I started telling them, to see where it would go.

The first story I posted was Anthony's.

By then, the point guard had become a Colgate graduate with a degree in English, a man building his life in his own way. He had sold 240 cars in a single year. He had bought a house. He was getting married. Today I watch from afar, mostly through photographs, as he lives a newer chapter still: a husband now, and a father.

The second story was Tatiana's. Episcopal, Class of 2006. She earned her degree in elementary education and was teaching second grade in Baltimore County, pouring herself into a classroom of children and into her own son, whom she loved out loud.

A car salesman and a second grade teacher. Those were my first two stories. I wrote them with the same care I would later give to executives and founders and graduates of famous universities. I cannot tell you that was a strategy. It was simply what I did. Looking back, I am glad I did not know enough to do it differently.

The Place I Thought I Knew

Here is the part of the story underneath the story.

Episcopal is where I found my voice. It is also where I first learned what it meant to be Black while standing in a place where I was not part of the racial majority. Those two things happened in the same buildings, in the same years, to the same kid.

Then I grew up. I came back. I worked there. I coached there. I carried institutional responsibility there. And the strangest thing happened: the school changed, because my position in it changed. The Episcopal I experienced as an adult with keys and a title was not the Episcopal I experienced as a teenager finding his footing. Same gates. Same campus. Different institution, because I was standing somewhere different inside it.

That realization produces a question, and the question is the reason BLAC exists:

If my understanding of the same place changed simply because my position changed, what might I learn by listening to people whose positions were different from mine altogether?

My experience could tell me what Episcopal meant to me. It could never tell me what Episcopal meant to Anthony. Anthony's could not tell me Tatiana's. A student's experience cannot tell you a teacher's. An alumnus cannot tell you a current student's. An admissions officer cannot tell you a family's. A leader cannot tell you an employee's.

Nobody possesses the entire institutional story.

That single fact is why the first word in everything I build is Listen.

Five Questions, Then Silence

The stories grew. Episcopal alumni first, then graduates of other schools, then colleges and universities, then professionals across every field. The written biographies became a podcast, Our Faces, Our Voices, and the podcast settled into a ritual I have never needed to change.

I ask five questions.

1. Who are you

2. What do you do?

3. What was your educational journey?

4. When did you learn you were a person of color?

5. And knowing what you know now, what would you tell your younger self, or someone who looks like you, entering that space?

   
   

Then I listen from there.

People sometimes assume there must be more to it. There is not, and that is the point. The first two questions establish where someone stands today. The third walks their whole journey, every doorway they ever crossed. The fourth asks something almost nobody gets asked: not what they are, but when they became aware of where they stood. And the last asks them to turn around and hand their map to the next person walking in.

The fifth question is the listening itself.

I learned that from years of conversations, and if I am honest, I first learned it in a gym. Watching Anthony run an offense taught me what real listening looks like.

It is not passive. It is not polite waiting. It is intense, whole-body absorption, done by someone who intends to be responsible for what they hear.

The best point guards listen before they lead. So do the best people I have ever interviewed. So, I have come to believe, do the best leaders anywhere.

Tatiana

I need to pause on one of those first stories.

Tatiana passed away, far too young. She was one of the very first people to trust me with her story, and hers is now among the first in the archive that belongs to someone we have lost.

I did not know, in July 2020, that one of those early stories would become one BLAC would have the privilege of preserving. Her narrative is still there, still hers, still telling anyone who listens about a teacher in Baltimore County and the son she loved and the care she carried as a mother. Her voice still resonates with me. It stays.

I do not have a lesson to attach to that, and I will not manufacture one. I will only say that nobody understands what an archive is for until a story in it becomes irreplaceable.

What the Stories Were Teaching Me

Somewhere along the way, without announcing itself, the collection became something else.

One story is a memory. Ten stories are a project. Hundreds of stories, gathered with the same questions across different schools, generations, professions, and lives, start to repeat themselves in ways no one planned. The same threads kept surfacing: the person who opened a door, the place where someone finally felt they belonged or painfully did not, the unwritten rules somebody had to explain, the moment a journey turned on a single conversation.

What I finally understood is that the stories were never about success. My story could not tell me anyone else's, so I listened. And story by story, Virginia to California, decades apart, I was learning how people experience institutions. I was not alone in what I lived. And I was keeping people.

Every story matters. I mean that as more than a warm sentiment. I mean it the way a researcher means it: every story holds a piece of the institutional picture that no other story can supply, because no two people ever stood in the same place. The car salesman's story matters. The second grade teacher's story matters. They matter the same amount as the CEO's, because the question was never "who climbed highest?" The question was always "what did this place look like from where you stood, and how did you find your way?"

Before You Go

So let me hand you the practice, because it costs nothing and it is where everything I have built began.

Think of a story you have never fully reflected on. Maybe your own. Maybe one belonging to someone you see every day and have never really asked.

Then think about who first listened to your story without trying to fix it, and what that did for you.

That is the whole discipline. Understanding before advising. Curiosity before certainty. Questions before answers, and after the questions, the silence where the real story lives.

Every meaningful journey begins with someone willing to listen.

This is where mine began. In a gym, watching a point guard's eyes.

Jonathan E. Lee is the founder of Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC), where he collects the stories of how people find their way through educational and professional life and studies why those journeys succeed. This article explores the first pillar of The BLAC Framework™: Listen. Next in the series: Listening Is a Leadership Skill.