The Stories We Carry: Listening, Leading, Becoming

Morning Breakout Session I

Through the lens of narrative medicine, participants will explore how deep listening, storytelling, and reflective practice support women in leading with clarity, courage, and purpose—while honoring complexity, emotional labor, and lived experience. By weaving together personal story, professional identity, and collective impact, this presentation invites women to reclaim influence in ways that feel true rather than performative.

Narrative medicine is an area of specialty applying principles and practices designed to honor stories and lived experiences. Drawing on narrative medicine’s approach to deep listening and reflection, this presentation reframes leadership as an ongoing practice of meaning-making rather than a fixed role. Participants will examine how influence and mentorship emerges when leaders attend to and are present with story—their own, their teams’, and the communities they serve. Such attentiveness transforms legacy from something we leave behind into something continually in motion. Together, we will examine how authentic leadership allows women to shape tomorrow, today, through everyday choices, presence, and the stories we hold, share, and pass forward. Legacy, in this space, becomes something we build together: dynamic, relational, and in motion.

By integrating reflective storytelling, practical leadership frameworks, and real-world examples, this session invites leaders to consider how their daily choices, language, and presence actively shape the future they hope to inherit.  Participants will explore: deep listening, meaning-making, understanding the importance of holding complexity without rushing to fix, and reclaiming definition of leadership and legacy. These practices mirror and validate the relational strengths many women bring to leadership and represent an act of legacy-building—one that reshapes leadership norms for those who follow.