The Power of Storytelling 2025 conference

For this conference of Power of Storytelling 2025, journalists, entrepreneurs, professors and thinkers from around the world gathered for one week-end in Bucharest. They did it to share their view on why stories matter and how we can tell them better in other to feel more connected.

A lot of the guests from the USA made it clear that these days connection is a state or urgency due to the political climate and to Donald Trump’s raid of common sense policies and life. But it wasn’t just them feeling the world distancing and segregating.

We felt it in Romania and we still feel it with a more profound hint of ”us versus them” than I ever felt before.

And bare with me, this battle is a constant in this material, because the conference showed the audience pretty clear that conflict comes from this stubborness on certainty. The good news is there are ways to fix it.

Companiile finaliste la Premiile de Excelență ANIS ale Industriei IT 2025

The reason I am writing this letter with impressions from the conference in English is out of respect for the guests that I am going to quote here. And because their story was in English and it makes perfect sense to keep it that way.

My takeaways from The Power of Storytelling

I am gonna start this article by extracting some of the quotes that really stuck to me.

Now I bet you have a pretty clear picture about what went on stage at the Power of Storytelling. But let me be your guide throught this world of insights on storytelling.

Conflict can turn into a better connection

The conference started with talks about faith as being a north star, it went on to give us a fresh perspective about conflict, and it ended on a fun way to look at how we can be better together in groups.

Antreprenorii Gen Z învață cum să-și gestioneze emoțiile printr-un curs dedicat

The talk about conflict gave a new meaning to what for some of us, in the bubble, looks like common sense. But author Amanda Ripley, presenting us conflict from gang wars to environmental protesters, made it clear that when people divide in groups, each group thinks it's better than the other.

Look at our recent elections and you will understand perfectly about what she’s talking about. As a recipe to make a high conflict into a good conflict is, shockingly, not doing the intuitive thing: “look at the indictment news about Trump that only made him more popular”.

So, the key here is to look for the counterintuitive examples and to report on them. To amplify the exhausted majority, instead of the conflict entrepreneurs, those who yell and are always there in your feed. An example here is the Focus Group podcast, that put at the front of the talks the people who voted for Trump in 2016, but changed their vote in 2024.

Also, another trick that would deescalate high conflict is identifying the understory, not just the villain.

That is why uncertainty in these times is more than welcome, because it leaves room for thought to wiggle and conflict to stabilize.

Listening as part of the connection

The talk about conflict is best delivered with a topping on how to listen, a fireside chat between a world changing entrepreneur in conscious business, Jennifer Brandel, and author and journalist Kate Murphy.

The autor talks about the lack of listening as a sign of insecurity and control. Listening comes with an image problem, inherited from parents and teacher who kept telling: “listen up”. So it has a lot of catching up to do.

But every conversation must have outtakes like: what did I learn and how did that person feel? The way of listening like in a meditation gives the listener the opportunity to truly understand what the other is saying.

See how can this help with conflict? And see how both of these can help with connection? This is a pattern, indeed.

Empathy as a bridge

Another buzzword that was very present on stage was empathy. Empathy as a bridge, as a tool and as a really hard thing to do.

We saw this being heavily practised in the “Tata” documentary, where filmmaker and reporter Lina Vdovîi tries to make peace with the way she feels about her father is a dichotomy difficult to comprehend: the abuser became the abused in different windows in time. And now she helps her father in need with the lens of the past deeply rooted in her soul, where the exact same man, only younger, made her feel so unsafe.

Empathy was also mentioned as a previous anger towards parents, either violent or narrow minded. Or directed at people being reported on. But, as Radu Ciorniciuc, filmmaker and investigative journalist said, empathy makes you look at bits of yourself. And anger is always easier when you come from a broken family, but what really helps you cross that feeling is empathy.

This was also featured in Jacqui Banaszynski's speech, an award winning reporter, whose angle for a good story was paying attention to what mattered to people, not to her.

And this is exactly the perfect statement that another guest built on. And here I am talking about Rhiannon White, co founder of Common Wealth, a theatre for all. She built this political theatre, or a documentary one as she called it, because of a failing institution. And yes, she was referring to the classical world of theatre, that wasn’t accessible to the lower class.

She changed that, by bringing theatre down to the people and in their environment. Her first masterpiece was a play about domestic abuse, that took place in a flat in a working class neighbourhood, for people to really grasp what violence looks like, even though when it isn’t so in your face.

Rhiannon said that people are experts at their own stories and that she always talked with victims, workers or immigrants before creating a play that presented different types of people.

The emotional as a storyworld

For an emotional intake at the event, Raluca Anton, internationally trained psychotherapist, walked us through what the space between means and how can people with their our sensitivities became a team or a group. How can people navigate the within and the exterior to get to that state where connection means existence and BELONGING is a prerequisite of safety.

And for a pure demonstration of what stories can do to people, journalist Chris Jones told his own story of how soccer helped him get through difficult times in his life and how a single thing to pour your extra love to can became part of your storyworld.

As the organizer of the event, Cristian Lupșa, journalist, teacher and former editor-in-chief at DOR, said, this conference felt as a 2 day retreat from the world, from the news and from the noise. It have a clearer picture on how connection can be made, conflict resolved and listening done better. And as a mantra of the event, I will leave you with the word of a guest who had it rough lately: hope is a choice.

And I will build on that: not a blind choice, but one where we can work through stories to have a more hopeful world to inhabit.