The Power of Sonder: How One Profound Realization Can Transform Your Communication
You are the main character of your life. Every single day, you pass hundreds — perhaps thousands — of other people, most of whom register as little more than extras in your personal story. A few become supporting actors or recurring characters. Your closest friends and family are your co-stars. But here's the shift that changes everything: every single one of those people you walked past today has a life as complex, vivid, and deeply felt as your own. They aren't extras in their story — they are the protagonists. And you, despite being the centre of your own universe, may be nothing more than a fleeting background figure in theirs. There's a word for this realization, and understanding it can fundamentally change the way you communicate.
What Is Sonder?
The word is sonder, coined in 2012 by John Koenig, the author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Koenig's project is built around neologisms — newly created words designed to fill gaps in our language for experiences we all recognize but struggle to articulate. As Koenig has explained in interviews, a word like "love" carries so many different meanings that it often fails to capture what we truly feel. His goal is to pinpoint those unnamed emotions and give them precise, evocative language.
Sonder is one of his most resonant creations. It describes the moment you realize that every passerby has a life as rich and layered as your own — filled with worries, ambitions, routines, heartbreaks, and private joys you will never know about. If you've ever sat in traffic or stood in a crowded train station and felt a sudden, almost dizzying awareness that every person around you is living an entire epic of their own, you've experienced sonder.
But sonder isn't just a beautiful philosophical concept. It's a practical tool. When you internalize this awareness — that everyone around you is the main character of their own story — it reshapes how you speak, listen, lead, and connect. Here are four specific ways sonder can make you a more impactful communicator.
1. Public Speaking: From Impressing to Connecting
When you understand sonder, a subtle but powerful shift happens on stage. You stop trying to impress your audience and start trying to connect with them. Your focus moves from showcasing your expertise to allowing your message to fit into their reality.
There are several practical ways to make this shift:
- Invite audience participation. Rather than speaking at your audience for the entire presentation, ask questions and encourage people to share their own stories. Think of yourself as a facilitator of conversation, not just a lecturer.
- Use interactive polls. Various apps allow audience members to answer questions in real time using their phones, with results projected on screen. This immediately makes the experience about the room, not just the speaker.
- Do deep research on your audience. If participation isn't practical for your format, invest time in understanding who you're speaking to — their industry, their community, their challenges. The moment you use language that reveals you don't understand their world is the moment they tune you out.
- Highlight individual stories from within the audience. If you can identify and reference specific people whose experiences are known to the broader group, you share the spotlight and demonstrate that many stories in the room matter — not just yours.
Every one of these techniques flows from the same sonder-inspired principle: the audience is not there to witness your performance. They are there hoping your message will illuminate something in their story.
2. One-on-One Conversations: Curiosity Over Self-Promotion
When you truly grasp sonder, every conversation becomes an opportunity for genuine curiosity. Whether you're speaking with a Fortune 500 CEO or a janitor, you recognize that the person in front of you is the protagonist of an extraordinarily rich life — and that their passions, struggles, and dreams are deeply important to them.
This realization naturally leads you to ask more questions. It embodies the timeless principle: seek to understand, not to be understood. Be interested, not interesting.
Most people default to talking about their own experiences. Sonder disrupts that habit. It reminds you that everyone loves to talk about their own story — and that offering someone the space to do so is one of the most generous and memorable things you can do in conversation.
The research backs this up. A 2017 Harvard study examined what makes people the most likable in one-on-one conversations. The finding was remarkably clear: those who asked more questions were consistently rated as the best conversationalists. It wasn't charm, wit, or impressive anecdotes that won people over. It was curiosity.
So ask people about their dreams, their goals, their relationships. You'll be amazed at how eagerly they share — and how deeply they'll remember you for asking.
3. Leadership: Seeing the Whole Person
Sonder has a transformative effect on leadership. When you internalize this concept, employees are no longer defined solely by their job titles and task lists. They become individuals — people with ambitions, personal challenges, and a vision for their lives that extends far beyond the walls of your organization.
When you take the time to understand those aspirations and help your team members connect the dots between their daily work and their larger purpose, something remarkable happens: they become more inspired, more engaged, and more willing to invest their best energy in the company. People work harder for leaders who see them as whole human beings.
On the flip side, sonder is equally valuable when delivering constructive criticism or difficult feedback. It reminds you that the person sitting across from you may be fighting battles you know nothing about — health concerns, family struggles, financial stress. That awareness doesn't mean you avoid hard conversations, but it does mean you approach them with greater empathy and care, which ultimately strengthens the employee-manager relationship.
4. Social Media: Making It About Them
Much of social media is vanity content — people broadcasting how great their lives are. The problem? It doesn't truly connect. It's performance, not communication.
Sonder prompts a different approach. Instead of trying to impress your audience, you try to enter their world. And this produces content that is not only more meaningful but also more effective.
Consider a simple example. A real estate agent could post: "Check out my new listing." That's self-centred content. But what if they wrote: "Imagine raising your kids in this home"? Suddenly, the post isn't about the agent — it's about the audience. It taps into their imagination, their dreams, their vision for their family's future.
This kind of audience-focused content does three things:
- It creates more emotionally resonant posts that stand out in crowded feeds.
- It sparks more meaningful conversations in the comments.
- It generates more engagement and reach, because algorithms reward content that people interact with — and people interact with content that speaks to them.
The Spotlight Belongs to Everyone
At its core, sonder teaches us something beautifully simple: the spotlight isn't just on us. It's on every person in the room, in the audience, on the other side of the screen, and across the table. The sooner we internalize that truth, the sooner we stop communicating at people and start communicating with them. Whether you're delivering a keynote, having a one-on-one conversation, leading a team, or crafting a social media post, let sonder be your guide. Make it about their story — and watch how profoundly your ability to connect, persuade, and inspire begins to grow.