* What goes into making a working environment a place of creative, cooperative, and productive energy?
* How do we pass knowledge from one generation of workers to another?
* How do we address difficult issues without alienating leadership, managers, or workers?
* How do we learn to honor one another’s work so that change can come from consensus rather than from the top of a hierarchy?
* How is our workplace and product special and how can we communicate that to the larger world?
Storytelling isn’t a magic pill that makes all ills disappear, but it can address many of these questions with techniques and content that will deeply enhance your organizations goals and functioning. Following are performance and workshop programs designed to stimulate and improve leadership and communication skills and help participants hone their agency/company mission into a story form that will guide and inspire others.
Performance Programs:
Leading From the Center
Stories, both ancient and contemporary, can offer new perspectives on leadership in ways that alter our thinking and actions. These stories both humorous and thought provoking will create a cognitive dissonance in terms of traditional leadership models. They are about attuned listening, watching, and learning from those you want influence. They will start us thinking about the authentic requirements for successful leadership.
Women’s Work: Tales from the Front
“Man he works from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done.”
Women in the work force are both effected by and effect their environment in ways that are unique and can bring important perspective to any organization or task. From Rosie, the first woman to aim a rivet gun, to high school football fields, these stories reflect women’s special gifts when then are at the helm of work or life, or simply helping to keep the boat afloat.
Communicating the Message
The minute any of us feel under attack, or are assailed by a critical eye, our gates of perception lock shut and learning stops. Today’s tales will model how to communicate a message and model behavior while engaging the listeners' heart, head, and imagination. This is the ultimate management tool.
Raising the Bar of Leadership
Strong, creative, nurturing, and intelligent leadership can utilize storytelling at every level. This presentation/workshop will model and teach the use of storytelling for three interwoven objectives.
Stories of Introduction:
If you want people to trust you, work with you, and share your vision, they need to know who you are. A “Who am I story” can be personal, about a historic character, or even a folk or fairy tale, if it conveys the essence of who you are, what you value, and how you operate. Your managerial style, expectations, and dreams are all communicated in these stories that often become the soul of a working environment.
Stories that Teach
Stories allow you to address personal, academic, technical, and social issues without threatening the individuals involved. The listener identifies with the characters and action of the tale. They emerge with their learning and then have the opportunity to integrate and utilize that learning into their own functioning. Stories can be used to model everything from broadening one’s conception of their work and company, to helping people negotiate serious changes.
Stories of Vision
No one goes to work for Walmart without the Sam Walton myth resonating somewhere in their conscious mind. What is your business or agencies myth or vision? Unless you understand and can communicate the story of your work, you cannot inspire others to invest themselves in it.
Creating Consensus
Storytelling is first and foremost about listening. A story cannot resonate unless it begins where your listeners are. A good storyteller must know their audience, and take them on a journey that begins in their physical, psychological, social, or political world. This knowledge is your best tool for communicating and creating enthusiastic consensus around issues. When you go to second tier management and tell them that a brand is being discontinued, or you are getting out of specific market, or personnel are being cut, it is difficult to give this information and expect full unquestioned support. A story, the story of how the decision was made, or a story that makes the decision understandable can create a consensus and support that buoy the company.
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CONVERSATIONS:
Internal and External Taught with Michael Elkin, master Internal Family Systems teacher and trainer and author of Families Under the Influence
The tale of Deborah and Simon is ostensibly a contemporary love story. Studded with the ironic humor that results from simultaneous internal and external conversations, it provides a window to a number of issues we will address. The hero and heroine have solid historic reasons for their thinking. The problem arises when it become clear that this thinking is getting in the way of meeting their needs, and thus their happiness. Judith tells the story with a framing, so that participants would be watching and listening for this phenomena.
We, each of us, have an internal dialogue, that runs parallel with every life experience. Our internal voices emerge from the culmination of our life experiences and are often so loud and strong that new information from the present cannot penetrate through them. This training helps participants identify their internal voices and begin to evaluate when it helps and when it hinders their managerial work. They will come to identify their internal voices, be offered a technique by which they can have them step aside so that new information can be assimilated, and ultimately learn how to identify, acknowledge, and use or decline both internal and external information.
1-2 Days
WORKSHOPS
Honing Affect for Effect/Presentational Skills
The words one chooses to use constitutes only half of the rich smorgasbord of affective communication tools available to us. Do you remember how your mother could call your name from one end of a city block and with nothing more than a single word to go on you could decipher her mood, what she wanted, and how quickly you needed to get home? Tonality, Intention, and body language are all as effective in getting your point across as the words chosen. In this workshop we will explore those silent but powerful variables, link them with words and discover how clear and affecting our communications and presentations can be.
3 hours
All the Possibilities
Problem solving is an everyday challenge. Intellect, and knowledge of your particular field, however, are not the only tools needed to be a competent problem solver. Contemporary society has educated many of us through complete images. Television, film, video tell and show us stories and in turn we take in the facts and images, but are never pushed to use our imaginations. This most important aspect of human capability becomes a rusty tool. If we only respond to what others have made and never create for ourselves, how can we imagine and build a better world? Without flexible use of the imagination we become desperately limited problem solvers. This completely participatory workshop is designed to open up the imagination, oil those rusty cogs, and set it to work on issues and problems relevant to your groups concerns.
2-3 hours
Telling Stories
There is almost nothing, because it relates to human experience, that can’t be communicated more effectively through story. During our time together participants will learn basic storytelling skills and practice them!
3-4 hours
BRIEF BIO:
From bedrooms in Brookline, to the armories of W.W.II to the tundra of Siberia, Judith Black’s traditional and original stories have rocked laughing audiences to their feet. Winner of the Oracle: Circle of Excellence, the most coveted award in storytelling, Judith has been featured on stages as far reaching as The Montreal Comedy Festival, The National Storytelling Festival, The Smithsonian Institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the National Art Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and NPR. She has created stories for the US Department of the Interior, NPR, The Mass. Foundation for the Humanities, and many others. Original performance programs and workshops have been designed for such organizations as:
US Dept. of the Interior
US Dept. of Forestry
US EPA Women’s Retreat
National Association for Interpreters
Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities
The Society of Female Engineers
Emergency Room Pediatric Nurses Annual Conference (CT)
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union
Verizon
Institute for Health Care Improvement
Unilever
Tsongas Industrial History Center
Rockwell Museum
Statewide Comprehensive Health Conference (MA)
She has performed at hundreds of festivals, universities and theaters throughout the nation.
For a full bio: Click Here
www.storiesalive.com
To contact judith:
781-631-4417
jb@storiesalive.com