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Annette Simmons

Advice from an 80 yr. old shuttle driver…

New Hampshire is cold in March. I was happy to be heading home to North Carolina. The shuttle driver was napping behind the wheel. The sunshine warmed him through windshield. When I opened the passenger door he stirred, “Thanks for waking me up!” He pointed. “Open that sliding door – that’s it, behind you – and

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Annette Simmons

How telling my own #metoo story helped me build resilience.

  I’d love to hear what you think about this podcast. I share a story of an early experience of sexual harassment and the ways I’ve rewritten and replaced shame stories that left me frozen so I learned how to stay present and protected when it happened again. Today I genuinely feel like I can call out bad behavior without getting triggered so badly I

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Annette Simmons

Narratives That Leave Us Feeling Powerless

“I think it’s because the dominant story in our culture is one that creates a feeling of powerlessness, and it starts with this reductive understanding of human nature.”  Francis Moore Lappe This is from the woman who wrote “Diet for a Small Planet” back in 1971.  That book started a conversation that is now a vital movement

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Annette Simmons

The Spirituality of Storytelling…with animals!

Do your stories have a spiritual message? Or…perhaps we should ask ourselves what spiritual message do our stories tell?  Because all storytelling delivers a spiritual message.  The message may be spiritually rich or poor but it is there.  And it seems like spirituality has been at the core of storytelling from the beginning.  A recent article about newly discovered cave

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Annette Simmons

The Morals of Our Stories

From Strategy + Business article in PwC’s online magazine: “Stories have always been about ethics. They help listeners find the right path in the face of ambiguity and competing desires. The King Midas story juxtaposes commercial desires against social desires. Narcissus was so entranced with his reflection in the water, he died of thirst. The

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Annette Simmons

The Story Factor 3rd ed. OCT2019 (new material)

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”                          Zora Neale Hurston From a distance, storytelling also seems to have every man’s wish on board. There is an initial euphoria when you consider that once you learn how to tell stories that

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Popular Posts

Paradox: Root Cause of Polarization

According to Pew research, disdain between opposing political parties in America has doubled in the last 30 years, coincidentally the span of my own consulting business, Group Process Consulting. My efforts to document true stories about these escalating conflicts inadvertently produced a set of oral histories across the years: Territorial Games (1997), A Safe Place

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Contrasts, Not Conflicts

 “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”  Groucho Marx Troublemakers erode trust faster than we can build it back right now. Yet, many of these “troubles” are invented conflicts that distort predictably contrasting values. It helps to know what to look for. And once

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Storyteller’s Confession: My Secret Mission

I’ve been trying to infiltrate the halls of power for decades. My secret mission is to increase the diversity of thought by teaching those without a voice how to tell their stories and by teaching leaders how to find and retell stories that broaden everyone’s understanding.

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

We need a Magic School for Storytellers Thirty years before J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series imagined a magic school that taught apprentice sorcerers how to avoid abusing the power of magic. Le Guin points out early in the series that “even to light a candle is to cast a

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Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

Truth in Storytelling When I wrote the first edition of The Story Factor twenty years ago, I began with the idea that people don’t want more information. They want faith in you and your positive intentions. I never suspected that two decades later we’d be discussing an explosion of stories that intentionally undermine this faith. Without

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