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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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Episode #14 – Secrets from the MOTH!

Lea Thau was creative director of TheMoth.org for a decade (2001-2010), developing the format and process that has become one of the most popular storytelling organizations in the world.  From the beginning, Lea favored the idea of sticking to true stories told in the first person – a critical decision that created what we know

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Episode #9 – Jane Praeger: The Role of Personal Stories at Work

Episode 009 Personal Storytelling in Business Jane thinks there is definately a role for personal storytelling in business. The best application is when you can turn a case study into a case story by making it more personal…making it about the people. She teaches this with a NASA case story that you can request by

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Episode #8 – Jane Praeger: Story and Suspense for Business Presentations

Using Personal Stories and Adding Suspense to your Storytelling Jane Praeger’s thirteen years of documentary filmmaking helps her coach executives and improve their presentations. She says, “I realized I could bring all I learned about narrative, theme, characters…to the business world… where it was missing.” Initially Jane delivered media training. One day a client complained,

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EASING A STORY INTO YOUR JOB INTERVIEW

Earn your turn! Listen first.  If there is dead silence offer your story as a little gift to get things rolling. Begin with an obvious link to their particular use for your story. “I am particularly interested in… how you do X…because my interest in X started one time when your focus on X…because I

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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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