See a photo of Patricia, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Patricia Keener, Question 2:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/ narrative?

A: I’ve always been a storyteller in one way or another. When I was 11, I joined the Young Author’s Club after-school activity where I had a chance to write a story and then bind it so it looked like a real hard-backed book. I thought then I’d like to be a writer when I grow up. Soon afterwards I was bitten by the acting bug and went on to pursue a BFA in Acting and work as a professional actor for a few years, dabbled as a stand-up comedienne, even these days still do some occasional extra work. I also enjoyed business and had the annoying habit of being promoted a lot in my “day” job. I realised the area of my management role I felt most inspired by was developing people and so moved into training and coaching.

Early one morning I was asked to run a workshop for a colleague whose back had gone out. The team I’d be delivering the course to hadn’t been working well together and had had several misunderstandings. On the spur of the moment, I was reminded of a poem called “The Cookie Thief” from the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and another story about “The Man Who Went to Heaven.” I was amazed at what impact these stories had to get people thinking about their own experience in a non-threatening way. Instead of the push they had been getting to work better — it suddenly became a pull — seeing themselves in the story. I received great feedback on the course.

Over the years I have created a portfolio career working first in sales, professional development and presentation-skills training and then adding intercultural training and career coaching to the mix. I liked the variety of doing different things, but began to notice how there were similarities across the kind of work I was doing and how often I was using all three of my strands of expertise at the same time. It wasn’t until I was re-doing my website and I really had to think about how I could effectively communicate the different things that I do that I realised in each instance I was helping individuals or organisations to better communicate who they were or “their stories.” I had already been using elements of story in my work, but once the word “story” popped out at me as the connector of all my work, it suddenly made sense how to weave them all together. Since then I’ve been drawn to all things story-related.

I was drawn to the work of Patricia Keener because of its intersections with my own. Although her practice is wider than mine, career coaching is part of it. I’m so pleased to present this Q&A with Patricia. The Q&A will run over the next several days.

Bio: Patricia Keener is a training consultant and coach whose focus is on organisational communication, presentations, professional development, and cross-cultural adaptation. For the past 19 years, she has worked with international businesses using training, workshop and coaching techniques to help her clients develop their interpersonal skills, improve their business effectiveness, understand cultural differences, and become better at giving presentations.

Her work has also included development of training strategies and programmes for industries including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, FMCG, government organisations and management consultancy. In her career coaching practice, she works with a variety of clients including senior-level executives, middle managers, and MBA and graduate students

Patricia is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and a member of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research UK and the Association for Career Professionals International. She both a coaching and career coaching qualification and is a certified NLP Practitioner. Pat is licensed to use Argonaut, an on-line cross cultural assessment tool and CareerStorm navigator, an online careers assessment.

For more information visit her Website, Keener Inspiration.

Q&A with Patricia Keener, Question 1:

Q: You and I share an interest in storytelling for career development. To what extent and in what ways do you integrate story into your work with job-seekers?

A: A lot of my career work is with international people looking for work in the UK. They may be overseas students who are finishing a graduate or MBA programme here, or other Europeans coming to work in the UK, or partners of employees who are here on an international assignment and wish to continue their own career progression. I have found that particularly with this group, using stories throughout their job-searching process was a very effective way to address such issues as: differences in culture, language challenges and often gaps in their CV from a global lifestyle.

I run a workshop called “Using Storytelling for an Effective Interview” that is designed to give the participants a clear idea of why stories are an effective way of demonstrating what they have to offer, how to find the stories they can use and then what they can do to prepare and polish them. The most important thing at interview is to be as authentic as possible in, let’s face it, a stressful environment. Instead of asking clients to rigidly adhere to practised answers for interview questions I ask them to create different stories they could share that would demonstrate their competencies. It helps to take the pressure off and create a more comfortable atmosphere. After being on the other side of the table, interviewing a series of candidates two years ago, I really began to appreciate the ones who could be interesting and engage me with stories rather than blandly answer my questions with facts. I’ve also used stories as a basis for creating compelling elevator pitches, cover letters, and backing up personal-branding statements.

With the experienced executive clients I work with who want to make career changes or who have been made redundant, it is often tempting for them to jump right into the job seeking process. They want to get their CV together and send it out before taking time to do some self-reflection on just what it is that make them a unique candidate to a perspective employer. Some people can be put off by doing “touchy feely coaching exercises,” but if you explain that they are creating their career narrative, suddenly it seems a lot easier to convince them to do it.

Editor’s note: A week ago, I wrote about the rising story folk profiled during the showcase session at Reinvention Summit 2. Andrew Melville was one of those people, but I didn’t have a lot of information about the concept — Story3 — that he was initiating. He has kindly written this post to further describe this concept:

A Guest Post by Andrew Melville

Great stories are like nature.

Full of patterns and symmetry, yet always different.

There is a science, an art and a spirit to story.

Three has been a pattern since time began for myths, tales, oratory, writing , films and theatre.

The hero’s journey, the archetype for stories at the centre of cultures across the world has three parts; the break in connection, the journey, and the return.

There are three-acts plays, and always a beginning a middle and an end, but as Jean Luc Godard famously said, not necessarily in that order.

There are so often three main characters in stories; the three kings of the bible, three little pigs, the Wizard of Oz has the tin man, the lion and the scarecrow and there are many other stories that follow a pattern of three.

There are three key areas that a story embeds in the brain; the centres of logic, emotion and primal instinct. Research shows us that the brain loves patterns and symmetry and we remember stories more than anything else.

Symbolism for cultures and religions across the globe frequently have three-part structures; the trinity of Christianity, the triangles of the Star of David, the three fingers on Maori carvings, the celtic triquestra symbol among them.

In my homeland, the indigenous people, Maori use the pattern of three in symbol, the spoken word and performance.

The three-fingered figures in Maori carving are said to represent, birth, life, and death, that match the universal hero’s journey archetype.

Many spiritual beliefs have stories about the importance of the three elements of a human being, the mind, the body and the spirit.

In science and in navigation, triangulations are a form, a shape, a structure that is intrinsic and solid.

Triangular three-part structures are a basic form of all molecular life on the planet.
So it is no surprise that the pattern of three has a powerful resonance for human beings.
It is a natural order of things. And it is simple and easy to comprehend.

In today’s media-rich world, many stories have become one-dimensional; they speak only to the heart and emotions, or only to the head and logic, and rarely to the spirit. Our lives and our work are often made up on a three-part structure, a problem, a cause and a solution.

Well crafted, three-dimensional stories have a huge amount to creating balance for us all, in our hearts, minds, and souls.

Andrew Melville is a recognized leader and specialist in the science of storytelling, drawing on experience from a career spanning more than 25 years. Read more on his company site, Spoke, and blog of the same name.

See a photo of John, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with John Randall, Question 5

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?

A: A little over 10 years ago, my friend Todd was severely depressed, fixated, as he himself wrote, on “death by revolver.” Isolated from everyone he had ever loved or who loved him, he lived in “the hollows” of existence. But a chance encounter with an old friend gave him just enough energy to begin reclaiming his life, to stop believing he was “no good.” He began challenging these thoughts and taking better care of himself in many ways. But perhaps most important, he began telling his story at schools and colleges all over Iowa. Amazingly, he overcame severely debilitating “stage fright and discovered he was good at public speaking.”

Todd is now the president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and executive director of the Iowa Advocates for Mental Health Recovery (IAMHR). I am overjoyed that he has invited me to present some of my ideas on narrative as it relates to recovery at this year’s IAMHR Conference in Des Moines.

Todd’s story appears in a little self-published book simply entitled Recovery, by another friend of mine, Dodie Fuhr.