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.