I’m delighted to present the third installment in this series of interviews with some of the gurus of both performance and applied storytelling. This interview is with prolific author Terrence Gargiulo. I’ve read several of his books and “attended” some excellent Webinars he’s presented. Read more about him in his bio below. I have broken his interview down into five parts, with one to appear each of the next five days.

Bio: Terrence L. Gargiulo, MMHS, is an eight-time author, international speaker, organizational development consultant, and group-process facilitator specializing in the use of stories. He holds a master of management in human services from the Florence Heller School, at Brandeis University, and is a recipient of Inc. Magazine’s Marketing Master Award and the 2008 HR Leadership Award from the Asia Pacific HRM Congress. Highlights of some of his past and present clients include, GM, HP, DTE Energy, MicroStrategy, Fidelity, Federal Reserve Bank, Ceridian, Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual, Dreyers Ice Cream, UNUM, US Coast Guard, Boston University, Raytheon, City of Lowell, Arthur D. Little, KANA Communications, Merck-Medco, Coca-Cola, Harvard Business School, and Cambridge Savings Bank.

Terrence’s books include, Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists (translated into Chinese), The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning, On Cloud Nine: Weathering Many Generations in the Workplace (translated into Korean and Spanish), Stories at Work: Using Stories to Improve Communications and Build Relationships, Building Business Acumen for Trainers: Skills to Empower the Training Function, Once Upon a Time: Using Story-based Activities to Develop Breakthrough Communication Skills, In the Land of Difficult People: 24 Timeless Tales Reveal How to Tame Beasts at Work, The Trainer’s Portable Mentor.

Terrence is a frequent speaker at international and national conferences including the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), Academy of Management, Conference Board, Linkage Inc, Association of Business Communications, and he is a field editor for ASTD. His articles have appeared in American Executive Magazine, Journal of Quality and Participation, Communication World, ISPI Journal, and ASTD Links.

Terrence’s and his father’s opera Tryillias was accepted for a nomination for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music.

Terrence can be reached by phone: 415-948-8087, email: Terrence@MAKINGTORIES.net

Q&A with Terrence Gargiulo (1st question):

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular definition of ”story?” (i.e., What is a story?) What definition do you espouse?

A: It isn’t important at all. In fact I’m afraid to say that I believe we miss the nuances of what stories really offer. I’m more comfortable letting go of story labels and definitions and getting down to just working and living with them. Isn’t that all we really can do? Definitions fly in the face of the very power of consciousness and awareness that stories offer us. When I work with groups I beg forgiveness for not giving a definition of stories; usually to the frustration of more literal and left-brain dominant types. Then through my interaction with the group I model story-based communication behaviors. I will collage strings of stories, elicit people’s stories, connect stories with one another, use lots of analogies and references to other stories to trigger rich associations in the minds and conversations of people present. All of this is meant to encourage proactive reflection. I want people to remember their experiences and appreciate/respect/take an interest in the experiences of others, look for connections between their experiences, and imagine new possibilities. This is the fluid and emergent quality of stories. And this is the framework I follow in all of my consulting work whether I am designing a large scale change management, developing a communications strategy, or architecting a learning event.

I have a passion for inciting insights in others. I am a conduit for opening story spaces. These are polyphonic dialogues orchestrated with reflective opportunities for insights to emerge. Recollecting our experiences and the experiences of others are precious gifts of attention that never stop gracing us with sense giving and sense making moments. I am committed to living these questions…Can we be authentic? Can we remember who we are? Can we create connections within ourselves, and between ourselves and others? Can we soar with our imaginations beyond the boundaries we erect in the name of stability? Can we let go of our habits and still feel alive?

I see the world through a lens of stories. The world unfolds as translucent, crisscrossing patterns of possibilities and meanings. It is my intuitive eye, fueled by my commitment to listen deeply, which sorts through this overwhelming array of perceptions. Here there is a mingling of vulnerabilities, differences, tensions, and myriad of intersecting points of connections. It is this self-sustaining structure-less structure that potentiates powerful dialogues that lead to solutions. I want to write and perform the dynamic melodies and harmonies that resonate for others and calls them to the dance of life.

When working with a group that want to delve into stories I will throw up some images on a screen like a rotating diamond with light streaming through it, a strand of DNA, raindrops hitting a pond of water, holograms, or a visualization of zooming in and out on a madlebrot set. I will invite the group to work with the images and suggest how they provide insights into the nature of stories beyond the obvious ways people are accustomed to thinking about them. Instead of offering definitions I will talk about some of the functions of stories and the effects of these functions:

Let me close by offering the following:

Stories fold in and out of themselves to reveal subtle worlds of meanings, purpose, and connections. They are gentle transporters bound by time but that travel beyond the boundaries of what we have experienced at any given point in time. Stories free us to move through a landscape of change. We leave the dusty road of the familiar and embrace a void where we can find the freedom to chose and perceive new realities and project worlds of our own making. Stories can either crush illusions we have become enslaved to due to habit or they can lift our veils of fear and familiarity and give us a glimpse of new ways of being. Here we will find a place where we can be our unique selves while in communion with others.

- Terrence L. Gargiulo

I first learned about Fray through a colleague at my university, Andy Dehnart (of Reality Blurred fame), who organized Fray events at the school. One year, my son participated in Fray Day, telling a largely fictionalized story of growing up as a gang member on the streets of Newark, NJ (OK, he was born in Newark, but that’s about as much truth as the story had in it.) Fray Day no longer happens, but as the Fray site explains, the Fray concept keeps morphing:

FRAY BEGAN as a website. We presented individually designed, true first-person stories. Each one ended with a question that prompted the audience to tell their stories, too. You can see an archive here. THEN IT EVOLVED into a series of live storytelling events, Fray Days and Fray Cafes, that took place all over the world, attended by thousands of people. You can see some photos and listen to audio of those events, too. AND NOW Fray is evolving again - this time into a quarterly series of independently produced books. Each one will be on a central storytelling theme, and include personal stories, articles, and original art. They will come out quarterly. They will be awesome. But the core of Fray remains unchanged: It’s about true stories. It’s about proving that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. It’s about finding that common thread that connects us all together. And it’s an invitation and a dare to get involved: What’s your story?

Fray also offers a blog.

See Jessica’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack (continued):

Q: You write about Web 2.0 in your blog: “Virtual teams have always been in the 2.0 world, adding content to their shared online spaces, carrying on conversations after the lights have gone out, trying out new media. But the explosion of 2.0 technologies — and the advent of a generation that knows more about how to work online than their bosses — has altered (and will continue) to alter the virtual team landscape.”

All of this is a long-winded lead-in to the two-part question: Given that these Web 2.0 technologies can be seen as storytelling vehicles and the generation that most uses them is accustomed to telling stories using these technologies, to what extent do you think storytelling will play a role in the way Web 2.0 continues to “alter the virtual team landscape?”

A: If we compare the work setting today with what was available even ten years ago, we see a world rich in storytelling possibilities. Every medium allows us to tell stories in different ways. As new technologies come online and the people who grew up using the new technologies move into leadership positions, we’ll see them encouraging the use of more diverse media — whether in virtual worlds or via micro-bursts, like Twitter. I think the “story” will spread across more media, which means people’s ability to use these media and acquire the behaviors necessary to collaborate productively will face some pretty steep challenges. The risk we run is that everything will become so fragmented that we need to become detectives to piece our stories together. Every project is its own story and it’s important that we capture it in process so that we can learn and apply our learning very quickly.

Q: Given that meetings of virtual teams, according to your HBR study, cut right to the chase, is there a role for storytelling in a typical VT meeting?

A: I don’t think we said that in the HBR article, “Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?” In fact, we implied the opposite. Several of our findings revolved around conversation — allowing conversations to wander, pairing strangers and those with conflicting points-of-view, using multiple media for communication. All of this contributes to shared understanding, which only comes about through people telling one another their stories.

Gardner cites Hedrick Ellis, who hired a personal historian to interview his parents.

“You hear these stories over the years, but nobody ever really gets around to writing them down,” says Mr. Ellis of Arling­ton, Mass. “This seemed like an easy and practical way of capturing them.”

Gardner quotes Paula Stahel, president of the Association of Personal Historians, who niotes “an increase in the number of elders who want to be sure their stories are handed down.” Another personal historian, David O’Neil, is quoted as observing that “it’s always a baby boomer who has children and aging parents. They look at their parents and their children and wonder, ‘What are my children going to remember about my own parents, and how do I capture and preserve their life stories?’ As the World War II generation is passing away, there are a lot of efforts to record their stories.”

Gardner writes that “many people don’t think they have stories to tell,” but most find they have much more to relate than they imagined.

Gardner cites Project Storykeeper, the mission of which “is to preserve our families’ heritage. We believe that by capturing the life stories of our oldest and wisest citizens future generations can benefit from a wealth of experience and wisdom.” The project provides certified audio-biography training, support and audio tools to StoryKeepers “to preserve the past, enrich the present and strengthen the future — one story at a time.” StoryKeepers are people who record life stories and connect the family to hear them.

Dennis Stack, founder of Project Storykeeper, offers tips in the extended portion iof this entry for interviewing folks about their stories.

The “Family Wealth Legacy” of this entry’s title comes from a blog entry in Family Wealth Secrets Online Magazine.

“It’s about capturing the assets that are most often lost when someone dies … the intellectual, spiritual and human assets that make up a great majority of our family’s wealth and passing them on as well,” writes blogger and attorney Alexis Neely. She urges a “Family Wealth Legacy Interview process” at the end of planning an estate with a loved near the end of his or her life to “help you capture the most valuable family wealth you have and pass that on for successive generations by building a legacy library that will be far more valuable than any dollars you could ever leave behind.”

See Jessica’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A and Part 2.

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack (continued):

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: Learn the craft of storytelling from the geniuses who write and who perform.

Q: Do you see a role for storytelling/sharing to build cohesiveness in virtual teams?

A: Very much so. When you’re bringing together people from diverse organizations, disciplines, cultures, countries, and time-zones, i.e., virtual teams, it usually means they don’t know one another. They come to know one another by sharing their stories, so this is a critical part of their work. Even the lowly conference call is a venue for telling stories. As a matter of fact, every conference call is a storytelling opportunity. To get “the voices in the room,” the opening to any good conference call, good facilitators/team leaders in essence ask people to tell a little story: What did you have for breakfast? What’s your favorite movie of all time? What music were you listening to before this call (or, if you’re one of the old breed that still travels to work ☺, what were you listening to on the commute)? These answers are mini-stories that build trust and cohesion.

Do you ever think of the “what-ifs” that led to your existence? The accidents and coincidences that resulted in your birth? Or how close you came to not existing if X, Y, or Z hadn’t happened?

Both my maternal and paternal ancestors came to America — Southern New Jersey to be precise — on the same ship, the Good Ship Kent, from England in 1677. Was that piece of history responsible for my existence? Perhaps just a little. More responsible probably was the fact that two teenagers at Moorestown High School in South Jersey — both descendants of the travelers on the Kent — had a passion for horses. Also responsible was the fact that first child of this couple — who had married — was tragically hit by a car and killed. I might have been born to the couple at some point anyway, but because they wanted to fill the empty space created my sister’s death, I was born almost a year to the day after she died.

The Danish Poet is a charming animated story of the chain of events that led to the narrator’s birth? The video asks: Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter?

I thoroughly enjoyed this funny, poignant, thought-provoking story. What chain of events led to your existence?

Collective Storytelling is a blog that serves as a repository class assignments for an unnamed class at NYU (maybe the class is titled, Collective Storytelling?).

The blog tantalizes with brief descriptions of the assignments, and the assignments themselves — but without very detailed explanations of the assignments. One posted idea for a final project sounds like fun:

I think it would be fun to harness the characters everyone in the world knows about — celebrities, as themselves. What I’d love to do (although I don’t have the programming chops) would be to call it “Five Celebs Stuck in an Elevator.” You pick 5 celebs from a list, and then you write a story about what happens when they get stuck in an enclosed space, and how they eventually get out (or perhaps don’t). In my imagination, their lines come out of their lil celebrity heads like speech bubbles [as shown above].

See Jessica’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack (continued):

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: I’m in. I keep Endless Knots, an active blog, am on LinkedIn (though I’m trying an experiment there where I only accept inbound links but don’t actively link to others), Facebook, and, yes, I have my avatar on Second Life, plus a bunch of others. You’re telling your story everywhere you appear online — when you write your profile, list your favorite music, post your pictures or videos. All of it together becomes your story.

Of these, the blog is the most powerful storytelling device for me — and, I think, for some of my friends in professional positions. (Much as I’d like to make films, I’m not a filmmaker — yet ☺.) The power of storytelling for executives cannot be overemphasized. One colleague is using his blog to help transform his hospital’s culture — and clinical outcomes — simply by telling the ongoing story of what’s happening in his academic medical center.

Q: What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: I’ve published short stories but I’ve yet to publish a novel (one is complete, another on the way). Much of what I practice professionally, as a management consultant, I express in my fiction. Fiction makes it easy to say difficult things—and to create worlds that are positive and optimistic.

I could not be more pleased to present the second in my series of Q&A interviews with story practitioners. This interview is with Jessica Lipnack, whom I first encountered early in this decade through her expertise in virtual teams, another one of my interests. I read her book (co-authored with Jeffrey Stamps), Virtual Teams, and drew on it heavily in teaching my students about virtual teams and guiding them through a virtual-teams project. I was delighted to find that Jessica was a member of Worldwide Story Network and thrilled that we share interests in both virtual teams and storytelling. Learn more about Jessica below. I am presenting the Q&A with Jessica over the next four days.

Bio: Jessica Lipnack is the CEO and co-founder of NetAge, a consultancy that provides advice, education, and ideas on virtual teams, collaboration, and organization structures. She is the co-author (with Jeffrey Stamps) of six non-fiction books on this subject, including Virtual Teams, The Age of the Network, and Networking. She has written articles and op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, The Industry Standard, New Age Journal, Mother Earth News, and more. As a fiction writer, Jessica’s work has appeared in Ars Medica, the Global City Review, Mothering, and The Futurist. Jessica lives in Massachusetts. For more information, visit her website and blog.

Q&A with Jessica Lipnack:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: I’m a writer. Writers tell stories regardless of genre — fiction, nonfiction, poets, business writers. I’ve been writing stories professionally since I took a job as a reporter for my hometown newspaper when I was sixteen. I worked at The Pottstown (PA) Mercury for four summers, eight-hour shifts, five or six days a week, and wrote a lot of stories. When Jeff Stamps and I started writing books for organizations (e.g., Networking, The Age of the Network, Virtual Teams), we included stories in all of them. But not just stories. After exposure to the work of Ned Hermann, we understood that people have differing cognitive preferences, different ways that they learn. Some respond most strongly to vision, some to theory, some to method, some to stories. Hermann’s approach became a design principle for our books — all four cognitive styles had to be included with every chapter. That said, we’ve begun nearly every chapter in every book with a story so as to engage people emotionally.

And, I’ve done some acting. There you learn how to connect your words, your expressions, and your gestures emotionally. Learning to act, at least in the limited way that I have, has helped with presentation skills, critical to good storytelling.

And and I’m a public speaker. By the time you’ve given a hundred speeches, you figure out what connects with audiences and what doesn’t, how to pace yourself, when to be funny, and when to be dead serious.

Q: What people or entities have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: Four things here:

1. The best writers — or at least the ones I love, big names like Doris Lessing and Geraldine Brooks, both of whom write both fiction and nonfiction, and best-kept secrets, like Roland Merullo, who writes superb novels and superb nonfiction — have had the greatest effect on my storytelling. I’ve learned technique by reading them. The list of all who’ve influenced me could be very long but Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird is a popular and recent book that’s been helpful; EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a lecture series from long ago, is worthy of study; and Ursula Le Guin’s advice is in a category of its own for its usefulness for anyone truly committed to storytelling.
2. I’ve been influenced by business people who tell good stories: an oil company executive who put his company’s one-hundred-year history on huge wall boards that he walked his colleagues around, explaining the challenges facing them; an Army general who has the authority to require senior officers to blog, which he has. These people understand the power of story — and how to reach people deep inside, where truly meaningful change transpires.
3. I’ve benefited immensely from being a member of Francis Ford Coppola’s writers’ site, Zoetrope.com. Although the site is for fiction writers — including screenwriters, poets, short story writers, and, inevitably, novelists, its structure encourages writers to critique one another’s work constructively.
4. My literary agents and my editors have been terrific and indispensable teachers about language and shaping big stories.

If a dog — or a cat or horse, but most often a dog — is introduced into the plot, there is a better than 50-50 chance that the animal will die as part of the story.

Occasionally this story convention works, but much of the time, it is quite gratuitous.

Because I feel particularly strong empathy with suffering pets, I immediately steel myself for the possibility that the animal will be killed off by saying (aloud): “Dog’s gonna die” as soon as I see the canine on the screen.

The most recent offense was on my beloved Mad Men. The dog isn’t actually killed, but if you let an Irish setter go outside of a Manhattan office building — even in 1962 — what are the odds? Poor Chauncey.

Healing Story Alliance is a special interest group of the National Storytelling Network that "explore[s] and promote[s] the use of storytelling in healing. Our goal for this special interest group is to share our experience and our skills, to increase our knowledge of stories and our knowledge of the best ways to use stories to inform, inspire, nurture and heal. We also wish to reach beyond our storytelling community to share with those in other service professions; therapists, clergy, health care practitioners of all kinds, anyone who can see the benefit of story as a tool for healing."

Medicine Chest is an online collection of traditional remedies and folk wisdom to do with health and healing. It aims to gather and record traditional know-how before it gets lost so it can be passed on for the benefit of future generations.

On this site you can upload your health-related tips, stories and information that come from traditional sources such as your own family. You can watch topics unfold as people discuss their own experiences alongside related scientific evidence and other relevant perspectives. Find stories here.

I’m delighted to initiate this series of interviews with some of the gurus of both performance and applied storytelling. First up is Molly Catron, whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak at the 2005 Golden Fleece Conference. Read more about her below.

Bio: Molly Catron left her day job in the corporate world in 2001 to become a storyteller. Like most storytellers, she felt a “calling” to tell stories aimed at uniting the heart, mind, body, and spirit. Her stories come from characters and personal experiences of childhood and as an adult. She has learned to observe life through the lens of a storyteller and can see value in the simplest encounter. In her work as a change agent in the corporate world, Molly often uses stories to “hold up the mirror” for others to observe their behaviors and assess their values. She has a master of arts in storytelling from East Tennessee State University and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Tennessee Storytelling Association and a performing member of the Jonesborough Storytellers Guild. She lives on a farm in East Tennessee with her husband, Wayne, and is Nana to four grandchildren. See her current projects here: Current Work for Molly Catron.doc

Q&A with Molly Catron

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

A: I came from a family of people who told stories. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was faced with teaching the principles associated with some of the organizational change efforts, I found myself telling stories. The stories put the facts in an emotional context working in the 18 inches between the heart and the head where true change occurs.

Q: What attracted you to the field?

A: I had worked for years in a manufacturing environment first as a chemist and later as an organizational change agent. I had always felt out of step with my peers (chemist and engineers). Because of a large donation to the International Storytelling Center, my company was asked to partner with the center to study the use of story in business. I was known for my stories so was the natural one to be selected to lead the effort for the company. When I became engaged in the storytelling community, I found my home. I belonged with them. In one of my stories I describe them as a group of people who laugh and cried with east, who applaud difference, thought deeply and used delicious language ….and they DO NOT wear golf shirts or use sports analogies.

Q: What do you love about it?

A: I always amazed at how a powerful, yet often simple, story can reach deep within the heart of a total stranger and bring them so very, very close. You see it in their eyes and feel a resonate energy. It is that magical moment of connection that delights me and feeds my spirit.

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now?

A: When getting my master’s in storytelling from ETSU, I remember sitting in a class and hearing Dr. Joseph Sobol say, “Anthropologists say storytellers arise when the society has lost its way.” Wow, that resonated in every part of my body. I think too often storytellers do not understand the power they hold in the spoken word…power to influence…to inform…to inspire…to change. We are needed more than ever in this society which, in my opinion, has somehow forfeited their soul in the name of progress.

Q: What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

A: Everything was mechanized in the Industrial Age. We became “human doings.” We severed our connections. We learned to praise logic and ridicule emotions. We became like our machines…different parts operating separately at breakneck speed disregarding any interdependency. I think we long for the lost connection. We were not machines. Our emotions reflect are humanity. Without them we are cold and deep down within us, we feel the void and fill it with a lot of bad things. We want to love and be loved (warts and all). We want to share our experience with life. We need it to have meaning. Somehow, in that magical space between the teller and the listener, we feel that connection and once felt, it isn’t easily forgotten.

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: I think it is very important to find your own unique voice. Some say that stories seek out the teller to be told and I know I have experienced that feeling. If I come from an authentic place and take the journey of the artist, I will be a good vessel for the story. When I first met David Novak, he reminded me that you don’t construct a story, you grow it. It is an organic process. Some stories take form in a matter of minutes and others take years. If you rush the process, the story is not all it could have been. This was hard for me because I had been trained to produce a “product’ and usually with a deadline. I had to learn to love the process and wait patiently for the story to form first in my heart, mind, body and spirit before I could carry it out to the world with my words.

Q: You write about a model of love and grace: The body carries us. The mind teaches us. The heart warms us. The spirit inspires us.

How does story fit into that model?

A: The rest of that thought is important: When they unite we are passionate, joyful and committed. I have often added the fact that stories can take us there. I think a powerful story manages in the most magical way to work on our heart, mind, body and spirit in a beautifully choreographed dance. I have studied some brain topology and understand some of the mechanics of how story functions in our neural networks but I prefer to think of story as a wonderful return to a very basic way of balancing our human experience. Stories have always been with us but we forgot them. We stopped gathering around the fire, the quilt, the dinner table. We left to sit silently in front of some form of media. We let ourselves wither in the desert of our beloved technology.

Q: One of the workshop topics you list on your Web site is Personal Mastery, and you talk about writing personal “life scripts.” Do you believe it’s possible to change one’s life by changing its story or script?

A: I taught the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey) as part of an effort to encourage character building (personal mastery) within the company culture. As part of my certification process, I went through the painful process of writing a personal mission statement. Although, it was painful, it was one of the most beneficial things I have ever done for myself and it ultimately led to an early retirement and a change of career. I had let society write my life script and had never questioned its interpretation of my purpose and value. As part of getting the master’s, I took a postmodern psychology course and was so absolutely excited to learn about the “dominant story” we tell ourselves and how it influences our lives without our conscious knowledge. I studied the woman’s movement and realized how that movement fragmented because groups within the movement could not agree up the new dominant story for women. I think we still haven’t defined it and that contributes to all the stress for women and men. Well, anyway, that’s a whole other area of work I am interested in and that’s bringing women back together in groups to redefine our story. When we were in the red tent or gathered around a quilt, we shaped our story and supported each other in its plot but now we are apart. Women must to gather again.

Her husband, John, developed the concept of the Leadership Story, “a narrative that excites people about what you stand for.” John, she said, “began to discover that everyone, armed with a leadership story, can become a leader.”

Using the aspects of Myers-Briggs types, Scanlon talks about:

• Feeling: “We become leaders when we become enthusiastic about something.”
• Sensing: “The ‘defining moment’ … tells about a specific moment, with specific sights and sounds, so it lets people experience what we experienced. We can feel what they felt, and it can be a defining moment for us too.”
• Intuition: “Defining the future we want to see adds the Intuitive part to our leadership story, where we ‘see’ what isn’t there yet. It advances us from saying ‘I want to go somewhere,’ to “I want to go THERE.’”
• Thinking: “This is the final piece to our leadership story, the Thinking piece, where we design a game plan to lead us to our goal.”

The other view of the Leadership Story comes from Katie K. Snapp, writing on the Neuroscience of Leadership on her Better-Leadership.com site. She writes:

A life story — whether we read it in a bestselling memoir or participate in it each day —contains silent assumptions and emotional scripts. Our assumptions tell us what to look for, and how to perceive and process experiences.

What about your identity as a leader in that story? Who defined it up until now? What events formed it? Were you an agent of the change or were you a victim? Change is not simple …

The good news is that we are not hard-wired for life. With new experiences, new neuronal pathways and new neural networks are formed. New highways to new communities in your brain. And, some remarkable new research shows, consistently repeating new experiences even alters gene expression. When we write a new story—and change our minds — we change our brains.

Snapp goes onto detail four principles of change, one of which is: “A new story can only occur by living in the present moment.” I have trouble with that one. The message has been coming at me from several directions — yoga class, my brush with Eckhart Tolle’s teachings this year — but I still find it a hard concept to embody.

She closes with: “The powerful use of story to examine what your leadership history leads to intention. Take control of the author in you. Rewrite what needs a change.”

I believe my life is slowly leading me in a direction in which I can impart this message to to others: Change the story, change your life.

Snapp teaches a 3-part workshop that seems similar to what I’d eventually like to teach: Reinventing Your Leadership: Using Brain Business and Mind Matters to Author Your Future.

My five-question interviews with some of the best-known folks in both applied and performance storytelling will commence Tuesday, Sept. 1.

Seventeen practitioners are featured in these Q&As: Molly Catron, Terrence Gargiulo, Jon Hansen, Loren Niemi, Gabrielle Dolan, John Caddell, Shawn Callahan, David Vanadia, Svend-Erk Engh, Sharon Lippincott, Tom Clifford, Ardath Albee, Sharon Benjamin, Carol Mon, Ron Donaldson, Jessica Lipnack, and Stephanie West Allen.

Among others who’ve agreed to participate are Annette Simmons, Christina Baldwin, Tim Sheppard, Michael Margolis, Victoria Ward, Steve Lovelace, Sally Strackbein, Thom Haller, Karen Dietz, Tim Enerata, Eric Wolf, Erin Fogarty, Rick Stone, David Drake, Nicky Fried, Cynthia Kurtz, Natalie Shell, Madelyn Blair, Lori Silverman, Kivi Leroux Miller, and Kathleen Golden.