Rediscovering The Human Connection™

In our workshops, participants discover how to connect with, influence and inspire change in others.  Story Leaders is a research-based framework that harnesses the power of two underused and underdeveloped communication methods: storytelling and empathic listening.

Facilitated by certified Story Leader™ Instructors, workshops are interactive, practical, experiential, and feedback-oriented. The workshop is broken into lecture, practice, coaching, and real life case study exercises.

The workshop is structured in five phases over a two and a half day period. In phase 1, attendees will learn the new science behind how humans act: how we decide to trust, decide to change, how we allow ourselves to be influenced by some people and not by others, and how we decide to buy or not buy. Also, in phase I, attendees will learn the science behind the powerful affects of story on the human mind. In phase II, attendees will learn how to build an inventory of stories, to be used in their sales cycles, using a universal story framework. The output of phase II will be a set of stories, that follow this narrative form, to include: The Who Am I story, The Who I Represent story and multiple Who I've Helped stories. In phase III, attendees will gain the practice necessary to tell their stories authentically and passionately to their peers and will receive immediate feedback on their content and telling skills. Phase IV immerses attendees in an Empathic Listening model designed to help attendees acquire the building blocks of active listening in order to tend to a buyer's stories. In the fifth and final phase, attendees will apply their storytelling and story listening skills to real life selling situations. Attendees will leave the workshop a StoryLeader: the ability to use StoryTelling and StoryTending as way to foster a collaborative, reciprocal conversation with potential customers.

After becoming StoryLeaders™ attendees will continue to refine their storytelling skills through ongoing application and sharing of best practices, successes and lessons learned.

At the end of a workshop, attendees will:

Understand the Barriers that buyers put up, and why.

Know the Pathway around those Barriers.

Understand the new science of basic human behavior.

Learn how to consciously activate the receptive part of someone's mind where hope, trust and decisions to change are formed, while relaxing the skeptical part of the mind.

Learn how to use a proven story structure to make information "storyable"

Know how to build the basic types of stories needed for sales situations: Who Am I, Who I Represent, Who I Have Helped, and other personal stories.

Through practice, gain the skills necessary to be able to share their stories authentically and passionately.

Learn an Empathic Listening model designed to encourage another person (i.e. a buyer) to open up and reveal themselves through their stories.

Learn how to incorporate storytelling and empathic listening as the means to have a collaborative conversation with a buyer.

The Story Learning Model

Attendees will leave our 2.5 day workshop as 'StoryLeaders': the ability to influence and inspire people to change.

 [5] To influence change in others, attendees will learn to foster a collaborative conversation with buyers through the mutual sharing of ideas and beliefs

[4] In order to facilitate this collaboration, one will learn an empathic listening model that encourages others to open up and reveal themselves

[3] Prior to learning the building blocks of listening, participants learn to search through, organize and communicate their own ideas, beliefs and experiences through the Story Leaders story framework.

[2] To be able to make your experiences storyable, participants learn why stories are so compelling to human beings and how they inspire people to take action

[1] Before one learns about story, modern neuroscience will be presented in order to provide an understanding of how people are influenced to change