Tag: story

Your Perspective is Your Truth

CoachingPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Your Perspective is Your Truth

Coaching is unique because no two coaching conversations are ever the same. Each individual brings their unique perspective to the table.

This makes coaching so interesting – every interaction is an opportunity for learning and growth. Each person has their own story, which shapes how they view the world. Their perspective is their truth.

As a coach, it is essential to be aware of these differences and find a way to balance structure with flexibility, process with responsiveness. In this week’s issue, we explore some of the dialogic nuances together.

It is worth noting, dear reader, this is an exploration in real-time. I will reflect and let my curiosity guide me, and my writing will lead me to clarity.

Structure Vs Story

Part of me has consistently pushed back against too much process and structure in coaching dialogue. This might come as a surprise to those who know me or have experienced facilitation with me. But facilitation is different in that it is bound by limited time and resourcing.

When there is scarcity, we need more constraint, which you might see as a contradiction, but every second needs to be designed when every second counts. Coaching dialogue at best is a co-created experience over an extended timeframe.

There are days when I feel like I need more space to be with my coaching client’s story. To hear them out, explore their experience and help them find meaning in what they are saying.

I need to bring more structure and focus to the conversation on other days. To explore specific topics, set goals and create action plans. In some coaching moments, structure interjects delicately via a phrase that corrals a fleeting set of swirling ideas.

It can be a delicate balance, but it is worth paying attention to. As coaches, we need to be aware of our style and approach and the needs of our clients. Find a way to balance structure with flexibility, process with responsiveness. Only then can we find what each coaching conversation needs.

Your Perspective is Your Truth

I strive to value every individual’s story. I might explore the same ideas or topics from one coaching conversation to the next. We might discuss the challenges of leading a team, building consensus or developing a strategy. But the person opposite me comes to those ideas very differently. Their path to this moment is always going to be unique.

I can’t assume that I know their perspective. I can only explore it with them by asking questions, listening deeply and being curious about their experience. Only then can I hope to understand their truth. And in doing so, help them find clarity and meaning in their own story.

It is their perspective, and it is their truth. In coaching, we might explore different versions of the truth, but ultimately it is up to the individual to decide what they believe.

As coaches, we need to be aware of our biases and assumptions. We all have them, and they will show up in our coaching conversations. The best we can do is be mindful of them and hold space for different perspectives.

When we are curious about our coaching clients’ experiences, we can learn so much. It is only then that we can truly understand their unique perspective.

It is a privilege to be part of someone’s journey, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

Slow Down

We explored the value of slowing down during some recent team leadership coaching. The pace and demands on all school staff at the moment is very high.

Coaching sessions can benefit from working at a pace appropriate to reflective thinking and perspective-shifting.

As I was inviting the school leaders to change gears, I heard myself explain what a more considered pace might offer:

We slow down

  • To smell the roses
  • To admire the view
  • To let the stories in
  • To notice the details
  • To find moments of peace
  • To connect the disparate dots
  • To listen with greater intention

These are all worthy goals. When we operate with too much haste, it is hard to see anything clearly. Our thoughts and reactions become automated, and we can lose touch with our intuition. We might also lose sight of the people around us.

When we slow down, we have a chance to connect with what is happening in the moment. To be present. To see and feel the world more fully.

Your Talking Points

Let’s turn some of this into some next steps and clear-talking points for further dialogue and reflection:

  • What benefits do you see in slowing down?
  • How might you apply a more considered pace in your work?
  • Remember our own biases and assumptions. Which of your stories gets in the way?
  • When you are supporting others, are you drawn to structure or responsiveness? How do these co-exist in your coaching experience?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with additional thoughts from the blog:

​How to Build Better Relationships  ⟶

​A Coaches Guide To Action Planning That Works ⟶

​Upgrade Your Mirror: The Power of Reflexive Thinking ⟶

​Counter Wooden-Headedness and Break Your Echo Chambers ⟶

​Create the Ideal Conditions for Coaching and Professional Growth ⟶

Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week – drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett.

How We Story

DialoguePublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on How We Story

The Pacific concept of Talanoa

This week I learned about the Pacific concept of “talanoa”. This is storytelling that leads to consensus-building and decision-making. It is a collective or community intelligence process deeply rooted in the Pacific way of life.

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Storytelling and discussion during a workshop with secondary teachers, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. (March 2020)

With parallels to Australian Aboriginal yarning and Hawaiian talkstory, talanoa is a conversational mode of storying through which knowledge is developed, collected and transmitted. It is at home in Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and elsewhere.

When we story, we embody our social self and deepen our connections in a dialogical universe. We know we are in a safe space.

Talking about tok stori | DLProg.

The informal process starts with someone sharing a story, and then others in the group add to it. This continued storytelling helps build relationships, create empathy and understanding, and develop consensus. As the stories are shared, they also teach values, traditions, and customs.

Let’s explore how the concept and process of talanoa apply to leadership, learning and innovation.

Leadership

To lead effectively, you need to build relationships and develop consensus. You also need to be able to understand and empathise with those that you are leading. The process of talanoa can help leaders do just that.

It helps you build relationships, understand different viewpoints, and develop a shared understanding. This can then lead to effective decision-making and problem-solving.

Here are some helpful guiding questions and ideas:

  • How often do we share stories?
  • What do we need to stop doing to make space for storying?
  • What artefacts do we share that represent the story of our community?
  • What is your organisation’s story, and how do you use this to learn together?

Learning

Talanoa is a process for learning. It encourages collaboration and the sharing of knowledge. It also helps to build deeper listening, relationships and develop empathy.

It makes me think about narrative pedagogies and how story is a mechanism for learning. In the same way, we think of the facets of learning assessment (for, as and of), we can learn from stories differently.

We learn from stories; storying can be the learning process and the vehicle to reflect on our experience.

I am curious to apply talanoa and other storying mechanisms in my workshops.

Innovation

I have been supporting primary teachers as they navigate a practitioner inquiry that uses design thinking. Storying has emerged as a critical feature of their innovative work.

A couple of insights surfaced.

  • Stay connected to the story of problem-solving — who needs our help the most? Why is this important?
  • As you move through later phases of design, it is easy to lose touch with the origin story of the problem. What’s the problem’s origin story? What would be in the Season 1 recap?
  • As we gather feedback on ideas, share the emerging story of feedback so far. This feedback narrative helps our audience be more precise in their feedback. What is the story of feedback so far?

A further reflection is how stories and storying might help people access new ideas. Make sure you have a story to tell about your innovation — this will be critical for marketing and scaling your work.

Your Talking Points

  • How do we optimise for storytelling?
  • How might we use stories to generate new ideas?
  • What would be the impact of using talanoa in business and leadership contexts?
  • How might we create learning environments that encourage the sharing of stories and the development of relationships?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with some Atomic Essays:

​Make Meetings Simple ⟶
​How to create the ideal conditions for dialogue, creativity and feedback ⟶
​Use This Question At The Start of Your Next Meeting to Increase Empathy and Connection ⟶

And some longer articles:

​Dialogic Coaching ⟶
​The Difference between Dialogue and Discussion ⟶
​‘Let’s have a yarn’ — empower every voice in your group ⟶

Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett.

How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

LeadershipPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

The pandemic experience is an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.

King Lear and Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7) Francesco Bartolozzi , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A look at storytelling and leadership, here is a summary.

Key Points

  • Story bias helps us organise, filter and remember information.
  • Storytelling is critical to successful leadership — this is especially true during disruptive change.
  • Teleological explanation helps us to understand what we are trying to become.
  • The pandemic experience gives us an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.
  • Read more articles on leadership.

Narrative Bias

We rely on the story bias. It helps us process our experiences into manageable chunks. This cognitive bias is our tendency to assimilate experiences and information into a coherent narrative or story pattern.

We filter the masses of data we encounter. This pattern recognition lets us jettison the information that does not fit into our story view.

There is a downside. Although experiences are more memorable, we might force information into a preset mould and disregard new insights we need to pay attention to.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrates how stories are more memorable when they offer layers of meaning. Compare the following statements:

“The king died and the queen died.”

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”

This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster, shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot. But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it better as a packaged idea.

The second example is more memorable because the chunks of data become tied together with the story and a layer of meaning.

Lead With Stories

Peter Senge explains that leaders add new layers of meaning when they focus on the ‘purpose story’ — why do we exist, and where are we heading?

[stories] provide what philosophy calls a “teleological explanation” (from the Greek telos, meaning “end” or “purpose”) — an understanding of what we are trying to become.

Purposeful narrative, coupled with system strategy, creates a sense of continuity and identity not achievable in any other way.

Activating purpose is impossible without storytelling ~ John Coleman

Use stories to help people reflect, learn and understand the forces of change within our education systems.

Leaders in learning organizations have the ability to conceptualize their strategic insights so that they become public knowledge, open to challenge and further improvement.

We also have to figure out ways to share stories across time and create artefacts that guide future generations.

Cautionary Tales

In issue #172 of my weekly email, we looked at how tsunami stones represented the catastrophic stories of the past. Dotted throughout the landscape of coastal communities are large stone tablets, some as tall as 10 feet, that date back to the 1890s. Carved into these are the stories of past tsunamis.

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Photo by Cindy Chan on Unsplash

Some feature warnings to seek higher ground in the wake of an earthquake. Others give death tolls or mark mass graves. A few denote place names with clear messages, like Nokoriya (Valley of Survivors) and Namiwake (Wave’s Edge).

These monuments saved lives in more recent events and act as a storied artefact and cautionary tale across generations.

I challenged readers of issue 172 to reflect on the story you might tell of our current times.

What will be your community’s story of the pandemic? Will it be of the virus? Or our struggle with isolation and remoteness? Or will your community story be about compassion, empathy, generosity, resilience, innovation and relationships?

Your Talking Points

  • What stories filter your experience?
  • Years from now, how will our storytelling be instructive, purposeful and add value?
  • How will it be pointed reminders of our collective commitment to a set of values that can resist a global pandemic?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on a weekly basis.

⚡️ Subscribe now and get started this week.

An Interview with Luiz Stockler – filmmaker, storyteller, people-watcher

LiteracyPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on An Interview with Luiz Stockler – filmmaker, storyteller, people-watcher

Luiz Lafayette Stockler is a 25 year old award winning director and animator. I recently discovered his film Vovô on Vimeo and was immediately struck by the powerful simplicity and the beautiful way the story is told. I have been lucky enough to find some incredible work on Vimeo just recently and Luiz’s film is most certainly in that category.

 

Vovô from Luiz Lafayette Stockler on Vimeo.

 

I managed to track Luiz down and he was kind enough to answer some questions about his film and his own process of storytelling.

You say in your Twitter profile “North Wales via Brazil” – what’s the story there?

I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to a Brazilian father and a Welsh mother. My parents worked with horses and were professional showjumpers who competed at the highest level in south america. when I was 8 years old, my dad was offered a job in Scotland riding horses for a breeder, so we moved to the UK. my dad has since moved back to Brazil.

You are soon to start at the London Royal College of Art – what are you studying?

I am starting an MA in Animation at the Royal college of Art, it’s quite a prestigious school in the animation world so I was ecstatic when I was offered a place!

Your short animated film Vovô has caused quite a stir online, what do you enjoy most about your film?

I think the one thing I enjoy the most out of my film is that its such a personal story to me, but also something that I think anyone can relate to in some way or another. It has a universal theme that makes it accessible to people.

Vovô has quite a sad story to it, is the film something you have created out of personal experiences or is it purely fiction?

Vovô is the Portuguese word for grandfather. The film is about my childhood memories of my grandfather when I was growing up in Brazil, up until his untimely death during a summer holiday I spent back in Rio visiting my family when I was 19, I havent been back since.

What sort of time did you dedicate to the Vovô project? Does it take a long time to create something so polished?

It was made during my third year of my BA in Animation at the University of Wales, Newport. I had the whole year to work on it from development/pre-production/production/post production to finished piece….the script was the easiest part, I wrote that in a day and took about 5 drafts to get it right, I got a lot of help and feedback from my friends which helped a lot…the rest of the film went through so many changes and doubt/insecurities that I almost gave up and considered re-doing the year. Because of its personal element it became very easy to lose sight of what I was trying to make. I think as a filmmaker/artist/musician/writer etc… you can become quite precious of your idea and it can be quite hard to stand back and take a look at it with an open mind. I had all these storyboards and animatics that no longer made sense to me so in the end I had to become a bit ruthless with it all and I just let spontaneity take over and freestyled most of the film, animating it in six weeks. I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone though as I hardly slept, but I thrived on the pressure. luckily most of the scenes were fairly simple to animate, otherwise it would have taken a lot longer. the best thing I had throughout though was my friends/fellow classmates, without their help I dont think I would have made this film the way I did. I cant thank them enough.

 

Showreel 2010 from Luiz Lafayette Stockler on Vimeo.

 

How do you maintain a sense of self and originality when there is so much incredible work published these days? What advice would you give a young artist or illustrator about finding their own way of doing things?

I think I’ve always struggled with drawing things ‘well’, I’m terrible at proportion/perspective etc…so the only way I could put to paper what is in my mind is to simplify it by about a 100 times, I always say that my work is a bad version of what I saw in my head. I think the most important/useful advice I ever got given was to play to your strengths, I kept things simple because thats the way I’ve always worked in my sketchbooks. You can get excited by a new technique or visual style or even a software plug-in that you end up getting carried away with it and lose perspective on what you’re trying to do, you also lose that raw connection you had with your work in the first place. Keep it simple, play to your strengths and do what excites you.

Do you consciously strike a balance between the depth of the story and the way it is told?

When I was coming up with visuals, I was told by a friend that if something is being said then we dont need to see it everytime, it’s like we’re being told something twice. With this in mind, I tried to think less literal and more metaphorically and symbolically about what was on screen, I thought about how the viewer could learn so much more about the characters without being told, but rather shown. I also think it has something to do with songwriting, I’ve written songs since i was young so I’ve always been used to telling stories in a stripped down/brief way. The script of the film ended up being a progression of my songwriting.

Your film is centred around the relationships of two people and very focused on particular idiosyncrasies, what do you like about people-watching?

I’ve always been interested in people watching. I like how you can tell a lot about a person before you’ve even had a conversation with them. The way they walk, the way they dress, cross their legs, hold a cigarette etc… we show a lot of who we are using just body language and I think I have been good at mimicking that in people from a young age, I was always doing impressions of friends and family, copying their gestures and behavioural nuances – something which has definitely helped me when it comes to animating characters.

Do you have any projects you are currently working on that you can share?

I’m currently just saving money for my big move to London and the Royal College of Art. apart from that, I’m constantly doing illustrations and working on ideas for films, which you can see on my blog at http://luizstockler.wordpress.com

//

Many thanks to Luiz for sharing his thoughts and taking the time to answer some questions. Working with children in school around the issues in Luiz’s film can be difficult and as teachers we are often a central part of the support that can be provided to children who are dealing with personal loss. Perhaps this film could be used to help an open discussion around these sensitive and difficult times.

Of course at the heart of the film is the story and such a narrative could be explored more widely in terms of the way it is told, un-picking the brevity of narration and how it is paired with visual metaphor and symbols as Luiz explained.

I hope you enjoyed the film and hearing from Luiz himself, perhaps you will see a place for it in your own curriculum or to support the work you are doing with children. I am sure you will join me in wishing Luiz every success when he joins the Royal College this September and in his future work.

Paraphernalia – a short animation to use in Literacy

Curriculum, LiteracyPublished onUpdated on10 Comments on Paraphernalia – a short animation to use in Literacy

The other night I had a little whirlwind session exploring content on Vimeo and discovered some fantastic pieces of work, including this lovely short animation called Paraphernalia. It is a 3rd year film made by Sabrina Cotungo who is studying at The California Institute of the Arts – however her film was made at Gobelins, l’école de l’image in Paris.

Sabrina Cotungo describes her film as

The story of an anemic little recluse of a girl who makes a friend at the expense of her ceiling.

 

Paraphernalia from Sabrina Cotugno on Vimeo.

What strikes me about the little story is the openings it presents for a class to explore in terms of their narrative literacy unit, the questions that could be asked about the plot and the characters.

  • Why is she all alone?
  • Where are her family?
  • Where was the gentleman heading?
  • Why did he crash?
  • Why had he invented such a wonderful flying machine?

Also a class could spend time working on the dialogue that takes place between our characters. It is conveniently silent and we might encourage our pupils to explain the emotions we see on their faces, to play these scenes out in some drama and then to perhaps develop the written dialogue.

What do you like about the film and how do you see it being used with your classes?