PAMELA GAWLER-WRIGHT, from BEELEAF
THE NATURAL ART OF STORYTELLING
We were promised:-
an oportunity to learn and practice specific techniques to unlock creativity, imagination and communication.
How our brain functions to make storytelling a potent tool for ecological change.
Some exercises to play with.
Potential developement of our unique storytelling style.

Pamela began with a quick trip through the developement of the brain and the need for whole brain functioning to identify and find patterns, and told us how emotion and memory are linked in the limbic brain. This may sound a bit dull as you read this but Pamela's storytelling skills made the whole evening a real example of how to hold an audience and achieve maximum participation from them.

Very quickly we were into the first exercise in groups of three exchanging "stories". As the groups warmed so the volume of noise in the room grew!
We reassembled to be asked about the "values" in our stories and discovered how our "value" may not have been shared by our listeners but they may have taken one of their own values out of our story. When we explored this we discovered we had indeed put a top value into the story we chose to share.
Pam explained about how values follow e-motions, they are a part of how we store stories and enable us to share our values without preaching. And what lies behind our values? Why Beliefs of course!
Pam then borrowed a volunteer to play the "NO. I'd rather do something else" Game. Even with the enthusiasm of Pam and Karen we had all begun to lose the will to live as just in time the game changed to "YES! and then let's...!!" This revived us all and soon we were playing it for ourselves, loudly and laughingly.
Stories are just part of our memory system and sometimes we need to let go of inhibitions and preconceived ideas to let the story flow. Pam enlisted the help of her colleague Mandy to demonstrate a good technique for moving a story about and helping with "stuck" states. Pam started her story and Mandy's role was to indicate a direction for the story to move to. Up to chunk up to a higher level, down to move into more detail, and left and right to stay at the same level but explore similarities. This is a great way to disable the conscious mind and stop it from interfering in the free flow and fun of storytelling. We all got to play with this too and discovered some interesting connections between direction of the story and our own body postures.
Our final game was played in threes. We were given two pieces of coloured card and on one asked to write the name of an object. (any object). On the other we wrote an issue we would like to solve. We moved the object one place to the left and the issue one place to the right. So now with someone else's object and the other one's issue we set about combining the two into a story to solve the issue with the object. Much fun all around. I never realised that a chair could help someone become slimmer so creatively.
Thank you Pamela for a super evening, full of practical help for Therapists, Trainers, Business People, Parents, Coaches, and NLPers of all types. and thank you to Mandy for supporting Pam and travelling down to deepest Eastleigh.

Return to NLP-South main site