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teaching story thinking skills

Eunoia and why you should do more of it

‘Eunoia’ is the shortest English word that contains all the five vowels. It derives from the Greek word εύνοια which means ‘well mind’ or ‘beautiful thinking’. It is a rarely used medical term referring to a state of “normal mental health”. By contrast, we have a vast vocabulary for states of mental dis-order and dis-ease. So […]

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corporate culture leadership myth organizational storytelling storytelling health thinking skills

Test your Defining of your position of power

The doings of power provide the raw material for many a conversation. But what is power really? And how is power constructed? Our world identifies certain individuals as having power and then proceeds to make them more powerful by talking about them in the media. Politicians, high profile business leaders, characters from the entertainment industry […]

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change management conflict management corporate culture thinking skills

How to use telling tales for corporate advantage

by Karen Alsfine 23 January 2007 From RalBusiness Network http://www.realbusiness.co.za/Article.aspx?articleID=3884&typeID=2 ONCE upon a time. Happily ever after. Comedy or drama. Telling tales is far more than an activity just for respite, so it seems. Storytelling is the meaning of life, connecting the prosaic to the divine and constituting the most engaging way of communicating, says […]

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change management conflict management storytelling coaching thinking skills

How caffeine works and how it can change everything

In almost every corporate environment in which we work, I often see computerised employee card activated coffee percolators and espresso machines on every floor. I’ve often wondered why caffeine is so much part of corporate culture and how people casually adopt the language of café society into everyday conversation. I often hear ‘Let’s meet over […]

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storytelling health thinking skills

What stories do to you

Billions of neurones are constantly making and pruning connections with other neurones in your brain. Acts of thinking and perception can be detected at the neuronal level as a complex movement electro-chemical signals. So it’ll come as no surprise that stories have a significant impact of the neurochemistry of our brain/mind/body complex. DARPA (Defence Advanced Research […]

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storytelling health thinking skills

Your story and sense of self

There is a magical link between life story and the way we construct our selfhood/sense-of-self and the experience of the world around us. This timeline helps you unpack and deconstruct your own narrative and then craft it into the Heroes Journey it deserves to be – reframe and recreate it to get what it is you […]

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change management conflict management story circle storytelling health thinking skills

Language use and change management

An often overlooked but fundamental aspect of change management is how we use words and metaphors and how slippery meaning really is. Think of how differently you relate to these terms when they are reframed: The ‘block of flats’ is now called a much more interesting sounding ‘vertical village’ The resale value of a  ‘used […]