The Story Habit Workshops
A selection of practical, ready-to-go workshops.
Each workshop lasts 3 hours, or can be condensed into a simpler 90 minute webinar.
You can book one stand alone workshop, or combine them together into a longer workshop or series of ongoing workshops. With each workshop based around the “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” framework and The 3 Ingredients of Stories (see at the bottom of the page for more details) combining workshops means less content and more practice, feedback and application.
Each workshop has its own unique template, summarised onto one A4 sheet of paper, that is designed to help participants achieve a particular objective or solve a particular problem.
To learn more, email Jamie or book a call.
Are important conversations a big part of your work? Are building trust, influencing and persuading essential for completing your work?
The greatest opportunity to build trust, change minds and inspire action is conversation. And in an increasingly automated and data driven world, people crave genuine human connection.
So in this workshop, we work on how to build trust through genuine lasting relationships, and influence and persuade in the moment through conversation.
By the end, you’ll have a framework to guide you through change-making conversations at work.
Our most popular workshop!
Are you finding it difficult to gain support from senior leaders or colleagues for your ideas that could bring about significant change? Do you find it challenging to communicate your vision to your team in a way that motivates and influences others?
The right message can make all the difference when the stakes are high. Whether you’re pitching a proposal, seeking stakeholder buy-in, or convincing your team to act, a persuasive message is your key to success.
We’ve all got stakeholders we need to persuade, so here we look at how to use “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” to change minds and inspire action.
By the end, you’ll have crafted a strategy for persuading a real-life stakeholder of yours, and you’ll gain a set of tools to help you persuade effectively in the future.
Are you presenting important information to a senioraudience? Perhapsyour audience has little patience and high expectations? Presenting to a senior audience can be a high stakes situation. We have little time to present to an audience with little patience and high expectations. We need to present our insights, in an impactful way, as efficiently as possible.
So, have you got an important presentation coming up?
You bring a presentation or message you need to craft. We then help you extract relevant insights and arrange into a meaningful narrative using “Relate, Challenge, Resolve”. Finally, we bring those insights to life using The 3 Ingredients of Stories.
By the end, you’ll have powerful insights you can deliver with impact, as well as a set of tools to help you keep crafting executive presentations.
Do you get nervous when giving important presentations? Do you need to show complete confidence when presenting? Then this workshop is for you!
This is the only workshop that doesn’t use “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” or The 3 Ingredients of Stories. Instead, we cover several approaches to help you “Anticipate” challenges and “Demonstrate” confidence during your presentation.
By the end, you’ll be able to relax and demonstrate executive presence.
Do you have important data to present? And does your audience struggle to understand what this data means?
Sometimes numbers just go in through one ear and straight out the other!
We start by searching for insights within your set of data. Afterwards, we convert those insights into a meaningful narrative using “Relate, Challenge, Resolve”. Then bring those insights to life using both The 3 Ingredients of Stories and Key Visualisation Principles.
By the end, you’ll have turned a dry set of data into a meaningful presentation.
Is your work so technical that other people don’t understand what you do? Or is your work so specialised that you sometimes feel like you’re speaking a different language?
This is a common challenge for people with a more technical role or more specialised expertise. Whether you’re an engineer, a programmer or even an accountant, storytelling is an essential skill to help people understand what you’re going on about!
So in this workshop, we demonstrate how we can use the “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” framework and “3 Ingredients of Stories” to explain technical concepts in a simple way.
By the end of this workshop, you’ll have used storytelling techniques to craft simple explanations for your technical concepts.
How do you make your training impactful and enjoyable? How do you make sure your training isn’t just another lecture that everyone complains about afterwards?
This workshop, based on Jamie Dixon’s first book “Shaping Paths – How to Design and Deliver PRACTICAL Training”, is split into two parts, each a day long. In the first part, we explore Practical Training Design, and in the second, we focus Facilitation Skills. You can also pick just one part if that’s all you need.
In Training Design, we look at a framework to make our training more practical by designing it around tools learners can take away to aid them back at work. In Facilitation Skills, we hone in on Jamie’s “5 Elements of Facilitation”, and the principles and skills we need for each element to bring our workshops to life.
By the end of this workshop, you’ll be able to deliver practical and impactful training.
Are you navigating a career transition, a new role or a challenging goal? Or is your team embarking on a project together and you need everyone aligned on what strengths you bring and the journey ahead?
Instead of using an assessment to dig out your strengths, we work with stories. Through reflection on your greatest successes and what others come to you for, strengths surface naturally.
NarraWay is a deeply reflective experience, where we identify the equipment we carry with us (our strengths), map out the journey that lies before us, and strategise how to use our strengths to navigate the journey we face.
By the end, you’ll have a Journey Map — a visual reminder of the strengths you carry and how to bring the best of yourself to meet the challenge at hand.
What is The Story Habit?
The Story Habit is a storytelling methodology with numerous applications.
It is based on a 3 step framework called “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” with habits for each step to help bring more meaning to daily conversations.
“Relate, Challenge, Resolve” was created by Jamie Dixon whilst researching his book The Story Habit.
As Jamie describes it:
“Through my research I collected lots of ideas about storytelling and put them straight to use in my workshops. I found some ideas stuck, whilst others fell flat. Over time, I took the ones that stuck and kept arranging them into different frameworks to see what made sense. One day, whilst looking at these ideas arranged in a new way, the idea of “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” just came to me, so I thought I’d test it out. I shared it in my next workshop and found people were able to quickly grasp it and start using it to craft and refine powerful stories. From the very first moment I used it I found it just works for people, and since then I’ve discovered numerous applications for it as well.”
The Relate, Challenge, Resolve Framework
Here’s how it works:
Relate:
Every story is about a character in a situation the audience can relate to.
Challenge:
That character then meets a challenge.
Resolve:
They then take action to resolve the challenge.
In “The Story Habit” book, Jamie shows the different layers to this framework. He starts by showing how it can be used to tell stories, and then spends the rest of the book showing how Relating, Challenging and Resolving are each individual skill sets with their own sets of habits.
Relate:
Is the skill of learning about other people’s stories; what they believe in and what they value.
Challenge:
Is the skill of challenging people’s stories, helping them see things differently and changing their minds.
Resolve:
Is the skill of clarifying the barriers to action, removing those barriers and inspiring change.
The 3 Ingredients of Stories
Jamie describes “Relate, Challenge, Resolve” as being like the meat, vegetables and staple of any meal. They are essential for a meal, but on their own they’re not enough. What’s missing is the flavouring to bring that meal to life. This is exactly what The 3 Ingredients of Stories does; they bring the details to life.
Show, Don’t Tell:
A picture is worth a thousand words. Great storytellers use vivid details, examples, demonstrations and experiences to bring details to life.
Analogies & Metaphors:
Analogies are bridges into the unknown; they connect ideas the audience know very well with ideas that are completely knew to them. Great storytellers use analogies & metaphors to make details more relatable.
Contrast:
Stories are always about change. When one thing (be a bit person, statistic or experience) is contrasted with another, it creates a space for meaning to emerge. Great storytellers use contrast to put ideas into a meaningful context.
A strong believer in the power of simplicity, Jamie structures every one of his workshops around the Relate, Challenge, Resolve framework, in combination with The 3 Ingredients of Stories. By showing participants how this simple approach to storytelling can be applied in multiple ways, this helps them build their own story habits.