Horses and theatre, and story telling

I attended a seminar on human resource and learning today. It was organized by People Potential and it was their 13th year in running these one-day complimentary seminars where they invite HR and Learning practitioners for an exchange of ideas and experience. 

I was exposed to two news ways of learning and I learnt one new thing.

The new thing I learnt is the basics of business story telling. I am never good in public speaking though I have done a few good ones and I am quite alright in facilitating training sessions. But when it comes to persuading and influencing, I am utterly bad at it and so I thought learning how to tell a business story may help. The basics seem simple and I could now easily craft one. But the challenge now though is to find the stories and they have to be personal and real. To me that is tough and I'd be cracking my head on that for now and after that to actually tell the stories. Ah! I don't know. 

The two news ways of learning I have discovered on the other hand are really interesting ones. One actually involves horses. It is a way of learning that gets you to the innermost values that you hold. It is through the caring, grooming and bonding with the horses that you might be able to get you to your heart of heart. I must say I am not yet convinced of its breadth and scope but I believe horses can teach us a lot and it will definitely be deep and long lasting. 

The second one is is fascinating. It is in the form of an exchange theatre. You will get a group of skilled actors to portray a common scene or problem in your organization that you want to address. And you use the actors to try out scenes that you yourself can get to play out what you think might work with zero consequences. It should handle culture and human behavior issues really well by putting you in a live test environment which you can twist and turn however you like to try out behaviors and solutions to see what might work. 

It was indeed a good day of learning. 

pearlie