Aviv's Blog » Storytelling

Make Your Learning Compelling

Aviv Shahar — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:43:59 +0000

Make your learning compelling. Make it compelling for you. You are the first listener and student of your teachings. When you listen well, the rest of the world wants to come and listen too.

A great Rabi once said “we tell stories to our children to put them to sleep. We tell stories to adults to wake them up.” In our leadership seminars and retreats we often practice the “From you I have learned” exercise. Each participant tells a story about a person that has had a formative impression on them. When they finish telling the story they end with saying – and so from (this person) I have learned about courage/ how to say no / how to pick myself up and have another go / how to forgive and let go, and so on. People tell stories about a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a manager or a friend. It’s a powerful exercise because people learn to distill and articulate a specific learning from their experience. They learn even more from each other’s stories. As we work through this life-centering-stories exercise, people are surprised to see the value that lives inside the significant stories of their lives. They find new wisdom is available to them when they learn to reframe their experiences and bring them up to date and harvest a new meaning.

Make the learning interesting, inspiring, compelling. This is how you forward your experience into further development and growth. The radium is always buried deep in the pitchblende. Charisma joins you when you process enough pitchblende to find the radium inside you.

The Making of A Storyteller

Aviv Shahar — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:56:26 +0000

This is a conversation about the power of storytelling. “Let’s bring back the dinner table conversation” is one of many messages from David McCullough.

In art, business or anything – “The only way to learn to do it is by doing it.”
This one life is the real thing, not the dress rehearsal for another time. David McCullough’s story is the making of a great storyteller. Told in this conversation with Charlie Rose, the story is about finding the sweet spot – the convergence point of talent and passion with an action that makes a difference. It is in that place that you find a life fully lived. In his books and in this interview, McCullough brings to life stories that shaped this nation and its people. He tells the story of learning to write by writing, and of the best advice he ever received (Watch it to find out).

What is your sweet spot? What mode of action allows you to express your passion and talent?
© Aviv Shahar

“Who Are We?”

Aviv Shahar — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:30:48 +0000

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight is an amazing testimony about the Left and Right Brain hemispheres, about a scientific passion to serve, about recover-ability driven by the human spirit and about “Who are We?”
The miracle of Taylor’s story is first in how she was able to stay totally curious in a middle of a stroke episode, revealing that her fascination with brain function is so deep that it was not erased at the onset of the trauma. The second miracle is how she was propelled into recovery by the insights she now shares.

Passionate Storytelling!

Aviv Shahar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:05:29 +0000

This story by Ben Dunlap tells of a Passionate Life that will move you to tears. It’s the power of his irresistible inspiration about courage and greatness that Dunlap communicates so evocatively. It is the belief that human beings are fundamentally good, that there is an insatiable curiosity and a desire to learn, and an irrepressible need to know and grow, and the inextinguishable drive to live each day as if it is your last.
Let’s tell such rousing stories. Let’s create more stories to be told.
© Aviv Shahar