Laird Schaub The Application of Story to Group Facilitation and Community Living.
Press Play to hear Laird Schaub speak about The Application of Story to Group Facilitation and Community Living on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf
Laird Schaub Writes…
“As a consultant, I’m often asked to work with groups that consider themselves stuck. In helping them understand how they got there and the choices they have to move through it, I always start with the stories-the way in which each person makes sense of their reality as a member of the group. Invariably, the stories don’t all match. Sometimes the realities are mutually exclusive. Still, I believe them all and do my best to help everyone in the group understand how each person’s actions make sense from that person’s perspective. Once I’ve established a bridge of understanding among the various players, it’s then possible to build a new story, where each person’s reality is now a little bigger and can hold aspects of others realities as well.
The key to this is to not ask a person to change their core beliefs, change their personality, or change the way they work with information. I just ask them to change their story, and then to adjust their behaviors accordingly. I ask them to make shifts that are in their interest; ones that will help them be better understood and be less triggering for others. I ask them to make changes that will help them build relationship.
Often, people in the group will be in pain. Being stuck doesn’t feel good, and if you cannot see past your own story it often appears that others have taken actions that are purposefully hurtful or disrespectful. Ouch! In this sense, pain is a symptom of a problem, and very useful in helping to diagnose where the stories are not in alignment. Because you want to be treating causes and not just symptoms, it’s important here to resist the impulse to alleviate the pain as your priority. It’s a better strategy to view the pain as an important source of information and explore it for the purpose of surfacing the clues you’ll need to build a story where everyone can feel held and respected.”
Brief Bio:
Laird has lived 36 years at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing rural community in Missouri which he helped found. He homesteads there, has raised two kids, and has developed a flair for preserving food and celebration cooking. He is also the main administrator of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, a network organization he helped create in 1986, and that serves as a clearinghouse of information about North American communities of all stripes.
In addition to being an author and public speaker about various aspects of community, he’s also a meeting junkie and has parlayed his passion for good process into a consulting business on group dynamics. He’s worked with about 75 different groups around the US, many of them multiple times. His specialty is up-tempo meetings that engage the full range of human input, teaching groups to work creatively with conflict, and at the same time being ruthless about about capturing as much product as possible. In 2003, he pioneered a two-year training in Integrative Facilitation that he’s delivered four times and is now marketing across the continent.
You can read his thoughts on his blog at http://communityandconsensus.blogspot.com/
Tags: Midwest Storytelling
Creating Success, Episode List, Healing Storytelling, Peace Storytelling, Storytelling in Community | Brother Wolf | 
August 7, 2010 2:02 am
