1.  Story Crafting Skill Building 

• Fun, easy, and psychologically safe three-phase process for crafting and progressively deepening resonant personal stories from small, meaningful experiences

• Created specifically for non-writers

• Participants generally sit with 6-7 others they do not yet know, or know well.

• ASC’s performance (spoken word and music) sets an emotional tone, and establishes a moving values sphere, for the evening.

• ASC facilitates with humor and playful realness

2. From Scary to Exciting Through Deft Pedagogy

• The workshop unfolds through brief writing experiments (90 seconds!), intentionally designed to avoid self-editing, intimidation or pressure (e.g., no time for the “this is stupids” to arrive!).
Such “emphatic not-big-dealness” is a vital principle for ASC cohesion process design.

• Each experiment moves the narrative deeper and deeper. 

3. Story Crafting Skills

• Participants learn ways to draw on moments they have lived — including moments so small that, at first blush, they may seem insignificant, and yet that are powerfully moving and formative.

• Each experiment adds layers of sensory/time/place detail, emotional specificity, and vividness — helping the story draw others in, increasing emotional and values relevance to the listener, even across differences of background, experience and perspective

4. Choose Your Own Adventure

• Each workshop uses a range of prompts tailored for the group. Each prompt opens the way to a different type of personal memory and story. 

• Participants choose the prompts that feel most alive to them, and for which they have the most time/place/sense detail.

5. Connection through Emphatic Not-Big-Dealness

• The workshop crafts the conditions for participants to listen generously, and share, true stories with increasing realness.

• The workshop is dynamic: Participants listen and share in duos and trios and small groups. 

• The sharing — like experiments — is as brief as 45-120 seconds, cumulatively increasing fullness — nearly imperceptibly, avoiding big “asks.”  

• As participants ease into depth with their own story, their sharing draws listeners in even more, and the curiosity with which others listen gently encourages greater openness, additional connections and realizations for the teller. This, in turn, makes the story more moving for the listener. It snowballs.

• At the workshop’s end, participants have the opportunity to share their story with the full group. Typically, even those at first reluctant to speak before others are eager to share, and are enthusiastically received. 

1. Storycrafting skills with real world applications

• Participants who often enter feeling they cannot write — and even that they have no story to tell — leave with a draft of a powerful story, approximately 300 words. Previous participants have gone on to expand, refine, and even publish, their stories in local and regional outlets (e.g., Berkshire Eagle)

• Participants gain skills to craft small stories with big emotional resonance 

• Skill applications include:

 — Professional skills to craft more compelling narratives for case studies, proposals and presentations

— Academic skills for more resonant, and personally meaningful, college/high school applications and essays

— Relational skills: The ability to draw a listener into one’s story of realness is more than a window into who one is as a human. It is also an invitation — and permission —  for the listener to reciprocate with own story of realness. As story begets story, curiosity and empathy increase, elevating shared identities above differences. The curiosity to understand experiences & circumstances underlying someone’s perspectives and choices requires neither agreement nor equivalence.

Yet such curiosity, empathy and identification across difference reinforces relationships in which people feel more valued as people, experience greater agency, and more safety to express their perspectives and experiences — irrespective of agreement. Over time, such relationships form a social muscle that strengthens people’s abilities to collaborate and navigate challenges, in the present as well as unknown future. 

2. Accelerated Connection with Self

• Going deeper and deeper into one’s own narrative increases self-curiosity and self-understanding

• Vivid details help reveal a person’s “actual features” — to themselves. Beyond self-assumptions this increases specificity and humanity with which the teller explores their own experience

• This gradually shifts participants’ unspoken inferences about themselves

3. Accelerated Connection with Others

• Feeling moved by each other’s stories increases empathy, curiosity of the heart, elevation of shared identities above differences. 

• The listeners’ interest makes the teller feel valued and increasingly understood.

• Participants become known not just as roles, but through the particular, vivid texture of their lives.

• Curiosity of the heart increases understanding of experiences bringing a person to know what they know, choose what they choose. This is not the same as agreement or endorsement. 

• The experience gradually shifts participants' unspoken inferences about each other and the social space between them. The workshop's environment helps these shifted narratives self-reinforce towards long-lasting changes.

• By the end of the workshop, participants who often begin as strangers are surprised by the connection they share — yet can scarcely pinpoint a “big-deal plunge.” The relational deepening occurs “degree by degree, nearly imperceptibly”