Spring 24 Cohort 2

If you want to communicate your ideas effectively, get buy-in and drive decisions, this 4-week course is for you!

Sri Srikrishna

Entrepreneur, author, professor

Bikash Chowdhury

Entrepreneur, marketing leader

Success Through Persuasive Storytelling

Intuit

Northeastern U.

Synopsys

Texas Instruments

Wadhwani Foundation

Learn storytelling systems proven for any occasion. 🪜 Identify your strengths to create, deliver and refine your first story 🎬 Start building a portfolio of stories to draw upon. 📚

Engage your audience and gain their buy-in consistently!

You are a Product Manager who would like to consistently get buy-in from your teams for your winning ideas.

You are a Marketer who is tired of trying to persuade leadership about your strategy and inspire consumers about your product.

You are an Engineering Manager who finds it a challenge to persuade non-technical execs and project stakeholders.

Who is this course for

After taking this course you'll...

You’ll learn to overcome anxiety whether addressing small work groups, or large professional or social audiences, through practice and feedback in small groups. You’ll learn and practice techniques to build on your strengths.

Become a confident presenter

You’ll learn to make audience-specific cases through structured storytelling. You'll practice a simple 3-step framework to identify your audience, intent and message, to build a compelling script and delivery. Hone this with feedback from your peers and me.

Advocate your cause effectively

Collect and curate a library of personal stories to draw upon at will. You’ll unearth the stories you already tell and identify more that you can tell. Practice repurposing and retelling the same stories for different audiences and outcomes.

Build a flywheel

You'll learn to recognize how persuasive speakers utilize stories. Apply them to your own vignettes and stories. Continuously learn from everyone around you, business leaders, politicians, actors, stand up comics, sportsmen and anyone you encounter.

Sharpen the saw

We'll begin with a self assessment of your storytelling skills. Your peer group will provide an initial assessment of your technique. We'll develop a shared definition of storytelling, understand why our brains love good stories and the power of storytelling in business. You'll learn the most common story structures and set individual goals.

Your goals and storytelling

We will analyze a variety of business speakers—from great to merely good to the truly terrible. From this you will learn and practice the tactics and tools of building good stories. Based on the peer feedback from session 1 and the lessons of session 2, you'll identify specific areas to work on individually. Identify your refined final project.

Good and bad ways to tell stories

You'll learn from your peers of storytelling successes or disasters that they've encountered first hand. You'll exercise the pre-story checklist—your audience, intent and message, outline your speech using one of the story structures you've learnt and complete a first draft of your speech. You'll identify candidate stories that you'll use.

Building your speech

You put together all that you learnt to deliver a compelling story. You refine your script, top it up with appropriate body language, vocal variety and the use of props with a clear opening hook, crisp middle and strong ending. You'll provide one another feedback, learn from observed best practices and make a plan for continuous learning.

Telling Your Story

Course syllabus

The story is NOT the content, it's how you organize the content! Kendall Haven

Associate Director of Community Development Initiatives

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Meet your instructor

11AM-1PM EST<ul><li>Session 1: Storytelling &amp; You - good &amp; bad storytelling in real life</li><li>Session 2: The Science of Stories - concepts and why they work</li><li>Session 3: Scripting &amp; Toolbox - applying what you've learnt</li><li>Session 4: Delivering</li></ul>

Weekly Workshop 

You will work on one primary storytelling project throughout the class. You'll begin with an introductory storytelling exercise. Subsequently each week you'll work on the identified talk/presentation/story continuously refining towards a final presentation.

Personal Project

Each week, we'll have one discussion board to review takeaways from pre-readings and learnings from previous session. Separately you will also provide peer feedback on others' work during live meetings and in-between classes.

Weekly Discussion

Optional office hours follow the 1st and 3rd workshops.<ul><li>AMA with Sri &amp; Bikash</li><li>Peer networking session in week 1</li></ul>

2 Bonus Session (optional)

Course schedule

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This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active learning, not passive watching

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

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About this course

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