An immersive workshop to help you develop your Leadership Story, based on the Public Narrative framework taught at Harvard University. Facilitated by Aditi Parekh, a two-time Teaching Fellow who has facilitated leadership courses and executive programs since 2018 for 2000+ leaders worldwide.

As a founder, team leader or community builder, reaching your goal relies almost entirely on working with other people. What separates a leader from any other role or title, is their ability to move people to action. And to do this, without carrots and sticks, requires you to earn trust, inspire effort, and motivate people – especially when things get tough.

Now, your actions can speak about your leadership and inspire people to act, and they definitely do. But you might have had the unfortunate experience where you were under-appreciated, or misunderstood, because you didn’t proactively share your WHY and show your wins.

When we don’t tell our story, we leave it entirely up to people to create their own stories of who we are and why we do what we do. And often, it’s not a story that does justice to who we are.

If you want people to “get” who you are, what you stand for, and why you are asking them to do something, storytelling is an absolutely essential leadership skill.

Let me dispel the myth that storytelling is some kind of innate skill. It’s not! It’s learnable, it’s teachable, and I’ve taught 2000+ leaders how to make storytelling their own. And the way I’ve done it is through the framework of Public Narrative.

Public Narrative helps you communicate:

With a story that communicates this, you can move people to join you on the journey by getting them to see the fundamental values you share.

Once you learn this framework, you’ll begin to see it everywhere – in the most memorable speeches from history, in movie scenes that give you goosebumps, in the impactful writing of modern day business leaders.

A powerful leadership story links these three stories that we’ll learn step-by-step in the workshop:

The most important technique we will practice in the workshop is ‘Show, not tell.’ By just stating our vision statement or statistics alone do the job! By narrating the right moments, we can get people to relate with us, feel the emotions from our journey, and deeply understand the values we stand for.

Storytelling as it is taught in Public Narrative is not about applying dress-up techniques from the outside. It’s not public speaking, personal branding, or the art of spin. It focuses on substance, not form.

Storytelling as a leader is the craft of creating an identity: making choices about what our purpose is, what we believe about ourselves, and how we might act to get there. It’s about being intentional: what can I show about myself, with authenticity and truth, so that people can understand who I am?

The workshop is interactive, practical, intense and fun! Public narrative is taught through plenty of deconstructed examples, and the core elements of storytelling are explained through a memorable framework. You will put the framework into practice immediately by writing a story of self, and engage with one another’s stories to develop an intuitive sense of good storytelling.

You are the subject, and you are the narrator, and this can be challenging at times. What you can expect is a safe and courageous space for you to learn and grow in the company of reflective and intentional leaders.

Scroll down for an agenda of the workshop, and to see examples of Public Narratives out in the world.

Crafting a leadership story will help you build trust, connect the dots, and relate with people you closely work with.

Here are some reflections from past students in the Public Narrative course at Harvard:

Aditi is a leadership trainer, ed-tech consultant and alternative learning researcher. She supports universities, communities and mission-driven businesses to develop leadership capacity in their teams through workshops and custom learning experiences. Her 10-year journey in the field of education – across research, teaching, business and philanthropy – draws on Narrative Storytelling, Community Organizing, Relational Pedagogy and Alternative Education. She seamlessly moves between the online and offline world, conducting workshops, coaching leaders, and crafting narratives for people whose stories need to be heard.

Aditi is an alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and spent two semesters as a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. After Harvard, Aditi worked with and advised edtech startups such as Coleap and Maven, designing programs and products for cohort-based courses. She is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer and teacher, and has been passionate about infusing educational spaces with self-directed learning since she dropped out of high school and took two gap years at the age of 15. The youngest of a large joint family based in the Nilgiris, Aditi enjoys helping people leverage technology in education, making friends on Twitter, and searching for the best Sambar between Chennai and Bangalore, where she now lives.

We use the metaphor of ‘getting on the bike’ when learning storytelling! Because this is an experience in practice (not theory), it will require you to try new things, to risk failure, and to step outside your comfort zone. You will learn through critical reflection on your experience, through feedback, and through coaching. Your facilitator will gently nudge you towards more “showing, not telling” and help you find the moments that can most bring your story to life.

We do not want the learning to stop at the end of this workshop. As part of this inaugural workshop, we also want to offer the following resources and a follow-on 30-min coaching call to help you refine your public narrative for a specific audience.

This immersive workshop is the first offering open to all, since workshops are usually offered only at Harvard University or within large social change organisations. Our hope with this format is to make it more accessible to leaders who want to invest in themselves with a supportive community and the magic of in-person learning.

If you listen or read any of these below, you’ll see the frameworks of Public Narrative in play. Notice the visuals, images, the emotional power of narrating key moments from these leaders’ lives.

Why Akshay joined Plum

Jeff Bezos' antitrust opening statement (credit to Trung T Phan)

Barack Obama's 2004 DNC Speech

Virat Kohli’s ‘Story of Us’ – deconstructed

Watch the video below, then read the post below to identify elements of Story of Us in his speech