"The Role of Narrative in Our Understanding of Everything” with Alexis Niki

Different themes. Different people. Every week.

Drinking Dialogues (DD) isn’t an ordinary weekly dialogue. What makes this EQ Lab session unique is the high-quality of active engagement between people and the extraordinary conversations with participants from all over the world.

After the guest speaker’s introduction of the theme, participants rotate in several different breakout sessions. During the intermissions viewpoints and perspectives are shared before continuing and joining a new group dialogue. All along this high-intensity learning session you’ll discover new knowledge, share insights, and cross-pollinate ideas.

Today’s theme: “The Hidden Story – The Role of Narrative in Our Understanding of Everything”

Our stories are more powerful than we realize. They are at the foundation of how we live and work together, shaping our lives and our world in ways often invisible to us. When we’re in upheaval, our stories become even more critical.

In this week’s session, we’ll explore the many facets of storytelling. We’ll experience ourselves as the natural born storytellers and story receivers that we are, and we’ll look at why the first step in solving a problem or lessening a crisis is to pay attention to the stories we are telling ourselves about the problem, about the crisis, about other people, and even about ourselves.
Finally, we’ll explore narrative intelligence and why it’s emerging as a critical 21st century business skill.

In the breakout sessions we’ll explore the following questions:

• How do we understand story and narrative intelligence?

• How do our narrative patterns impact our individual choices?

• What is the role of narrative intelligence in groups and organizations?

Alexis Niki is a former screenwriter and an ICF accredited Whole Person coach. Under her Paris-based consultancy StoryNova, she partners with clients to help them increase their narrative intelligence and become more intentional and positive about the stories they enact in the world. A New Yorker by birth, she has lived more than half her life in Europe.

Each encounter with a new culture required her to adapt and to integrate new information into her personal narrative. With a background in screenwriting, she worked as a story consultant in independent film production before bringing her story skills to the nonprofit and business worlds.