"A big thank you to ICON for organising a very informative webinar with Freya Giles on storytelling. It was interesting to see that many of the call participants rated themselves as “advanced” storytellers, which made me reflect on how often I engage in storytelling and how I would rate my own skills.  

It would be fair to say that storytelling is all around us – in our jobs, homes, communities. We tell stories all the time – whether we know it, or not. We tell ourselves stories too – about how good (or bad) we are, whether we are worthy (or not) of a recognition or reward.  But telling stories on a daily basis doesn’t equate to being good at it, and it doesn’t mean that we know which story to focus on, and which of our stories will lead to [positive] action, and why.  

So despite being “advanced” at the number of stories I tell on a daily basis, I have found Freya’s webinar extremely useful as it 1. went over some basic storytelling building blocks, and 2. it made me want to become “advanced” at telling quality stories that inspire action.

Freya is an incredibly experienced story teller, who very skilfully took us on a journey of why storytelling was important and what we can all do to become better at it. She reminded us that stories are everywhere – be it an email, water-cooler conversation (don’t we all miss those!?), CV, phone call, or a fully-blown marketing campaign – and we all have the power to influence our readers and listeners with a well-told story.

Good stories lead to action, which makes honing our storytelling skills in today’s noisy world ever more important. So a big thank you once again to Freya and ICON for organising this webinar." A Senior ICON member