Change Your Training Narrative As a trainer, you try to facilitate connections for learners, knowing you must first make connections for yourself. One way to do that is to be a storyteller. But how do you tell stories? How do you find stories to tell? StoryTraining: Selecting and Shaping Stories That Connect explores how to find your stories and deliver them for learners, ultimately strengthening the storyteller you already are. The challenge with storytelling, according to author Hadiya Nuriddin, is in finding a story to tell. This book focuses on that elusive part of storytelling—finding the stories lurking everywhere and telling them. Hadiya shows you how by pulling from other disciplines, especially literature and creative writing, to help you select, structure, shape, and tell stories that can facilitate connections between you, your learners, and the material. You’ll learn about the characteristics of stories that are most useful for facilitating learning, and understand what each looks like in practice. StoryTraining also includes helpful checklists as well as the author’s surefire tips, diagrams for story timelining, and favorite story models. Given the push to make training more relevant, storytelling ability will continue to be in high demand. If you yearn to find your own stories—and to successfully engage with learners and others—this is the facilitation book you have been waiting for.

Including helpful checklists as well as the author's sure-fire tips and diagrams, this insightful book explores how to find your stories and deliver them for learners, ultimately strengthening the storyteller you already are. --

More than half-a-million business leaders have discovered the power of the StoryBrand Framework, created by New York Times best-selling author and marketing expert Donald Miller. And they are making millions. If you use the wrong words to talk about your product, nobody will buy it. Marketers and business owners struggle to effectively connect with their customers, costing them and their companies millions in lost revenue. In a world filled with constant, on-demand distractions, it has become near-impossible for business owners to effectively cut through the noise to reach their customers, something Donald Miller knows first-hand. In this book, he shares the proven system he has created to help you engage and truly influence customers. The StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their companies. Without a clear, distinct message, customers will not understand what you can do for them and are unwilling to engage, causing you to lose potential sales, opportunities for customer engagement, and much more. In Building a StoryBrand, Donald Miller teaches marketers and business owners to use the seven universal elements of powerful stories to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses. His proven process has helped thousands of companies engage with their existing customers, giving them the ultimate competitive advantage. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching you: The seven universal story points all humans respond to; The real reason customers make purchases; How to simplify a brand message so people understand it; and How to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media. Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion-dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.

REFRAME YOUR STORY, RECLAIM YOUR LIFE Every day we relate stories about our highs and lows, relationships and jobs, heartaches and joys. But do we ever consider the choices we make about how to tell our story? In this groundbreaking book, Kim Schneiderman shows us that by choosing a version that values life lessons and meaningful personal victories we can redirect our energy and narrative toward our desires and goals. It presents character development workouts and life-affirming, liberating exercises for retelling our stories to find redemptive silver linings and reshape our lives. As both a therapist and a writer, Schneiderman knows the power of story. By employing the storytelling techniques she offers, you’ll learn to view your life as a work in progress and understand big-picture story lines in ways that allow you to easily steer your actions and relationships toward redefined — and realistic — “happy endings.”

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

Francis Glebas, a top Disney storyboard artist, shows how to reach the ultimate goal of animation and moviemaking by showing how to provide audiences with an emotionally satisfying experience. Directing the Story offers a structural approach to clearly and dramatically presenting visual stories. With Francis' help you'll discover the professional storytelling techniques which have swept away generations of movie goers and kept them coming back for more. You'll also learn to spot potential problems before they cost you time or money and offers creative solutions to solve them. Best of all, it practices what it preaches, using a graphic novel format to demonstrate the professional visual storytelling techniques you need to know.

Training Camp is an inspirational story filled with invaluable lessons and insights on bringing out the best in yourself and your team. The story follows Martin, an un-drafted rookie trying to make it in the NFL. He’s spent his entire life proving to the critics that a small guy with a big heart can succeed against all odds. After spraining his ankle in the pre-season, Martin thinks his dream is lost when he happens to meet a very special coach who shares eleven life-changing lessons that keep his dream alive—and might even make him the best of the best. If you want to be your best—Training Camp offers an inspirational story and real-world wisdom on what it takes to reach true excellence and how you and your team (your work team, school team, church team and family team) can achieve it.