When you get called a game changer, you have to feel a little bit proud! And we are …the poetry and performance sessions which Nina Burchett and I started as a community give back in our spare time, have now grown and are having a lasting impact.

Last month we entered one of our more active groups, from Selwyn Village into the Auckland arts fringe festival to bring to the stage their passion for poetry and the spoken word…we believed they deserved a larger audience. This proved so true. We performed ‘An Oldie But a Goodie’ to a sell-out audience of 120 and won the Fringe Festival’s Outstanding Community Engagement Award! The show was an ensemble of favourite poems performed by the residents, MC’d and Directed by yours truly.

Some audience members had tears in their eyes as they witnessed their relatives (many with early stage dementia) perform from memory and interact with the audience, there were also lots of laughs as one of the naughtier pieces ‘Shall I Feel’ By EE cummings (the title says it all!) was performed.

We have been delivering these sessions for 2 years in aged care homes throughout Auckland. Our key sponsor at Selwyn Village Orquidea Mortera, their amazing Diversional Therapist, shared that:

“I personally believe that Fiona and Nina are game changers in times of an ageing population which demands non-pharmacological and Diversional Therapy interventions such as Poetry and Performance in order to continue to enjoy meaningful life experiences.

Their support has been crucial to help us enrich our residents’ confidence and personal growth. Their sessions have also helped our residents to learn new skills which they are now able to share with their own family members and friends. The passion and love for what they do is felt by everyone during the sessions”.

Come and join us for our Engagement and Communication Master Class

Venue: TAPAC

When: Friday 1st December 2017 9-2.30pm

Cost: $250 per person

Numbers are limited, to find our more and register please contact Fiona Fiona@creativebusiness.co.nz

Are you looking for the opportunity to develop your presenting and group communication skills? Then this workshop is for you!

You may already be presenting to small or large groups, or returning to work and needing a boost in your skills and confidence. You may regularly be facilitating meetings and working groups, running planning sessions and never had any professional development to support you in this work.

Attending this workshop will provide you with great techniques to support you engage people, develop clear key messages for impact and maximise a group dynamic.

During the workshop you will:

Widen your repertoire of engagement and presentation techniquesExplore the impact of great facilitationHave time to practice these new techniques with the groupReceive valuable feedback from your facilitatorsDevelop your natural style and confidence so you put up your hand to do more!

With the good fortune to have been on the Insights Discovery training programme last month, I am now an accredited facilitator in this awesome personality profiling and team building tool …Yahoo!

When I am to reflect on the benefits to organisations; Insights provides you with a great starting point for building personal insight and self-improvement across areas of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as well as the potential to elevate leadership impact.

Viewing this through the lens of a client, Insights provides an important launch pad to grow and develop people, the dynamics and culture within their team as well as external business relationships and opportunities for growth.

As we reflect on the wider benefits for organisations when they invest in Insights Discovery, it’s interesting to consider some of the key leader competencies and the link with building self-awareness and effectiveness in our interactions with others.

Some of these leader competencies include; building trusting relationships and networks, effective communication and having the ability to coach and motivate others, creating an inclusive culture, driving successful customer engagements and sales transformation, being adaptable, an active learner and driving for results[1].

None of these behaviours fully develop unless an individual first understands self and how they operate within a group environment to effectively interact with others. Insights Discovery provides you with such understanding and opportunity to act.

Insights Discovery is a flexible and dynamic tool, which provides individual information for self-development as well as an effective platform to explore how best to perform as a team.

Completing a personality profile gives you with a report rich with information about your own style, blind spots, key strengths and areas for development, how you are best motivated and managed, what your contribution is to a team environment. Combined with 1-1 feedback, individuals receive a personalised session to absorb and fully understand their profile. With the option of specific chapters on sales effectiveness and communication, Insights really provides you with practical points for development which are relevant for your personal and business growth.

When using the tool in a group the session is lively, interactive and full of tailoured exercises to fit your business context.

A bit about the background of the tool - Insights Discovery draws on the research base of Carl Jung and brings to life different personality types which provide you with self-insight and the information you need to build effective team. The key concepts of personality difference stem from an individual’s orientation to decision making, perception and whether they are intuitive or sensory in their approach to life. Insights has created a comprehensive wheel of 72 types and your placement on the wheel is determined by your answers to 10-15 minutes of simple profiling questions.

[1] These competencies we have identified through organisational research from Development Dimensions International as well as our development consulting work.

Augusto Boal - 2 Day Intensive Applied Theatre Workshop

Skott Taylor from NewSeed Creative and Fiona join forces to bring you a professional development workshop.

Learn the methodology of Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed alongside actors trained in theatre and specific Boal techniques. This is an intensive programme of professional development which introduces you to the history and technique of Boal work, with the added focus on how you can use these techniques with people in various settings.

Where: TAPAC, Auckland, NZ.

When: Friday September 2nd and Saturday September 3rd, 2016.

Times: 10am - 5pm each day

For further information please contact fiona@creativebusiness.co.nz

The connection between art and business is strong. Increasingly the arts are being tapped into for the insights they can offer into the world of business. This is probably because they have a tremendous amount in common. Wall Street Journal author Carol Hymowitz put it succinctly when she explained their parallels. “There are similarities between successful artists and executives in their approaches to their work. Both must be self-confident about making a product that can hold the attention of paying customers. They must be astute in assessing and developing talent, as well as making sure that talent works well together.”

Harvard Business Review take it one step further by suggesting that every leader is an artist, implying that leadership is an art, not metaphorically but actually.

As someone who has a background in the performing arts I’ve witnessed firsthand the ways in which the performing arts can impact one’s leadership, management and communication style. I think because it is, at its core, a profoundly human endeavour to create art. Moreover, this can have a profound impact on business.

Take for example the all-important subject of employee engagement. Much has been written about this topic and if you talk to any HR manager they’ll tell you all about the rewards and challenges of having engaged employees. So how do you get engagement? Well one strategy is to understand that you’re dealing with a human, not a cog or a “worker”. And humans are essentially emotional creatures with drives and behaviours. As Tom Peters says “Profit is fine. - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" (a lovely word) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal.”

Reports have shown that those who participate in the arts “become more engaged citizens”, meaning that they promote not only civic behaviors such as voting and volunteering, but also helping articulate alternatives to current assumptions, offering innovative and alternative solutions to challenges and fueling a broader political imagination. If this is the good that the arts can promote for society, just imagine what sort of good they can do in an orgnisation.

I use the arts to help with all the facilitation and development work I undertake. The platform of the arts reminds me that each client session is a unique opportunity to engage with and learn from our audience, alongside the professional development focus for the session. The performing arts provides a wealth of knowledge and practical techniques to work with varied groups of people, support effective communication and encourage rich diversity. The arts provides interdisciplinary learning techniques, which encourage people to express themselves in a safe and creative way – in terms of leadership development this can be a very rewarding outcome when logic, scientific approaches and process don’t always deliver alone, the arts enable a pathway forward.

Having issues getting your team to stay connected and engaged when you are speaking with them? Need help with a specific public speaking or internal company opportunity? Want to increase your impact and ability to hold a room? A PowerBoost session may be just what you need! Get in touch today to talk through how we can support you to develop engagement, enhance your presence and level of impact.