Like a lot of you, I’m still adjusting to being back at work after the holiday season and the inevitable January sick days. Standing right in my path: a world of distractions on top of the winter drags. But I’ve found a trick that’s helping me tremendously: light a candle. Well, technically, I light a […]
You’re an expert in your field and have to give a presentation to a non-expert audience. You’ve heard about storytelling, but you aren’t sure how a story can accommodate the complex information that you want to share. What do you do? This is the kind of doubt I encounter regularly in my workshops. The fact […]
I’ve been following Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for a few weeks now. It’s a 12-week program to recover your creativity. Every morning, I get up half an hour early, make a cup of coffee, and sit down at my desk to write three pages in my journal. Every Saturday, I spend half an hour […]
There’s an image that’s lived in my imagination for many years. It’s a woman walking into the distance. She’s carrying a bucket away from her body, like someone used to carrying heavy loads. I read that description more than a decade ago. The source of the image escapes me, but the image has never gone […]
My name is Christine and I’m an expat. I didn’t want to be an expat, I wanted to be a local. When I came to the Netherlands in 2004, I thought the deck was stacked in my favor. I had a Dutch boyfriend and a good 10 years of experience living abroad. It didn’t work. […]
Picking the hero is the first step in planning your story. Heroes are so central in stories that a name can be enough to cause the audience to recall the entire story: Cinderella, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, but also Harry Potter, Michael Corleone, and Jack Reacher. But what is a hero? Technically, […]
This coming weekend, I’m going to talk to some Arnhem Together ladies about women and leadership. Me. Yeah, the girl who’s never had a formal leadership position, perhaps ever anywhere. For me to talk about leadership, I needed to reframe it. The working world hasn’t been my place for leadership. It probably never will be. […]
Story’s role in human life extends far beyond conventional novels or films. Story, and a variety of storylike activities, dominates human life. Storytelling is a fundamental drive. It’s a skill that humans have developed to survive. That’s Jonathan Gottschall’s position in The Storytelling Animal. Gottschall is an evolutionary biologist who asks a simple but important […]
While on vacation in Wales this summer, I bought a beautiful used copy of Cinderella. It’s a hardcover book that used to belong to a library. On the endpaper, there are traces of due date stamps dating back to 1975. The book’s older than I am! This version was written in 1919 by CS Evans, […]
Summer vacation has come to its end here and everywhere I go, the conversations start with sharing stories of what we did and where we went. We went to the UK, a week in East Sussex and two weeks in Wales. It was blissful. I’m trying to retain the spirit of being more in the […]