Master Storytelling training

Advanced storytelling training to drive lasting change on social and ecological issues.

Our societies, our culture, our values are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves.

Creating real and lasting change on the issues we care about requires more than just emotionally engaging stories that inspire; it demands a deeper understanding of the underlying narratives that shape our values, worldviews, and behaviours.

This approach to storytelling, known as Master Storytelling, involves working with the underlying metanarratives that drive our values and behaviours.

Master Storytelling is a powerful storytelling approach that can transform culture, values, and social norms. Using this form of storytelling to drive our fundraising, campaigns, and initiatives, we can achieve both short-term goals (such as fundraising targets and sign-ups) as well as long-term objectives (like cultural change).

Storytelling strategy for meaningful change

Metanarratives are fundamental to everything we do. They shape every aspect of our work, how we fundraise, motivate, inspire and engage our audiences, and yet we tend to ignore, overlook or deny that they even exist.

Understanding metanarratives—their nature and how to work with them—is crucial for anyone aiming to create long-term positive change. Developing this storytelling skillset can offer us incredible power in helping us to engage with the higher stages of values, motivation, and purpose.

Beyond the marketing paradigm

Our training offers an antidote to marketing, and the negative effect marketing approaches play on long-term social, cultural and behavioural change. This marketing mindset, which we call the marketing paradigm, is the dominant paradigm we use to drive everything we do.

Shifting from a marketing mindset to a storytelling mindset goes beyond just telling stories. It is a change in mindset where we think like a storyteller. This means drawing insights from wisdom traditions to help us see different ways to motivate and engage audiences. Using these insights we can build powerful campaigns that lead to real and meaningful change on the issues that we care about.

Full Master Storytelling training programme

Our full training programme, which includes self-directed learning, follow-up workshops and co-learning support space, is designed to help you become a Master Storyteller, and to help you create powerful metanarratives to drive positive change. 

No pre-knowledge is required as we start from the basics and build up. While anyone can become a Master Storyteller, this training will challenge your thinking on a whole range of issues. So you must be willing to abandon old paradigms, and embrace new ideas and new methodologies to drive positive change.

 

3 new key skillsts to becoming a Master Storyteller

To drive positive change in the world, we must work with three ontological primitives: values, purpose, and motivation. These three elements are implicitly communicated in every fundraiser, campaign, or initiative. Making changes in these areas has profound implications for our work. 

In this training, we will explore insights from neuropsychology to re-examine values theory, motivation theory, and how to work with intrinsic purpose. By redefining these three key elements, we can create a new motivational ecosystem—or rather, a new “engine”—that will drive everything we do. This is what we call the storytelling paradigm.

New motivational theory

A new motivational model that reveals the 'hidden' stages on the motivational continuum.

Intrinsic motivation

Drawing from Self Determination Theory, we expand this model to reveal the 'hidden' stages of intrinsic motivation, and how to work with these 'hidden' stages through storytelling.
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New values theory

Using insights from neuro-psychology we create a new values theory that aligns with storytelling methodologies.

Values flow state

Values always emerge within a context or flow state. This flow state changes the nature of the values we hold. Our model shows new ways to create this flow state at the metanarrative level.
Find out more

How to work with Purpose

Purpose drives everything we do, but do we really understand the nature of purpose or how to harness it for positive change?

Intrinsic purpose

One of the most challenging aspects of our training is understanding the nature of intrinsic purpose and how to utilise it as a motivational trigger in our work.
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Core skills you will learn on this course

Building on the work of Iain McGilchrist

Much of this training is building on, and developing insights from Dr Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric lateralisation theory. This explores the nature of the two hemispheres of the brain and the different attention both hemispheres pay to the world.

Each hemisphere pays a quite different type of attention to the world: and the type of attention we pay transforms the world we perceive and in which we come to believe we live.

Iain McGilchrist

DOWNLOAD our training overview

Our resource pack includes a full overview of the 8 modules found on this training course, alongside additional resources to help you on your storytelling journey.

Our training package includes:

Master Storytelling

Full training programme
£699
£ 349
00
Early Bird offer*
Recommended

Master Storytelling training

The Climate Edition
£350
£ 175
00
Early Bird offer*
  • Full access to 8 modules of online self-directed training only
  • Access to training materials and handouts
DIGITAL ONLY

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Master Storytelling training - CORPORATE

The Climate Edition
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  • In house training for your organisation
  • Building bespoke storytelling methodologies into your work
  • Consultancy on how to reach out to cold and hard to reach audiences
  • In house workshops and hands on training to upskill teams in storytelling for a cause methodology

About the trainer

Kieran O’Brien is the director of Ministory, a professional digital storyteller and trainer with over 20 years of working within and alongside the charity sector on a range of campaigns over the years. 

He has created numerous animations, videos, story-led resources, educational materials and campaigns on a range of positive causes, as well as running a range of talks, training programmes and workshops on issues related to creating positive change in the world.

Frequently asked questions

Master Storytelling is different to standard storytelling approaches. When we think of storytelling, we may automatically think about explicit narratives that are found in the stories we tell to drive our campaigns, fundraisers or social media engagement strategies.

Master Storytelling works primarily on the metanarrative level, where we work at the implicit, or pre-conscious, level of the stories we tell.

This means developing an understanding of deep psychological drivers that shape our behaviours and attitudes, and how to change them at the metanarrative level. Working on Master Storytelling demands a whole new skillset and understanding of human motivation and how to use stories to bring about the changes we seek.

Storytelling for a cause is our unique storytelling approach for audience engagement and motivation. It is based on a range of insights taken from philosophy, neuro-psychology, social psychology, theology and literature. While it is purposefully designed for individuals, organisations or movements that have a cause, it can be used in any context where you are looking to motivate people to do something without using fear or creating anxiety as a motivational trigger.

Our Storytelling for a Cause storytelling approach cannot be defined as a single methodology, or a communication technique, but rather is made up of a whole eco-system of resources, insights and approaches that seek to motivate audiences into action by using storytelling dynamics to ‘lift’ audiences up to a greater purpose. 

You can use this methodology on any cause, including environmental or social based causes. The core concept that drives this methodology is based on, what we call, the Storytelling Paradigm, which works like a motivational engine to bring about positive and meaningful change. To use this technique demands a conscious and intentional shift away from standard marketing logic to embrace new methodologies that find their home in storytelling theory.

The insights you will find in our training programmes are unique approaches to storytelling that have been developed in-house. Utilising cutting-edge research into neuro-psychology we can show you how to work with the deep unconscious drivers that shape our behaviours, as well as offering us some practical insights on how to overcome some of the biggest and most stubborn problems we face. 

Our training is designed not only to help you to create powerful metanarratives that can help bring about real and meaningful change but also to help you think like a storyteller who can work with aspects of the unconscious mind.

This requires time to develop your skills in working with the implicit nature of storytelling, how to craft powerful metanarratives, and how to work with values dynamics to motivate your audience into action.

But the end result is always simple. We simply tell a new story. 

Our training programme is a healthy mix of theory and practical application. Whether you are in a communications role, leadership role, volunteer support, social media support, or any other role that deals with face to face engagement with audiences, then you will benefit from this training. 

The core fundamentals of the training programme can be applied to pretty much any situation where you are looking to inspire, engage and motivate others into action. We also offer follow on workshops to help you to embed this approach into your work. 

Our training is offered through three stages. The first is the self-directed online training programme, in which you can work through the different chapters at your own pace. The second is through a series of follow up workshops, that allow you to explore Master Storytelling in a real context. The third is through a co-learning space called the Storytelling circle, which is a support space to come together and share experiences of how to work with metanarratives.  Buying access to the training will give you lifetime access to the online training, where you can come back at a later date if needed. 

In the full training package you will gain full access to our video courses, access to workshops and support from the Storytelling bi-monthly meeting. In addition to all this, you will also receive the Master Storytelling toolkit which you can use throughout your work.

This training programme is generic, and can be applied to all different contexts. But to help illustrate how it works, we use the climate focus as an example to show how everything fits together within this context. If you are not working in this area this will not prevent you from learning.

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Metanarrative explainer

Neuropsychology reveals to us how the two hemispheres of the brain work differently. The left deals with explicit communication (narrative), the right deals with implicit communication (metanarrative). This means half of all our thinking is dedicated to implicit communication. This understanding provides profound insights into how values, motivation, and purpose are processed by the right hemisphere, revealing powerful ways to influence human behaviour and achieve long-term social and cultural change.

New motivational theory

Standard motivational models tend to conflate the different stages of intrinsic motivation (self-regulation) into a single category or to view intrinsic motivation only in terms of utility (i.e. improved outputs). 

The result is that our current motivational models are no longer fit for purpose in terms of working with higher values, or how to create long-term behavioural change. 

Creating a new and expanded model, utilising insights from neuro-psychology, offers some profound insights on how to create meaningful change on the issues we care about.