Many in the peer support and recovery community are familiar with the idea of sharing one’s story in a personal recovery context. But what else can your story do?
The CAFÉ TA Center’s training series, Master Your Personal Narrative: Storytelling As A Leadership Tool, broadens the idea of the personal recovery narrative and discusses how you can use your story as a leadership tool in different contexts, including advocacy, executive/organizational leadership, and agency-level systems change.
This free six-part webinar series began on Tuesday, January 31 at 1:30 PM ET, and recurred every Tuesday at the same time through Tuesday, March 7, with each session lasting about 90 minutes.
As we explored in this series, in addition to being foundational to your personal recovery, your recovery story can also be an essential leadership and systems change tool that you can use to lead, create change, and make a difference for others!
Participants examined:
- Grounding assumptions about leadership, what it is, and how it looks
- What it means to “stretch” your ability to share, and how doing so forms the basis for leadership
- Different leadership styles and the cultural factors that inform them
- How to grow leadership capacity while maintaining your recovery and wellness
The series is presented by mental health self-advocate and Principal of Chi Bornfree, Inc., Chioma Oruh, Ph.D. In keeping with CAFÉ TAC’s commitment to creating meaningful dialogue in a peer-centered, recovery-friendly space, each of the sessions provided ample opportunity for interactive discussion in spaces designed for mutual listening and shared learning.
For people with lived experience of serious mental health conditions, understanding your story and sharing it with others can be an essential part of their own personal recovery. But a recovery story can also be the key to leadership, bringing recovery to communities, and creating positive change for others.
Join us on this journey to identify your own leadership capacity, explore strategies to deploy it at whatever level and in whatever context is meaningful for you, and develop a strengths-based approach to impacting communities, organizations, and public policy in a thoughtful, intentional manner that allows you to stretch beyond your comfort zone!
Recordings of Previously Held Sessions:
- Session 1 – Stretch Out of Your Comfort Zone (Jan 31)
- Session 2 – Telling Your Recovery Story (Feb 7)
- Session 3 – The Art and Science of Advocacy Story (Feb 14)
- Session 4 – The Story of the Executive and the Balcony (Feb 21)
- Session 5 – Finding Agency, Leading Agency (Feb 28)
- Session 6 – Challenges You May Encounter as a Leader Telling Yours Story in the 4 Domains (Mar 7)