Seminars & Workshops
Navigating Impermanence: A Seminar for Leaders
Facilitator: Emily Ball Cicchini, PhD
Format: Three 90-minute Zoom sessions with readings, discussion, small group work, and practical exercises
Cost: $250
Dates: TBD
Overview
In every sector, change is constant—priorities shift, teams evolve, and the landscape around us rarely holds still for long. This seminar is designed to help leaders navigate these realities with clarity and confidence by approaching impermanence not as a disruption, but as a source of insight.
Based on years of experience and extensive research, these interactive sessions offer practical frameworks and tools to help you understand continuous and inevitable change as a natural cycle—and to lead yourself and others through it with resilience and compassion.
What You’ll Gain
🔵 Tools to recognize where you and your team are within cycles of change
🔵 Skills to communicate clearly and thoughtfully during uncertainty
🔵 Practices for letting go with intention while staying grounded in purpose
🔵 A peer community for reflection, perspective, and shared learning
Session Topics
Session 1 – The Nature of Impermanence & Cycles of Work
Explore how impermanence shapes leadership and organizations. Learn to recognize five cycles of change and the rhythms of communication that influence progress: Confidence, Awareness, Influence, Continuity, and Affirmation.
Session 2 – Communicating Through Change & Decision-Making
Build practical skills for communicating during uncertain times. Examine decision-making cycles to better understand when to stay the course, pivot, or release what’s no longer serving the work.
Session 3 – Leading with Wabi-Sabi Wisdom: Integration & Application
Bring the concepts together into your own leadership context. Reflect, map your current challenges and opportunities, and develop a personal approach to leading with balance and steadiness.
Who Should Attend
- Leaders across sectors navigating change and complexity
- Managers and directors guiding teams through transition
- Executives and founders making strategic decisions in evolving environments
Format & Expectations
- Expert overview of each topic
- Interactive discussions, activities, and small group work
- Practical exercises you can apply immediately
- Optional short readings to read before or after each session and keep forever
- Maximum cohort size: ~20 participants to support meaningful connection
Embrace change. Lead with clarity, humility, and strength.
Interested? Subscribe to be informed about upcoming sessions.
Leadership Stories: A Workshop for Crafting Your Narratives
Facilitator: Emily Ball Cicchini, PhD
Format: Six 60-minute Zoom sessions with guided writing, reflection, small group work, and facilitated discussion
Cost: $500
Dates: TBD
Overview
Leadership is often described through strategy and outcomes—but what people remember, trust, and follow are stories. Not polished origin myths or rehearsed elevator pitches, but grounded, lived narratives that reflect how we’ve changed, struggled, adapted, and continued forward.
This workshop invites you to write and refine your own leadership stories, rooted in experiences of impermanence. Through structured prompts and guided reflection, you’ll explore key moments that have shaped how you lead—tracing your journey across five essential dimensions: Confidence, Awareness, Influence, Continuity, and Acceptance.
These are not memoirs, and they’re not sound bites. They are working narratives—clear, human, and adaptable—that you can carry into conversations, decision-making, and the ongoing articulation of your authentic value and vision.
What You’ll Gain
🔵 A set of personal leadership stories grounded in real experience
🔵 Greater clarity on how change has shaped your leadership approach
🔵 Language to communicate your values, decisions, and vision with authenticity
🔵 Practice sharing your stories in ways that resonate with others
🔵 A framework to continue developing your narrative over time
Workshop Flow
Session 1 – Foundations: How Leadership Stories Work
Learn the basics of narrative structure—beginning, tension, turning point, and resolution—and how these elements show up in real leadership experiences. Explore the difference between telling events and shaping meaning. Begin identifying moments from your own experience that carry narrative weight.
Session 2 – Confidence: Claiming Your Starting Point
Write into moments that shaped your sense of confidence (or lack of it). Explore early decisions, risks, and internal narratives that continue to influence how you lead today.
Session 3 – Awareness: Seeing What Changed You
Focus on perception shifts—times when your understanding deepened or was challenged. Develop stories that highlight how awareness evolves through experience, not just insight.
Session 4 – Influence: When Your Leadership Meets Others
Examine how your actions have affected people, systems, or outcomes. Write stories that connect your choices to impact, including moments of both success and misstep.
Session 5 – Continuity: Staying the Course Through Change
Explore how you’ve sustained effort, purpose, or identity over time. Develop narratives that reflect persistence, adaptation, and the tension between consistency and change.
Session 6 – Acceptance: Integrating the Story You’re Still Living
Reflect on limits, losses, and unresolved edges. Refine your stories into grounded, flexible narratives you can use in real contexts—conversations, presentations, and decision-making.
Who Should Attend
- Leaders, founders, and professionals seeking to articulate their authentic leadership voice
- Those navigating transition, growth, or redefinition in their work
- Anyone who wants to communicate their value and vision with greater clarity and resonance
Format & Expectations
- Guided writing exercises during and between sessions
- Opportunities to share and receive feedback in small groups
- A reflective, workshop-style environment focused on practice, not performance
- Maximum cohort size: ~16 participants to allow for deeper engagement
Your story is already shaping how you lead. This workshop helps you tell it with clarity, intention, and integrity.
Interested? Subscribe to be informed about upcoming sessions.
Dramatic Structure: Watching Stories, Practicing Leadership
Facilitator: Emily Ball Cicchini, PhD
Format: Four 60-minute Zoom sessions combining discussion, analysis, and applied reflection
Cost: $400, plus your own access to streaming media
Dates TBD
Overview
Stories don’t just entertain us—they train our attention. They show us where to look, what to notice, and how change unfolds over time.
This workshop uses contemporary films and limited series as a shared text to explore dramatic structure as an observational practice. Together, we’ll watch and discuss selected films, paying close attention to how tension rises, how imbalance takes shape, and how stories move toward catharsis—a release, a shift, a return to a different kind of balance.
Participants will select the films book-club style, based on group interest and contemporary relevance. Rather than analyzing from a distance, we’ll use these films to sharpen a core leadership skill: the ability to observe clearly and respond with intention.
This work connects directly to Leadership Stories and Navigating Impermanence. Just as stories move through rising and falling arcs, so do teams. As a leader, your role is not to eliminate tension, but to notice it—to understand when pressure is building, use its power to drive performance, act when release is needed, and how to help your team move toward a productive form of balance.
What You’ll Gain
🔵 A practical understanding of dramatic structure as cycles of tension and release
🔵 A clearer sense of how catharsis functions as a return to balance—not a perfect ending
🔵 Practice observing where energy is building or dissipating in a system
🔵 Insight into how leaders can support healthy movement through rising and falling dynamics
🔵 A stronger connection between storytelling, perception, and leadership action
Session Flow
Session 1 – Learning to See: Rising and Falling Structures
Introduce core elements of dramatic structure—setup, rising tension, turning points, and catharsis. Discuss the first film with a focus on how imbalance is created and how the story signals the need for release.
Session 2 – Rising Action: The Build of Tension
Explore how stories generate momentum and strain. Identify where pressure accumulates, what’s at stake, and how imbalance intensifies over time.
Session 3 – Turning Points: Choice, Intervention, and Shift
Examine the moments where something changes—decisions, realizations, or disruptions that alter the trajectory. Connect these shifts to leadership: when to act, and what kind of action restores movement.
Session 4 – Catharsis and Continuity: Returning to Balance
Reflect on how stories resolve—not as neat endings, but as transitions into a new state of balance. Consider how leaders help teams process, release, and continue forward.
How It Works
- Films are selected collaboratively based on participant interest and current cultural relevance
- Participants watch each film independently between sessions
- Sessions center on shared observation—what’s building, what’s releasing, and what that reveals
Who Should Attend
- Leaders who want to strengthen their observational and reflective practice
- Participants in Leadership Stories or Navigating Impermanence, or those interested in deepening narrative awareness
- Professionals navigating complexity who want to respond with greater clarity and balance
Format & Expectations
- Watch one film per week outside of session time
- Arrive ready to discuss patterns of tension and release
- No prior experience with film or storytelling required
- Maximum cohort size: ~20 participants to support meaningful dialogue
Tension is not the problem. Unresolved and underutilized tension is. This workshop helps you recognize when to hold, when to release, and how to support a return to balance
Interested? Subscribe to be informed about upcoming sessions.