About the workshop:Separating Facts from Story: A skillful approach to accountability, communication, and human development.Mike Posner is a psychotherapist and coach. Outside of running successful tech startup sales teams and helping tech founders navigate leadership, personal development, and communication skills, he's also a seasoned retreat facilitator for Techstars. He's offered to lead Propel members through one of his most impactful workshops.Human beings are meaning-making machines. We turn ‘what happened’ into an interpretation ‘about what happened’ without even realizing that we’ve added anything at all. The impact is that we judge, label, evaluate, and introduce a personal agenda to make objective matters subjective, and often much more complicated than they need to be. The ability to stay in the facts and express ourselves authentically allows us to find resolutions to issues much more expeditiously.Learning objectives:In this session, participants will learn to disentangle their interpretations and beliefs about what happened from things that actually happened. They will apply this new skill to problems in their personal or professional lives and discover a new ability to more effectively navigate previously daunting situations. Finally, they will learn to teach this distinction (between facts and stories) to their direct reports in order to increase their team's ability to autonomously solve problems.Session style:This workshop will include a lecture to introduce people to the concepts that will be discussed to create a shared paradigm for the learning. Then there will be a facilitated discussion that prompts people to deal with real issues. Learners will apply the distinctions to their own lives and be able to take this new skill back to apply to their personal and professional challenges.