Running the storytelling workshop
This is for you if your students have real strengths, but every practice answer comes out as a list of duties. They tell an interviewer what they were responsible for, and the room forgets by the next candidate.
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An interviewer remembers a scene, not a claim: one moment where a strength did something, told well enough to last until tomorrow.
First, have each student open Discovering Your Strengths in their report. That ranked list is where every story begins, each built to prove a single strength they already have.
The frame is STAR, and the last letter is the one that carries it.
- Setting: where and when, the line that drops the listener into the scene.
- Tension: what was at stake, or what made it hard. With no tension, there is no story.
- Action: what the student did. Their own move, not the group's.
- Realization: the moment it clicked. A Realization, not a Result: a result is a number, a Realization is what the moment taught and the strength it proves.
Say to students: specific beats generic, and the moment of change is what people remember.
Walk them through the worksheet's own example first, a sixty-second story that shows an Influential strength.
The Setting: last year, a student and their roommate talking after dinner. The Tension: the roommate says she is about to drop out, sure she does not belong in engineering. The Action: the student does not give advice. They ask her when she last felt brilliant, and for twenty minutes she lights up about the short stories she writes for creative writing, until she is registering for next semester. The Realization: that shift from defeat to determination is what the student lives for, and it points to an Influential strength.
A story can come from anywhere: a class project, a shift at work, a night in a dorm room. Not just a job, and the best ones often are not.
Now they build. Each student writes three sixty-second stories, one per top strength off the Discovering Your Strengths list. For each, they fill the four beats. Then the part that matters most: write it the way they would say it out loud, in sixty seconds.
The real words, not notes. The full worksheet carries three blank STAR templates for exactly this, ready to download and hand out.
Then they grade each story against the same five checks on the worksheet.
- Under sixty seconds said out loud.
- Specific details, not general ones.
- A clear moment of change.
- It shows the strength rather than claims it.
- Still memorable tomorrow.
A story that misses one gets one more pass.
Pick the shape that fits your slot.
Independent. Each student builds their three stories alone, then grades each against the five checks.
Partner. They draft three, pair up, and trade feedback, telling each story out loud and marking it against the checklist together. Said aloud is where the over-sixty-second runs and the weak endings get caught.
Land the workshop on three things, and let students say them back:
- Specific beats generic.
- The Realization, the moment of change, is what people keep.
- A story is never finished. It sharpens every time it is told.
Everyone leaves holding three sixty-second stories, each proving a real strength, each ready for the next interview. Not a list of traits they hope someone believes. Three moments they can actually tell.
