PUBLIC WORKSHOPS
Dynamic. Engaging. Orignal. Fun. Online. Offline. Hybrid.
Whole-Brain Creative Facilitation Workshops
For professional facilitatars, trainers, leaders, coaches, teachers and anyone who facilitates groups.
Online or in person. Michelle did her first Creative Facilitation Train-the-Trainer workshop in the series in 2006, and has been consistantly evolving this series. (In 2024, she published a creative facilitation guidebook on her discoveries.) Effectively getting groups to open to experiential creative approaches begins with increasing your comfort, ease, and flexibility with your own creativity...and owning it! This program focuses on YOU as a uniquely creative individual and using your unique creativity to create a impactful creative learning experience for your participants.
You'll learn how to: be more at ease creating, improvising, and adapting in the moment; enliven your facilitation with accessible, fun, purposeful activities; cultivate and trust your own unique, awesome juicy creativity; and. design compelling, original content for full-on participant engagement – online and offline.
In these programs you will learn and experience a variety of Applied Improvisational Theater, Applied Storytelling, and other Applied Creative Thinking (visual, somatic, reflective, values-based, analytical) practices and principles that will enliven your programs, accelerate participant learning and deepen your presence, confidence, and flexibility as a facilitator.
- Whole-Brain Creative Facilitation
- The Creative, Orginal Facilitator
- Creative Facilitation Using Storytelling
- Creative Facilitation Using Improv
- Creative Facilitation for Divergent Groups
- Whole-Brain CF Certification Program
- Creative Facilitation Coaching
Creativity for Coaches
For professional coaches who want to bring more of their unique creativity into their coaching and out of their clients.
Online. Discover and develop your unique creative signature approaches as a coach. In this workshop, we explore and experience some of the foundations – constructs, frameworks, ways of being, and principles - that establish the conditions for purposeful, actionable creativity to emerge.
We'll use creative whole-brain, whole-being-engagement approaches, and actualize your unique Inner Creator, and craft meaningful activities to help deepen your client's experience, or expand what you offer in your coaching practice. You'll learn how to adapt the activities for who you are and what you do - and create orignal new ones in the process. This is about embodying the ways of thinking and being to draw more creativity out of yourself, and draw it out from your clients. And it's super fun!
Art piece by a workshop participant
Whole-Brain Facilitation for Divergent Groups
For facilitators, team leaders, community leaders, and anyone who faciliates groups with
divergent creative styles, values, beliefs, or priorities who want or have to work together.
Online or in person. In this highly creative and interactive workshop, we'll explore and experience whole-brain creative processes, stoytelling, applied impov, applied discovery, inquiry, dialogue, and a variety other approaches for facilitating groups with divergent creative styles, temperaments, values, beliefs, or priorities, among other things. We'll go beyond habitual thinking into rich, untapped creative territory where it's possible to co-create with a divergent group of team members to create a vision, achieve an outcome, or learn to work more collaboratively without compromising who you are and what you value.
Creative leadership
For professional facilitatars, trainers, leaders, coaches, teachers and anyone who leads teams or groups.
Online or in person. Creativity is increasingly being recognized as the most valuable leadership skill. Creative Leaders facilitate meaning, creativity, and contribution of those he or she serves – employee, colleague, team member, customer, participant, etc. Creative Leadership is paradoxical: strong and soft; directional and flexible; strategic and emergent; focused and open. Creative Leaders welcome, inspire, and awaken the Creative Leadership in those they lead. Creative leading relies on breaking habitual patterns, exploring, discovering, and taking informed risks.
In this highly interactive workshop, participants will experience learn and experience compelling Creative Thinking and Innovation practices, tools and techniques for individuals and groups; engaging experiential methods for collaboration and co-creation; getting more creativity our of your teams; and applying creative process to new solutions finding.
For personal growth and professional development
In this highly interactive, engaging program we explore Foundations for creating and producing what's next - with purpose - in an uncertain world with a lot of unknowns. We use whole-brain, whole-self (mind, body, heart, soul) creative practices and principles to discover, design, and develop what’s next in your work, cause, or mission. It's a deep-dive into creating with meaning, purpose, and heart for actionable ways to meet the needs of today's world - and your own! This is a program for birthing something new and meaningful into the world.
Mind and Heart Openers for Moving Forward in Uncertainty
For personal growth and professional development
Online. 90 minutes. Moving forward while in uncertainty can be challenging. In this workshop, we will move into it with 7 Mind and Heart Opening Concepts using storytelling, improv/theater, visual thinking, reflection, energy-oriented and embodiment practices. It's so important to take care of and ground yourself - taking "your own oxygen" as you discover your ways to support and contribute to others to come from a purposeful, meaningful, centered place. In this dynamic experiential session we explore 7 core transformative concepts from the inside out - using whole-brain practices to experience owning and embodying them – so you can use them for yourself and for those you serve and support beyond the workshop setting.
Creative Body Workshop
For personal growth and professional development
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This workshop can be customized to be used
with entrepreneurs, teams, and organizations.
Your body is an amazing creative resource. It has it own creative intelligence. Using your body in ways aligned with this
natural intelligence increases adaptability, creativity, and resilience. When you move and embody in new ways, new perspectives and thinking emerge. Breaking patterns of movement and opening to new ones create space for novel ideas and insights.
This highly interactive workshop integrates different interrelated body-centered modalities that work together toward a cohesive whole. The convergence of somatic philosophy and techniques with other creative practices help you experience a deepened awareness of, and connection to, your body intelligence and unique creative expression. We explore and experience using our bodies to overcome blocks to creativity, create new visions and solve problems, feel more empowered, generate feelings of aliveness and more ease of movement, and more.
This highly interactive workshop integrates different interrelated body-centered modalities that work together toward a cohesive whole. The convergence of somatic philosophy and techniques with other creative practices help you experience a deepened awareness of, and connection to, your body intelligence and unique creative expression. We explore and experience using our bodies to overcome blocks to creativity, create new visions and solve problems, feel more empowered, generate feelings of aliveness and more ease of movement, and more.
Emergent Mandala Making: Creating in the Unknown
For personal growth and professional development
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Emergent Mandalas by Michelle James
Online. Manadala making is an ancient practice. In this workshop, we explore making them emergently, letting the structure emerge one layer at a time - a visual improvisation - as a practice for presence, creativity, stress-reduction, and getting more comfortable creating in the unknown. We focus on your creative self – including the self-talk, judgements, and stories you carry when creating with no outline - and the techniques, such as what to do when you make a "mistake" in the process and there's no starting over, among other things. Creating this way is about choosing presence over polish, adapting in the moment, and creating as you go. The practice of doing them regularly can open you up to new levels of presence, intution, and creativity that transfers to all areas of life. And, you have an end product that is your unique expression. In this program, we'll create a series over time, using the process as a way of deepening your relationship with spontaneity, creative expression, and feeling more at ease in life when there is no road map and you have to make it up as you.
Creative Emergence Painting Process™
For personal growth and professional development
Michelle has been using this process for 20 years with coaching clients, and discovered a process to make it easy and accessible for anyone. It doesn't require any special skill or talent. It's now opening up as a public workshop.
Online. Painting intuitively and improvisationaly from the inside-out. From creative expression to solution finding to creating what's next, learn how to paint concepts, feelings, ideas, insights, and more emergently. Anyone can learn to do this and it requires no art experience.
This workshop is not in place of an art technique class on how to paint. It is about learning to trust yourself, your intuition, your instincts, your creativity, and the unknown. You just need presence and a desire to have fun with focused improvisational painting. We all have a life-animating creative source within us - the same generative energy that brings nature to life - and you'll learn how to paint it, and paint from that place.
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Emergent Painting by Michelle James