Category: Cycle 2

For the first intervention, I originally planned a three-hour session with a maximum of three participants so each person could iterate their speech several times. In practice, people were not willing to commit to three hours, so I adapted it to two. The session went well overall. One participant later told me the tool helped and gave them confidence. Another resisted using the storyboard, arguing that it required dismantling their existing structure. I did not find this critique fully convincing; it felt more like resistance to change. The main takeaway was that I needed clearer slides to guide the process, so I focused on improving them for Intervention 2.

Intervention 2, also at St Martin’s, involved three participants. Each person presented twice, and the structure felt smoother. The improved slides helped. Two participants clearly improved in their second iteration, while one performed worse, which I think is part of a non-linear learning process and normal nerves. Something that needs work across all interventions is gathering feedback a few days later, after people have had time to reflect. This connects directly to what I learned in Sweden.

The third intervention was more complicated. The first attempt failed because no one showed up, mostly due to poor publicity.

A week later, six people attended, but only after I clarified that no one would be forced to speak in public. Several issues appeared. I started the session rushed because of a logistical problem with the room booking, which left me agitated. I skipped introductions, did not ask why people were there, and jumped straight into theory. Because we began without rapport, no one volunteered to present in either iteration. However, participants still said the workshop felt relaxing and useful, and a facilitator with expertise in disability-inclusive workshops gave me positive feedback.

Despite that, I left feeling disappointed. The silence during the presentations affected me more than I expected, and since then I have avoided organizing new sessions. Even the Applied Storytelling Society I founded has been on pause. I realize now that part of this is emotional fatigue, but acknowledging it is already a first step toward moving forward.

Here is the feedback of the expert I invited, mentioned before:

As the Dragons’ Den presentation approached for the Applied Imagination students, I decided to design an intervention focused on strengthening narrative agency. By narrative agency I mean giving people control over the process of creating and structuring a talk.

I kept returning to a hypothesis I’ve been forming about public speaking anxiety. It often comes from three different places.

• The first is trauma or past negative experiences, which is a psychological field I cannot and should not enter.

• The second is physiological anxiety: accelerated breathing, shaky voice, and the usual reactions of the body. That part is manageable.
• The third comes from a lack of control. Many participants have told me they simply do not know where to start. They feel there is no structure, no roadmap, no sequence they can rely on. Without that, the process feels abstract, and stepping in front of an audience becomes much more vulnerable.

This third point is where I want to focus. If people understand why a scene belongs in minute three rather than minute four, or why a certain moment follows another, they stop depending on memorization. They start relying on logic, sequence, and meaning. The presentation becomes a chain of ideas they know by heart, not because they memorized it, but because it makes sense to them.

My goal is to help them build, deconstruct, reorder, and experiment with the structure, so they genuinely feel in control. When someone tells a personal story, they do not struggle to remember it; the causal links guide the memory. I remember reading that memory improves when information is organized in causal sequences, although I can’t recall the exact source. What matters is that this principle fits naturally into narrative work.

Giving people agency over the process may reduce anxiety more effectively than any memorized script. That is the direction I want this intervention to take.