Episode #50: Alina Siegfried on The Power of Story to Transform the World and Ourselves
In this episode, I had a chat with Alina Siegfried, a New Zealand-based storyteller, narrative strategist, systems change advocate, TEDx speaker, and award-winning spoken word artist whose stage name is Ali Jacs. Alina’s journey in storytelling and communications has taken her through environmental advocacy, political issues campaigning, social enterprise, crowdfunding, arts, and community development. In her role as the founding communications lead of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, she’s helped bring together a global community of 500 world-leading entrepreneurs, investors, artists, and system change leaders to develop transformative solutions to pressing global challenges.
Her book, A Future Untold: The Power of Story to Transform the World and Ourselves, will be published at the end of this month (October 2021), and is centered around Alina’s own 15-year journey through storytelling and creating narratives for systems change. With the current widespread awareness that the systems upon which we rely on are harming us and our planet, there’s a great need to come up with radical solutions that we can use to shift those systems. Alina will share some solutions with us and tell us how we can use storytelling to challenge and trigger ourselves to seek out discomfort in order to find new ways of being and acting. Stay tuned for more of our inspiring conversation.
Key Points Discussed:
Announcing herself as gay to an audience of 700 people during a TEDx ChristChurch talk she was doing and how it changed her life (05:07)
Understanding the power of storytelling (11:08)
Listening to the stories of others so we can work towards addressing polarization (16:21)
Changing our relationship with certainty in order to hold space for paradox (20:48)
Why we need to move away from our individualistic way of life to build wide-scale collectivism (23:25)
How storytelling can unite us (25:47)
Tackling the luxury of privilege in avoiding uncomfortable conversations (30:53)
The inspiration behind writing her book and what the process of writing it was like (36:00)
Creating new myths for humanity to bring people together (45:01)
Resources Mentioned:
Connect with Alina Siegfried:
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