Gossip, Star Wars, anthropology: Just another Chepstow Networking Hub!
The latest Networking Hub at Basepoint Chepstow was another roaring success thanks to an excellent guest speaker and a fabulous turnout of enthusiastic attendees. Our guest speaker for this event was Tony Coll of Tony Coll Media Training, a former BBC journalist and presenter who has also worked as a coach, trainer, facilitator, writer, director and performer.
Tony gave a talk that was relevant to personal development, team-building, internal and external communication, including presentations, speeches, media interviews and in-house videos. He touched on three approaches to communication – narrative, news and anthropology – and talked us through a couple of techniques that can be adopted when creating stories and can be applied in different situations.
The first technique he explained was ‘The Hero’s Journey’. The Hero’s Journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell. It describes the typical adventure of the archetype known as The Hero, the person who goes out and achieves great deeds on behalf of the group, tribe, or civilization. Tony described each stage of the journey, applying it to the original Star Wars film, which kept everybody engrossed as you might expect.
Tony then went on to describe a technique that he came up with, the CHORTLE acronym for Press Releases – Conflict, Human interest, Odd, Relevant, Topical, Local, Entertaining. By encompassing all of these items, an engaging article will be created which is more likely to be published by news outlets and talked about.
Tony also touched on the fascinating subject of evolutionary anthropology, the study of how we came to be modern humans, and introduced us to the work of Psychologist Robin Dunbar and in particular his book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting, but Robin Dunbar’s studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up-to-date with friends and family, and that gossip is essentially the human version of primate grooming. During this time we were all given the opportunity to engage in the kind of grooming undertaken by our ancestors - something us Brits have definitely evolved well away from! Que giggling galore…
Following Tony’s talk, guests enjoyed a buffet lunch while they networked. The Business Card prize draw was won by Viv White of KN Office Supplies, after declaring that she never wins anything. She was delighted to take home a bottle of bubbly.
Keep an eye on the calendar on our website for details of future events. Alternatively, if you’d like to be added to our mailing list for invitations please contact [email protected]