Workshop Logistics

If you’re wondering how this all works:

PROGRAM FORMATS: Big Muse keynotes and workshops are super flexible. Depending on scope and budget, we can provide several different program formats…

• Full Band Collaboration: Peter, drums, bass, keyboards, two guitars, and an additional vocalist).

• Small Band Workshop: Peter, a singer, a percussionist/and or bassist, and an additional vocalist.

• Anti-Silo Solo: Just Peter and his guitar. (A great option for lectures, keynotes, intimate seminars).

PROGRAM RUNNING TIMES:

• General Workshops: 90 minutes to 120 minutes

• Full-Day Workshops: 5 to 8 hours

• Half-Day workshops: 3 to 4 hours

• Keynotes: 45 minutes to one hour

PROGRAM CUSTOMIZATION: To discuss the needs, design, and flow of your workshop—along with any details you deem important—we typically schedule up to two one-hour calls in advance of your event. 

PRICING: Workshop fees vary based on program format, running time, and number of participants. Please reach out to Mike Frick for more information.

Sample Workshop Frameworks

Framework 1: Instant Trust And Collaboration

Develops instant trust to make your team powerfully co-creative

Whether it’s through songwriting, poetry, artwork, or storytelling, we put together an experience that will leave your people feeling more trusting of one another, more connected to the mission of your company, and more trusting in their own creative capacities.

I’m often asked, “Peter, can you help make our people more creative”? While I believe it’s entirely possible, I’ve found that particular challenge has less to do with “making people more creative” than it does with developing an environment that’s more trusting.

The people you employ have gone through an arduous vetting process. They work for you because you believe they are highly competent and highly intelligent. You pay them well for that competency. Knowing that, we don’t frame the solution around “bringing out” creativity, but rather, on how to create the trust that allows it to effortlessly shine forth.

A few years back, I had an experience working with a large company that drove this idea home in a powerful way. Their ask of me was similar to the one I just described: “Can you help make our young leaders more comfortable with creativity?”

On the day of our workshop, I was dismayed to see members of the company’s upper management team in positions around the room wearing grim faces, each of them holding clipboards in their hands, and taking notes on the performance of each of these young leaders as I went through my program. ‘How could anyone be expected to be creative in this hostile —almost punitive environment?’ I wondered.

I learned a simple, but essential lesson that day: Intelligent people are creative by nature, all they need is an environment of trust and their creativity will burst forth.

Framework 2: Stamp Out Creativity-Killing Fear

Push aside fear and access greater creativity

This Big Muse program gives participants techniques to short circuit the brain’s native tendency towards fear, which allows them access to new creative possibilities. M.A.R.V., which stands for (Majorly Afraid of Revealing Vulnerability®, is our metaphor for your internal critic. Learn to silence him, fearlessly share your ideas, be deeply creative, and grow in your personal and professional life.

Your people will learn key tools to keep Marv at bay while they free their minds to do their best work. Employees that are overly focused on negative judgment, whether externally imposed, or from their own destructive thinking, may well be the single biggest inhibitor to your company’s success.

While other programs and speakers simply speak to the issue of overcoming fear, Big Muse programs are super-interactive. This interactivity includes having your people write original songs (whether individually or in groups) about key company concerns, new outlooks, social issues (you name it), songs that will later be performed by the Big Muse band to create a powerfully resounding culmination to the session.

Instead of being told how to act or how to feel, participants in each Big Muse session absorb information in a potent, visceral, and unforgettable manner.

Framework 3: Electric Leaders

Leverage tools of self-reflection to become a more effective leader

It’s axiomatic; if you can’t self-reflect, you can’t know yourself. If you can’t know yourself, you can’t lead your own growth. If you can’t lead your own growth you can’t lead others. Learn to take control of your career and your life, so both you and your teams can perform better and lead more fulfilling lives. One of the keys to being resilient in these times of unceasing flux and disruption is not only to know your values, but to examine them, to write about them, and then…to make a plan to bring those values into every part of your life.

Words like courage, loyalty, honor, and integrity have sadly fallen into disuse. They are considered by many to be things found only in old movies and on Hallmark greeting cards. At Big Muse, we think about those words very differently. We believe that core values are what’s missing in today’s mercurial business climate; a sometimes, less than humane place, where many leaders appear to be clawing their way to some mythical “top” —in spite of the consequences to stakeholders, employees, and society at large. We also believe that a deep exploration into values, ideas of purpose, and of an overall sense of contributing to mankind, is not only moral, it makes strategic business sense as well.

In this important session, (primarily geared to upper management), we create both conversation and action around what it means, not only to empower talented people to flex their creative muscles, but to empower oneself.

Framework 4: Amping Up Employee Engagement

Create and maintain a more engaged and passionate workforce

87% of the global workforce is disengaged. 20% of that 87 are actively engaged in sabotaging the organizations they work for. In this hands-on session we explore the reasons for employee disengagement that are unique to your organization and implement strategies to halt it.

We feel strongly that disengagement comes about when people sense the company they are working for lacks strong values. They become dissatisfied when they think the only mission statement is: Increase the bottom line. While keeping numbers up should be a priority, if that’s all your company stands for in the minds of your employees, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to keep them around for long.

I know a young woman who works for a large international food chain. After hearing her speak about her frustration with having to deal with the company’s complex hierarchy and its intrusion into even the smallest decisions, I felt her pain. She admitted two things that stuck with me:

1.) She could accomplish so much more at her job if only she were given the opportunity to implement some of her own solutions to existing problems.
2.) She puts in only three hours of valuable work per week. The rest of the time she deals with a snail-paced, creativity-stifling bureaucracy.

As human beings, we are motivated far more by a sense of purpose than we are by simply filling our personal coffers. Without the ability to try new things, employees become bored, and their boredom invariably leads to frustration.

Engagement isn’t a survey or a point on a graph; engagement is people coming together with passion and trust in one another to find creative solutions that make real, tangible change.