Method

NSAH offers consulting, coaching, workshops and courses based on methods that promotes creativity. NSAH has an approach that nurtures the playful and inventive that is so important to growing and changing. We work in the intersection of Expressive Arts Therapy, storytelling and educational conversations.

Expressive Arts Therapy differs from conventional talk therapy in that it incorporates various art forms as sculpturing, paintings, and drawings in the work with the participants' wishes and performances. This form of work helps to identify challenges as well as own resources, strengths and visions.  Through the process of art-making, an Expressive Arts therapist discovers how their clients can live in a better way, how the arts facilitate change, personal growth and transformation. Expressive Arts Therapy is based on philosophy, anthropology, psychology and performative arts. It draws inspiration from indigenous cultures' approach to crises, transformation and human welfare. In Native American cultures, dance, song and rituals were used when people were to be part of new life chapters. In African tribes, the rite of passage is an essential element from child to adult, where the key to well-being lies in song, group dance and play. In art therapy, challenging transitions in life are seen in a way that views these states as being part of life.

NSAH has it’s educational background  from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where Expressive Arts Therapy is offered as an academic graduate program - M.A. in Expressive Arts Therapy with a Minor in Psychology.

Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Karen Blixen was the first Dane to call herself a storyteller. We will bring the joy and art of storytelling directly to personal and organizational development. Here storytelling is a powerful tool that can create meaning and direction, redeem innovation and strengthen communities and relationships. Our approach to storytelling is based on many years of close collaboration with David Boje, an international acknowledged scholar of true storytelling in organizations, as well as Danish authors who sees themselves as storytellers.

Unlike ordinary coaching, the educational conversation takes place on a general human and philosophical level. It draws on the ancient Protreptics, a classic Greek dialogue concept whose purpose is to turn (protrepo) the individual towards their own basic values ​​and manner. The protreptic dialogue is about realizing the deepest inherent values that control our lives and in the context of management, it requires addressing members of organizations not as employees, but as human beings. It is a dialogue where the individual is confronted with what he / she wants with his life as a leader and as a human being. The educational conversation helps to anchor essential values ​​and concepts in modern leadership, to create a standpoint, as professor Svend Brinkmann says, that provides existential strength and helps navigate in a changing and complex world. The educational conversation can be used both by the individual as means of self-reflection, and by organizations as part of becoming aware of shared values. In creative and innovative processes educational conversation can be included as a way of expanding perspectives and opportunities. 

Founder Jens Larsen teaches educational conversation at the Master of Public Governance at Aalborg University and arranges hikes in the Dolomites and Pyrenees with the focal point of the educational conversation.