What is the Passion Never Retires Conference

The Passion Never Retires Conference is a three-day international event in Rome 2018 which covers the most important ideas we teach and aims to transform creative lives. It is designed to equip creative participants with a toolkit of Storytelling Skills that will revolutionise your creative life, business, relationships and your sense of possibility and happiness.

The Passion Never Retires conference will be an uncommon experience. For a start, we are not being taught in entirely standard ways. The storytellers on stage are you and your fellow travellers, creative heroes and heroines who don’t merely lecture to a passive audience. They invite with their passionate stories almost continuous interaction, getting participants to look inside themselves, complete a variety of storytelling exercises and bring their stories to bear on the ideas put forward on stage.

Stories are peppered with films, pieces of music, slides and visual prompts; all the senses are properly stimulated to keep the creative mind fresh and receptive. Furthermore, there is an enormous emphasis on friendship. We are not merely seated quietly on our own, isolated from other participants. We are guided on a journey in a world city to mingle, form smaller and larger groups and carry out storytelling exercises together. It is almost impossible to leave after three days without having made quite a few firm friends.

Conference Course Guides

The Conference will be led by our founder Peter de Kuster, who will take participants through the three-day immersive experience.  He will be supported by creative heroines from our Passion Never Retires Year program.

Programme Details

Day 1 Friday The Power of your Story. What is your Story? 

We begin with a look at what storytelling is, how it can be taught – and in what areas we’ll acquire it in the days ahead. We consider our particular position in history: living in an age of declining religious faith, with enormous emphasis on romantic fulfilment and career success – and we situate the work of Passion Never Retires against this ideological background.

We define our focus as an organisation as being about creativity and happiness; a richer world for you more alive to the real complexity of existence.

We identify that a core task of storytelling is to achieve self-knowledge. Throughout the day we teach story questing techniques to explore our deep minds and clarify vague and almost-out-of-reach stories. In particular, we consider our longing to connect properly with other human beings through storytelling. We learn about the art of good questions, about ways to listen to others fruitfully and how to overcome barriers to intimacy. We aim to teach storytelling strategies that will help remove excessive superficial contact from our lives, and put these into practice at the end of the day with our new found acquaintances.

Day 2 Saturday Morning  In the Company of Heroes & Heroines  – Our Creative Skills 

On our second day we will study why we have the ‘archetypal’ stories we do – and how our early experiences give us scripts of what, how we can create. We’ll learn how there are always more possible stories than we initially believe and how we might come to broaden our unconscious scripts of what we can create.

We also look at the storytelling techniques that can make a creative professional move others and themselves in the long term. Passion Never Retires firmly believes that storytelling is ultimately a skill, not a talent. We learn about how to communicate, how not to sulk, how to understand and explain our distinctive way of creating, how to forgive and be forgiven, how to negotiate conflicts through humour and how to deal with conflicts.

We don’t evade the darker side of creativity. We look at the notion of good and bad compromises and usefully complicate the way we are looking at the choices before us.

We’re reminded that many of the answers we need are within us already, waiting for the correct storytelling tool to extract them.

Day 2 Saturday Afternoon Creative Business, Potential, Confidence, Failure 

We will move on to consider the emotional dimension of our work; what impels us to want to do a certain sort of job, and why it is often so hard to align our emotional desires with our practical requirements. We’ll explore our creative personalities and sift through our authentic interests.

We also consider a variety of blocks and inhibitions which prevent us from pushing forward with our hunches.

We pay particular attention to the idea of creative confidence. The difference between success and failure often hangs on this almost humiliatingly small and elusive concept that standard education never touches. We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow professional fields, but we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of creative confidence which can serve us across a range of tasks in professional, but also in personal, life.

Day 3 Sunday  Storytelling, Passion, Creativity & Happiness 

Passion has a natural and deep appeal for creative people. Most of us long to be more passionate, creative, happy and capable of reacting with quiet good humour to life’s setbacks and irritants. But we are often still only at the very beginning of knowing how to be.

A passionate life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life. It draws upon and exercises our higher capacities, for example, tenderness, care, connection, self-understanding, sympathy, intelligence and creativity.

On our final day we will look at the art of responding to our challenges with greater passion, alongside a discussion of finding happiness in life. We teach a storytelling toolkit of how to approach our creative moments – and to triumph over free-floating or intense anxiety.

Who Should Attend the Passion Never Retires Conference

The Passion Never Retires Conference is ideal for those looking for an in-depth experience that covers the main areas of our creative lives; Passion, Creativity, Self Promotion, Money, Time, Others, Happiness.

What you can expect:

• A rich programme drawing from the key insights across our core curriculum
• A learning experience combining stories of rolemodels, lectures, films, music, storytelling exercises and continuous audience participation
• Three-days of engaging content written and presented by Storyteller and Writer Peter de Kuster, supported by leading members of the Passion Never Retires team.
• Daily educational programme and curated morning and evening social activities
• An opportunity to join and share wisdom in a thriving community of like-minded creative individuals
• An unforgettable weekend break in one of Europe’s most culturally vibrant capitals