1. Personal Meaning

We help individuals articulate and deepen their understanding of what makes their daily work significant and fulfilling. By reflecting on questions such as “What is meaningful about what I do every day?” and “How does my individual work resonate with my personal values, ethics, and vision of a good life?” professionals reconnect with intrinsic motivation, creative satisfaction, and clarity of purpose.

2. Organizational Meaning

We facilitate reflection on each participant’s role within their orgaWe facilitate reflection on each participant’s role within their organization, highlighting their contributions and connections to broader strategic aims. Participants explore questions like “What part do I play in the story our organization tells about itself?” and “How does my role influence, support, or shape the work of my colleagues?” This fosters a sense of belonging, and a collective clarity about what the organization is for.

3. Social and Historical Meaning

Finally, our workshops open space for collective exploration of the broader societal and historical significance of participants’ professional fields and specific organizations. Together, we consider deeper questions such as “How does our profession shape—and how is it shaped by—historical, cultural, and economic change?” and “What philosophical ideas or cultural narratives underpin our industry today, and how might these be evolving?” By engaging in these conversations, teams gain perspective on their place within a larger story—and with it, greater cohesion and adaptability.

Our multi-layered approach sets GWG’s workshops apart. These are not standard skill-building sessions but intellectually rigorous experiences, designed to help participants and teams achieve clarity of purpose and deeper fulfillment. At a time when professionals everywhere grapple with disconnection, burnout, and uncertainty, our workshops address those challenges directly—through structured, deliberate meaning-making.

These benefits may seem intangible at first glance. But intangible does not mean insubstantial: teams that understand why their work matters communicate more clearly, cooperate more readily, and stay motivated long after the workshop ends.

Our workshops are fully customizable and can be delivered virtually or in person at your organization’s New York City-area location. We invite you to explore these offerings further by scheduling a complimentary consultation with our Enrollment Managers.

Your team’s workshop will be led by an accomplished professional whose career represents the highest levels of academic and literary achievement.

The Gilliam faculty includes New York Times best-selling novelists, graduates of renowned MFA programs in creative writing who have published with major presses, cultural critics leading celebrated magazines (e.g., the Editor-in-Chief of Bookforum), and former English department chairs from top universities. Their writing appears in legacy publications like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic, and their award-winning books have been published by presses such as Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Macmillan.

They have also taught literature and creative writing at elite institutions throughout the US, from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to Cornell University, to the University of Chicago—yet, through the Gilliam Writers Group, their teaching reaches beyond the small number of students who are admitted to those programs.

Every workshop facilitator at GWG is skilled at translating that expertise into meaningful learning for professional teams across industries.

The command of attention is a foundational human skill, essential to reflection and understanding. Although contemporary culture most commonly examines attention through the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, and popular mindfulness practices, the cultivation of this ability has an even deeper lineage in the intellectual traditions of the humanities. Literary analysis, rhetorical studies, and philosophical inquiry have all long emphasized the value of sustained, focused attention to texts, arguments, and the complexities of everyday experience.

This workshop reintroduces participants to techniques and insights drawn from the academic humanities, exploring attention not merely as a cognitive function but as a culturally and historically shaped capacity, one that has been carefully developed by scholars and writers across many centuries.

Participants consider how habits of attention—absorption and distraction, focus and diversion—are shaped not only by contemporary media environments, but also by older social forces. Through exercises derived from deep reading (reading for pleasure), close reading (reading for literary analysis), reflective writing, and philosophical dialogue, the workshop guides individuals and teams toward a heightened awareness of their own attentional tendencies and the contexts that shape them—contexts which can, in turn, be reshaped.

We also discuss the implications of the contemporary “attention economy,” in which attention operates as a crucial form of currency. Recognizing the commercial and technological interests that seek to mine our attention, we return to historical examples and traditional humanities-based methods as tools for reclaiming it.

By the workshop’s conclusion, participants will have gained insights into attention as both a core humanistic skill and a practical, everyday resource, becoming more intentional in how they engage with their work, their professional environment, and each other.

This workshop raises a controversial possibility: that the last thing anyone needs is more information. Innovation, creativity, and insight are not kinds of information but cognitive operations for processing knowledge and expressing ideas and states of mind. Mastery of these operations is what allows professionals to analyze and synthesize, to think laterally and metaphorically, to reason through hypotheticals and counterfactuals...to evaluate, and then to create.

These ways of working with knowledge have long been formally cultivated in higher education, scientific and technological research, and the creative arts, but they are just as relevant to organizational design, problem solving, and innovation.

In this workshop, we examine these processes in theory and ground them in the realities of your team’s specific professional context. We analyze exemplary instances of each, reflecting on their cultivation and application in our lives and work. By cultivating these habits of mind, we become better equipped to find satisfaction and productive engagement in our professional lives.

This workshop begins with a historically and culturally varied survey of important concepts of work. The idea here is to identify and reflect on diverse types of work: paid and unpaid, skilled and unskilled, blue and white collar, technical and creative. We look at how different kinds of value intersect with different kinds of labor. What kinds of work have been highly valued, and why? How is this value expressed? Are the highest paid jobs always the most prestigious?

Drawing on participant experience, this workshop uses short writing exercises and discussion to guide reflection on a set of fundamental questions: Why and how do we work? What do we ask from our work and what does it ask from us? Work takes many forms and has many flavors. So when we talk about work, we draw from a whole grab bag of words, each of which spins its own web of mental associations: “job,” “career,” “vocation,” “gig,” “opportunity,” “position,” “capacity,” and so on.

These explorations support awareness of the professional decisions and directions we take, and so help cultivate a more integrated, more authentic relation to the enterprise that participants have undertaken together.

In this workshop, we introduce a thumbnail history of the type of organization your team represents. (This could be any type of corporation, company, or nonprofit.) One goal here is to frame a big picture in which participants can find a place and orient themselves toward possible futures. For people to make effective strategic decisions, they need to have a sense of where they stand and how they got there. Engagement and motivation thrive where a shared enterprise can be imagined and adapted.

Concentrating on the specific enterprise that participants are engaged in, this workshop draws on their experience and knowledge to draft a kind of narrative portrait, or biography, of that enterprise. We look at its origin, its legal identity, its function, and its relation to government and law.

Then, from information that the organization offers the public and its employees, we ask what stories it tells about itself. What forms do these stories take? Who are their audiences? Are these organizational self-portraits touched up and updated over time?

Turning to the individual participants, we ask what role they see themselves taking in this organizational narrative. Do they already have a seat at the table, or will they need to realize their place through creative positioning?

Finally, to help clarify their own professional identities and aspirations, participants are invited to draft a personal version of this portrait: the story of the organization as seen from their own position within it.

This workshop touches on elements central to our first two workshops on the mind—processes such as sustained, absorptive attention, and metaphorical, hypothetical, and counterfactual thinking. All of these are essential to self-reflective awareness and emotional perceptiveness. Crucially, this workshop emphasizes that ethical thinking and reasoning are not rigid or dogmatic, but rather open-ended analytical skills. By approaching ethics as a flexible practice—one informed by imaginative exploration, storytelling, and genuine curiosity—participants cultivate their capacity for nuanced ethical analysis, capable of accommodating multiple perspectives.

The workshop proceeds through three sections. The first focuses on breadth of perspective, encouraging participants to contemplate the sheer quantity and multiplicity of people and situations outside their immediate sphere. The second explores how we relate to and discuss complicated issues involving multiple stakeholders. Finally, drawing on these encounters with the unknown and unfamiliar, participants explore frameworks and techniques that use storytelling (the purposeful construction of narratives) as a method for ethical analysis. Through this approach, they practice the novelists’ art of testing theoretical moral frameworks within “simulated” realities—ones they must attempt to experience as honestly and convincingly as possible, through the imagined perspectives of people unlike themselves.

This skill is useful well beyond literary practice; it applies directly to a wide range of professional contexts. The hypothetical and imaginative thinking practiced in this workshop enhances the ability to approach problems from multiple perspectives, enriching participants’ ethical sensitivity and analytical rigor. The awareness and agility exercised by this kind of perspective-taking also support the evaluation of impact and risk, and enable reasoned speculation about how a statement, product, or project might be received across diverse psychological and cultural terrain.