Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/09/2016
8:30 am to 4:30 pm
Location
Conversation Place
Public Conversations Project’s workshops will enhance your ability to plan, facilitate, and engage in more constructive conversations in your professional, civic, or personal life.
Our highly experiential workshops are capped at a small size to maximize each participant’s learning and allow for customization. Whether you are a beginner in dialogue or a master facilitator, you’ll develop skills you can apply across a wide range of settings. Check out our workshops today!
Dialogue Across Differences: An Introduction to Reflective Structured Dialogue
January 29, 2016
$150 (discounts available)
CE credits for marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors, and pastoral psychotherapists.
Preparation isn’t just for the “sage from the stage” type of communication – i.e. your next big presentation or lecture. Effective preparation is critical for conversation, too, enabling a group to avoid ruts of dysfunctional and transform their relationships. As a result of preparation, participants can engage more deeply with others on subjects about which they feel passionately…and differently. A facilitator can prepare people to enter a new kind of conversation and avoid old, stuck patterns of communication. After 25 years of working with communities facing deep cultural, religious and political divides, Public Conversations Project has honed in on thoughtful preparation practices as one of a facilitator’s most valuable tools, enabling a divided group to have conversations they never dreamed possible. This workshop offers participants one of Public Conversations’ signature contributions to the field of dialogue: a toolkit for participants — and facilitators — to prepare themselves and a group for conversations across deep differences.
Learning Objectives:
- Avoid “either-or” frameworks when asking questions, and instead use curiosity as an effective tool to open a stuck conversation across differences in beliefs or identity.
- More effectively navigate possible landmines in language, personality, or interpersonal relationships that might derail a conversation.
- Practice clear speaking, deep listening, and bringing your “best self” to the conversation, as a facilitator or participant.
- Gain greater clarity, clearer perspective and a deeper understanding of purpose before entering a meeting, dialogue, or difficult conversation.
- Gather preparation practices to minimize emotional reactivity of people engaging in a dialogue or conversation.
Results:
As a result of this workshop, you will be equipped to:
- Promote curiosity about others’ beliefs to encourage sharing and listening across deep differences in ideology or belief.
- Keep purpose front and center in the heat of challenging conversations.
- Avoid pitfalls in facilitation through self-knowledge and preparation.
- Design meetings to enhance trust among meeting or dialogue participants.
Who might participate:
- Mediators or alternative dispute resolution professionals anticipating a highly emotional conversation between people.
- Family members anticipating a challenging collective decision.
- Professional association, nonprofit, or business leaders navigating internal transitions.
- University staff engaging students in campus dialogue around issues of identity or diversity.
For more information, please contact us at training@publicconversations.org or 617-923-1216 ext. 10.
