Are you ready to dedicate some attention to a fresh approach to your working relationships? In this 8-week workshop, we will cultivate our capacity to connect with ourselves and others, practice nonviolent communication skills, and develop conflict resilience in our work with others.

When we pour ourselves into work we care about, we want to know it matters. We want to know that our collective efforts to bring about needed changes and work toward Just Transition will be fruitful. How disheartening, exhausting, and frustrating it is to see our hard work fall short as conflict slows down the momentum of our work or, worse yet, leads us to step away from collaborative efforts. 

And yet, tensions will arise in our working relationships. Think about the relationships most important to you: are any of them devoid of tension? The problem with tension is not that it exists but that the legacies of a domination paradigm (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and scarcity to name a few) have left us without the skills we need to find learning and growth in the conflict that inevitably arises in big or small ways.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) offers us a toolkit to deepen our own embodied self-connection and build our capacity to relate to ourselves and one another with empathy so that we can show up more fully and authentically to our work in the world. As we begin to unpack the way that domination culture has shaped our very language, we can learn new/old ways of communicating that bring us more deeply into alignment with our values, our purpose, and into connection with one another as we work together to build the world we long for.

During this 8-week, online workshop, we will explore practical strategies for undoing domination in ourselves, our communication, our relationships, and our collaborations. Each two-hour session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your work and life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with another participant for practice in between sessions. Because a shared experience with colleagues can make it easier to bring this language and these skills into your working relationships, we encourage you to sign up with one or more of the people you work with! This course will support you, and the colleagues and collaborators who join you, to:

• Understand empathy: what is it and why does it matter in working relationships? How can I listen with empathy and compassion, with others and with myself?
• Explore NVC as an embodied mindfulness practice 
• Grow your capacity to tune into body sensations as valuable feedback from your nervous system pointing you towards what matters to you
• Develop an awareness of and vocabulary for resonant language – including “feelings” and “needs” – and your understanding of the brain science behind why this kind of language works
• Prepare for difficult conversations, and have more tools for “clean up” afterwards
• Foster connection while maintaining personal authenticity
• Identify patterns of domination culture and develop a needs-based orientation that can enable you to undo domination
• Develop an empathetic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in conflict and collaboration

This workshop is not meant to be a forum for working through active conflicts with one another, but rather a place to be supported in cultivating the skills that will help us to engage more effectively with conflict in our working relationships.

And, if you’ve previously taken Navigating Conflict: Communication Skills for Working Together or Navigating Conflict: Building Skills for Connection and Resilience, this is a similar offering…but not exactly the same. We are constantly learning and adjusting! Since we first offered this in 2020, we’ve added 2 weeks to the series. Past participants (including GWI workers who provide facilitation support) have found it very valuable to repeat the series…consider joining us again for a refresher and new material!