This is a technique I use in the office when people are very reactive about an incident. I use it often. I have noticed that I refer to it in one of my most popular articles – on Resentments. Yet, nowhere have I written up how to do it. So, here goes.
Continue reading →This is a beginner, Validation exercise. You are Uninformed at that point when you think your partner is doing something odd or that “doesn’t make sense to you.” If you were informed, you wouldn’t think it odd, and you would see your partner’s sense. Use this practice sheet to get good at Validating.
Continue reading →Notes for a Class on Guiding Dialogue
Continue reading →I am presenting this paper as a discussion of dialogue norms to use in Power Differential Relationships. My goal is to re-approach One-up/One-down situations from the relational model, the dialogical model that is central to Imago Relationship theory and practice.
The paper is divided into three sections:
1. Types of Power Differential Situations
2. Decision Making as the legitimate reason for Power Differential Situations
3. The Four Challenges facing groups trying to make decisions.
This is a way of scoring to see if you were experiencing dialogue or just normal chaotic conversation.
Continue reading →This is a very brief (bullet format) summary of the Rules and Principles I have used in guiding Communologue.
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How about it? Want to learn to be empathic? Want to know when you aren't? Want to improve? I believe that more and more people will be talking about the “need for more empathy.” I believe that the primary cause of conflict in our families, our partnerships, our business, our marriages, our political communities, our churches, and in the world, is a pronounced lack of reliable empathic skills.
Relationship confusion. Though I have written many times about this topic, I still find it the hardest for people to grasp. And in all my experience of relating, in starting a relationship, recovering one, maintain a high reliable quality of connection, this is the most important. Here is another attempt to make the relational situation clearer. [I’ve also been reminded that this is Advanced Relationship material – not for beginners.]
For years I have been teaching and “thinking” about Feelings. I have been teaching what I call , the Four Prime Feelings for years: Fear, Anger, Sorrow, and Joy. But more and more I have become aware of a set of feelings that are very important and which are not usually called emotions. I think they are.
Continue reading →A couple of days ago I got a note from a friend letting me in on her delight sharing the posters I have. Probably half a dozen times I have heard from people who used this method of learning the “wisdom” that I am passing on to you all.
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