Workshops
I am enlivened and gratified to earn a portion of my income developing and leading personal growth workshops. These range in focus from facilitation skills to communication skills, from gender and multicultural work to personal mastery.
I offer my workshops to the general public and to community groups. My offerings usually range from two to three hours to a full weekend retreat. Below is a sampling of workshops I currently offer. I am also available to custom-design workshops for existing groups with specific learning goals.
Facilitation Skills
Life Purpose / Balance
Communications Skills
Gender
Facilitation Skills
Polishing the Mirror: The value of self-awareness in effective facilitation
This interactive workshop is for teachers, facilitators, managers, leaders, coaches and counselors—or anyone wanting more flexibility and presence in their interactions with others. It is designed to help you learn more about your "buttons"—what they are, how they get pushed, what happens when they do and what you can do to remain in, or return to, your center.
Learning experiences are made more potent by a facilitator's ability to reflect to the participants a clear image of themselves in the midst of their experience. This image is a candid reflection of the person which is free from the facilitator's judgments and interpretations. The more leaders become aware of our biases and "buttons," the more we are able to be such "polished mirrors" for our participants.
The content of this workshop is drawn from a variety of disciplines and theories, including Re-Evaluation Counseling, Vipassana meditation, yoga and Shadow Work. Using guided imagery, role-plays, individual reflection and group dialogue, individuals will look at how they get "triggered" when leading. We will also explore strategies for coping with and neutralizing the charge of our own reactions--using the support of a co-leader, and on our own.
This workshop is appropriate for teachers, facilitators, managers, leaders and counselors—or anyone wanting more flexibility and presence in their interactions with others. The opportunities for greatest risk-taking will be revealing to oneself and others the ways we get stuck or triggered as leaders.
From the Ground Up: Foundational Skills of Helping
“I bring to this workshop my passion for the art of facilitation and my deep belief in the power of these skills to bring the facilitator into a ‘flow state’— where the dancer becomes the dance and where self-consciousness and fear are replaced with deep presence, curiosity, trust and joy.” --Joseph DiCenso
What are the core skills needed to guide someone through any process of self-discovery and healing? What are the deep skills that allow us to both follow and guide that person’s work?
A house is built from the ground up. The artist first learns to draw a chair. This workshop teaches the basic facilitation skills of listening, asking powerful questions and self-awareness. While fundamental, these skills are not the “easiest” to master. They are the skills of the master facilitator and require time and practice to integrate. Even so, they can immediately improve your facilitation—allowing you to bring more curiosity, creativity, clean communication and respect to your work.
In addition to these basic skills, “From the Ground Up” provides the basic goals, questions and milestones that guide a facilitator within any process. This big picture map will give you context and direction in any specific process you facilitate.
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Life Purpose/Balance
Courageous Living: Having More of What you Want
If you’ve been…
- wondering about your work in the world,
- seeking your "right livelihood,"
- nursing a strong longing, or
- yearning for a truer life ,
...Courageous Living may be just what you’re looking for.
The purpose of this program is to help you build your life around what matters most to you; to align your outer living with your inner passion and delight, to find where your "deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet" (Gregg Levoy).
The primary focus is on each person developing the ability to create meaningful change toward what s/he wants. Think of this as coaching in-the-round amidst a mutually-supportive team of adventurers.
The very least you can do in your life
is to figure out what you hope for.
And the most you can do is to live inside that hope…
– Barbara Kingsolver
What you will get
- Practice articulating what you WANT
- Increased awareness of your inner RESISTANCE
- Tools for creating USABLE ENERGY from your resistance
- Guidance uncovering OLD BELIEFS and choosing new ones
- Practice setting SIMPLE GOALS that move you toward what you want
- Opportunities to LEARN from experience--your own and others'
- A 1-hour PERSONAL COACHING session
- Fierce-loving SUPPORT and encouragement from your facilitator
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The Reckoning: Midlife as a Call to Wholeheartedness
Midlife is known as a time of crisis. A time when the persona that has gotten us this far starts to crack and peel, exposing the wood of the deeper self. A time when we lose our bearings and the old maps we've always consulted become useless. In the words of Dante Alighieri, "In the middle of the road of my life / I awoke in a dark wood / where the true way was wholly lost."
For women and men the timing and experience of this change is different. Both may feel disoriented, dispirited, exhausted. Many of us in our middle years now also feel the weight of the current state of the world. The antidote to this exhaustion may not be rest, but wholeheartedness (Stendhal-Rast).
This workshop series offers support for the reckoning required for wholeheartedness (including truth-telling, acceptance and "right action"). It is an invitation to open to the unknown, to the beckoning home to your self, to what most enlivens you—ultimately, to return yourself to the world, heart whole, spirit refreshed, full, generous and fiercely alive.
What will I get?
Form:
- A mutually supportive small group (12 max)
- Experiential and interactive learning
- Personalized 1:1 coaching session (60 min)
- Six 3-hour evening sessions
Content:
- Practice entering the unknown and being lost with confidence!
- Increased awareness and acceptance of your nature and what brings you alive
- Tools for listening, self-acceptance, forgiveness and sustenance
- Guidance & practice crafting simple goals and potent practices
In Our Bones: Awakening the Archetypes
Many features of our lives seem to come in fours: the four seasons, the four elements, the four points on the compass and four directions of ahead, behind, left and right. In Shadow Work®, a healing form grounded in Jungian and body-centered psychologies, four primary archetypes (universal forms) hold the four cardinal directions on the map of the human psyche.
This experiential introduction to the four archetypes of Lover, Warrior, Magician and Sovereign offers a series of simple exercises which invoke these 4 universal energies. These exercises give us a way to call upon these energies at any time, to bring greater balance, power and creativity to our lives. Come awaken and deepen!
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Communication Skills
Talk that Works: Four Archetypes & Clean Communication
This experiential, interactive workshop will explore 4 Jungian archetypes and a 4-quarter model that supports clear and complete communication--to resolve conflicts, offer feedback or simply to convey your message in a way that fosters trust, credibility and understanding. Some participants will have an opportunity to apply these tools to “live” issues, helping them and others more deeply and personally integrate the models presented.
This workshop may be for you if you:
- desire clarity and trust in your personal and work relationships
- wish to learn new ways of understanding yourself and creating more balance in yourself—in communication and in your life
- enjoy learning while engaging your body, imagination and personal experiences
How to Say NO: So You can Say YES to what Matters Most
(A workshop developed with Guthrie Sayen and based on The Power of a Positive No by William Ury)
Do you have trouble saying No? Can you say No with kindness? What if you could strengthen relationships and self-esteem while standing for what matters and saying No!?
Saying No seems to present us with a dilemma:
Do I exercise my power (say No),
or do I take care of the relationship (say Yes when I mean No)?
Faced with this dilemma, we often fall into the AAA-trap:
- Accommodate: Say Yes when we want to say No.
- Attack: Say No unskillfully and alienate the other person.
- Avoid: Do nothing and hope the problem will go away.
The way out of this dilemma is the Positive No--a simple three-step practice developed by William Ury, Ph. D., of Harvard. At this workshop participants will learn these three steps and practice applying them to their own real-life situations.
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Gender
Hearth & Hero: How Women and Men Do Conflict and How we can Find Our Hearts Together
An experiential, interactive exploration of the archetypal feminine and masculine approaches to conflict, this workshop asks: How do these differences set us up for missing each other, for failing to hear and understand one another because we are using different instinctual languages? We will plumb for answers to these questions and explore how these differences can be embraced and valued by each as important tools for resolving conflicts.
Can We Talk?: Courageous Connection between Women and Men
(Developed with Ingrid Bredenberg)
Men and women experience the world differently. We think, act, talk and love differently. Exploring these differences, finding common ground, and creating new stories is the focus of these evenings of guided inquiry. Bridge the gap, quench your curiosity, plant the seeds of deeper understanding.
In this experiential workshop we will create a forum in which we can skillfully ask and answer the questions most alive in us--about men and women and how we relate to each other. All in the spirit of authentic inquiry.
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