Conscious Communication Skills Private Trainings for
Your Group, Organization, or Business
Conscious Communication Skills guide you to focus on emotions and needs instead of critical judgments, enabling you to collaborate rather than compete. Together you create a foundation of safety and trust, which allows you to maintain your connection when conversations become difficult.
Do you want to feel understood in your communications with others?
Do you want to express yourself honestly and get your needs met?
Are conflicts getting in the way of productivity or success?
Do you want to understand yourself and others when their behavior is upsetting you?
Do you want a greater sense of unity and connection; and more enjoyment, fulfillment, and satisfaction in your relationships?
Conscious Communication Skills Private Trainings
are available for your group, organization, or business
* Online or in-person *
In the interactive group training you will learn how to connect with other people by creating a base of understanding, even when you disagree. These new skills enable you to speak honestly without blame, listen to others without judgment, and resolve difficult issues while staying connected.
These trainings are perfect for personal, social, and professional groups who desire to improve the quality of communication and understanding in their relationships (family, group, organization, or business), and create an optimal, healthy foundation upon which to grow.
Conscious Communication Skills are easy to learn, but can be difficult to use in live conversations.
When someone becomes emotionally charged, we often revert to familiar responses, even when we know they don't work.
A personal coach can make all the difference in enabling you to change your habits and use these skills effectively to connect more deeply with others and create mutually nourishing and satisfying relationships.
Applying the tools of Conscious Communication within your professional or team setting can have a profoundly positive impact. Investing energy in supporting healthy, authentic communication can improve morale, increase efficiency, and expand creativity. These skills will strengthen your organization and enhance people's ability to connect.
Group Trainings
Conscious Communication Skills interrupt your instinctual responses, enabling you to get your basic needs met while connecting authentically with another person. Practicing them can 'reset' your conditioned reactions, create space for empathy and understanding, and keep your focus on actual needs instead of imagined fears.
Applying these skills improves and fortifies relationships, restores connections, and erodes misunderstandings.
These skills work, however, they are not magic. Using them effectively takes intention, effort, and discipline. The process is easy to learn, but difficult to apply because it challenges your basic assumptions and makes you think outside the box. However, once you make this shift, it can change your life.
To learn to use these relationship tools effectively usually requires the guidance of a teacher who can show you how to apply them to your personal issues. An intensive small-group workshop or training gives you an opportunity to discuss specific situations, watch demonstrations, and practice the skills for yourself in role-play scenarios.
In these Group Trainings participants learn and practice the Conscious Communication foundational skills:
• Listening without judgment
• Voicing emotions and needs without blame
• Establishing healthy boundaries that enable mutual respect
• Caring for yourself while also caring about another person
Together participants explore the roots of common communication habits and learn to evaluate how well these are working.
From this new perspective, you learn how to communicate more directly and honestly without attacking or blaming others and to listen without judgment or evaluation.
While you will be encouraged to practice these skills in role-plays using real scenarios from your life, you will not be pressured to reveal more than is comfortable for you. And, although all sessions are confidential, we will not delve deeply into personal issues or conflicts between people in the workshop unless there is a group consensus and it would enhance the group learning*.
* Trainings and workshops can be modified in content and duration, depending upon its participants. Topics and formatting for family and other close groups naturally involve more intimate subjects and issues.
Group Trainings
How does it work?
In any situation with friends, at work, or at home, when you spend time together you are bound to upset one another. This is actually a sign that the relationship is becoming less superficial and more real. A stranger’s behavior doesn’t bother you nearly as much as someone you feel close and connected to. This is why giving and receiving feedback is essential for healthy relationships in which everyone’s needs are met.
Yet, most of us don’t know how to do this effectively. When are emotionally charged, we tend to judge each other, escalating conflict and putting distance between us. When we feel threatened, most of us default to our primal fight, flight, or freeze instincts, which not only undermines trust and safety in our closest relationships, it makes it impossible to move forward, and we get stuck.
The focus for trainings for businesses, organizations, and teams can include a combination of the following skills:
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Supportive Listening – listening in order to understand others
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Assertion – speaking directly about your feelings and needs in order to be understood
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Collaborative Negotiation and Decision Making – negotiating fairly without competition so everyone’s feelings and needs are recognized and all sides get their basic needs met
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Meeting Facilitation – guiding the process of a meeting so all members have a voice and the process is fun, productive, and efficient
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Shared Leadership – sharing the management tasks so everyone feels invested and no one is over-stressed or burned out
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Building a Supportive Team – creating a sense of unity that gives each member a sense of ownership and belonging, while maintaining their autonomy.
A full introductory training normally requires two days, or 12 hours of workshop time and can include any combination of skills. Workshop content and hours can be modified to fit your specific needs, and shorter sessions will be considered depending upon the circumstances.
Typical Training / Workshop Schedule
* This can be modified for online workshops, for a weekend intensive, weekly meetings, or monthly series to suit your needs.
FRIDAY EVENING
8:00-9:30
Introductions
Disconnects-habits that block connection
SATURDAY
9:00-12:00
Supportive Listening-how to listen for understanding, without judgement or evaluation
2:00-5:00
Assertion-how to express your emotions and needs honestly, without judgement or evaluation
7:30-9:00
Empathy Circle- facilitated, confidential, personal sharing using supportive listening skills
SUNDAY
9:00-12:00
Practice listening and assertion skills in facilitated live conversations and role plays
Customized Trainings for
Your Organization or Business
* You can bring Miles to train your group at your chosen venue.
Miles offers customized training in communication skills combined with group processes for your organization or business. Applying the tools of Conscious Communication within a professional or team setting can have a profoundly positive impact on an organization. Investing energy in supporting healthy, authentic communication can improve morale, increase efficiency, and expand creativity. These skills will strengthen your organization and enhance people's ability to connect.
Working with Miles
Miles has studied and practiced Conscious Communication and Conflict Resolution skills since 1978 and has been teaching since 1990. He is passionate about viewing conflict as a means to deepen relationships, rather than allowing it to distance us from each other. His teaching emphasizes practical skills for reorienting from a competitive mindset to a cooperative one.
Testimonials
Preparation for Your Training
Take the Conscious Communication Online Course. This self-directed course with instructional videos also includes the Conscious Communication book. This combined resource provides you with optimal preparedness for the workshop.
Fees range from $150-250/hour depending on length of training and travel time. Discounts may be available under certain circumstances such as purchasing multiple sessions or consecutive or ongoing workshop training packages.
... and, for Couples or Individuals
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