You’re caught in an encounter that is activating your fight or flight response—learn how to expand your emotional capacity for nonviolent, collaborative engagement so that you can go deep in a conversation with anyone. And we mean anyone.

We face much uncertainty when we approach a stranger, friend, colleague, or a partner about difficult subjects--those scary or uncomfortable topics that are triggering, that can make us feel threatened in an instant, and can backfire, despite our best intentions. Such conversations are unpredictable. They feel volatile, ambiguous, and challenging. This class will provide you with frameworks and skills to approach such conversations with empathy, dexterity, and curiosity. Together we will pick apart damaging, defensive, communication habits and rebuild ways to quickly understand the needs of others and enter a collaborative dialog that keeps everyone’s needs and perspectives intact. The goal is not to “win” a difficult conversation but to learn the art of shifting from acting with fear, avoidance, and defensiveness to listening with empathy, curiosity, and understanding. We engage challenging encounters with creative problem-solving.

This class was designed to address the following conundrum: Challenging conversations that we have everyday—on power-relations and family dynamics, on expressions of desire and experiences of hurt, on racism and sexism—require significant skills, listening past what people say to understand what they mean, and balancing multiple perspectives. Yet there are few places to acquire these skills. This class will provide you with skills, frameworks, and a space to try out these conversations through role plays and observations before having them in the real world.

In this class, you will learn by doing. Through an iterative learning process, you will gradually expand your capacity for deescalating conflict, listening across differences, and expressing your needs and concerns honestly while staying in conversation in a connected way, especially when there is tension. 

The class will have two parts. The first half will help you build a resilient mindset and teach you skills in empathetic listening so that you can enter into and stay in dialog. Given that encounters do not take place in a vacuum and are shaped by social, cultural, political realities, the second half will help you develop context-specific skills for negotiating consent, addressing conflicts in partnerships, and speaking up around racism, sexism, and micro-aggressions. By the end of the class, you will learn to approach an encounter as a co-created event between two or more people, and use deep listening to track the moment to moment shifts in the dynamics and move conversations towards meaningful, collaborative, dialog.

Learn With

Teaching Team