

Workshop Outlines
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​​Workshops beginning the week of 24 Feb
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Human relationships (Leadership and Management)
Structure of Experience (Personal Development)
Trauma & Self-regulation (Personal Development)
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Workshops beginning the week of 10 March
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Motivation and Burnout (Leadership and Management)
Rejuvenating Creativity (Personal Development)
​Modeling Other Minds (Coaching Training)​​
Workshops beginning the week of 24 February 2025
Subscribe to register by February 17
Human Relationships (Leadership and Management)
Sundays @ 2:00 - 3:30pm EST : Feb 23 – Apr 13 (8 weeks)
Session 1: Your Relationship Ecology
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Immersiveness and encompassing-ness of relationships
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Impact of relationships on mental health and productivity
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Inventory of key relationships and first steps towards modeling their impact
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Wishes and goals for improving relationships
Session 2: Relationship Rules
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What rules, expectations, or “shoulds” do you hold about relationships?
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Where do these come from and how are they working for you?
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Establishing and re-negotiating rules
Session 3: Trust, Authenticity, and Rapport
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When are and aren’t you trustworthy?
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What makes social lies compelling, and are they worth it?
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Establishing rapport and overcoming barriers to rapport
Session 4: Assessing Capability, Compatibility, and Goal-Alignment
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Trustworthiness of different social signals
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Congruence between ideals and implementations in collaborative environments
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Interpreting “sync” on tasks, goals, outcomes
Session 5: Interpersonal Conflict
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Fights as opportunities
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Personality clashes
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Mismatches in cognitive style
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Cultural blindspots and misrecognitions
Session 6: Relationship Overhang
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The force of inertia in relationships
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Evaluating relational habits or ways of being that no longer match your current goals or reality
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Transitioning out of relationships without burning bridges
Session 7: Wildly Frustrating, Unaccountable, or “Impossible” People
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What is and isn’t in our hypothesis space regarding exceptionally challenging people
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Ways social taboos can interfere with learning (and ways they still matter)
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“Gaps” in the social fabric and their impact
Session 8: Relationship Pioneering
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The need for leadership and the costs of leaderlessness
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Taking initiative to set relationships on beneficial/desirable foundations
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Blowback and benefits to being a first mover
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Structure of Experience (Personal Development)
Tuesdays @ 1:30 - 3:00pm EST : Feb 25 – Mar 18 (4 weeks)
Session 1: Introduction to Phenomenology
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Methods of observing the mind
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Value of self-inquiry
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Value of truths about the experience
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Value of shared reference experiences in human coordination
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Exercises in self-observation
Session 2: Developing an Ontology of Experience
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Exploring what types of things or objects occur in experience
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How general are our categories of experience?
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What happens when we try to extend these categories to other people’s experiences?
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Possibilities for convergence on shared experience based on experiential universals
Session 3: Navigating Experience — Zooming Out and Zooming In
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How do we hold and reflect on our whole experience?
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Zooming out and connecting to the whole as a problem-solving strategy
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Contrast with possibilities for zooming in
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Zooming in as a problem-solving strategy
Session 4: Phenomenological Frontiers
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How we experience ourselves is conditioned on how we’ve already experienced ourselves
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What does it mean to improve one’s understanding of one’s experience or experience in general?
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Possibilities for connecting to larger shared social and cultural experiences, “collective phenomenology”
Trauma and Self-Regulation (Personal Development)
Thursdays @ 6:00 - 7:30pm EST : Feb 27 – Mar 20 (4 weeks)
Session 1: A Basic Model of Trauma
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Features of the basic model
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Trauma and overwhelm
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Implications of trauma in everyday life
Session 2: Regulatory Resources
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Trauma in the nervous system: polyvagal theory
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Distinguishing states of nervous system activation
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Identifying resources for nervous system regulation
Session 3: Trauma, Safety, and Healing
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Possibilities for working with trauma
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Pendulation technique for connecting to trauma
Session 4: Trauma, Survivorship, and Social Integration
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Relationship between the nervous system and the “story” of trauma
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Social betrayal and social reintegration
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Finding an audience for the story of trauma
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Being that audience
Workshops beginning the week of 10 March 2025
Subscribe to register by March 2
Motivation and Burnout (Leadership and Management)
Wednesdays @ 6:00 - 7:30pm EST : Mar 12 – Apr 16 (6 weeks)
Session 1: Motivation in the Workplace
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Alignment of actions, outcomes, and human desires
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What actions are available
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What do the actions get
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What do the people want
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The role of creativity and strategy in maintaining morale, productivity, and progress
Session 2: Individual Character and Dispositions
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Incentives and rewards
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Where are people capably maintaining their own motivation, where are they relating on external support
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Exploring and establishing possibilities for that external motivational support
Session 3: Interpersonal Factors
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Inspiring and demoralizing relationships in the workplace
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Matches and mismatches of personality and role
Session 4: Cultural Forces
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Evaluating enculturation processes at play in the workplace
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Culture shear, culture shock, and possibilities for cultural harmony
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Establishing a cultural role of creativity
Session 5: Structural Pressures
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What broader social and cultural forces is the workplace exposed to through its work?
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How are (and aren’t) these internalized and dealt with within the work environment?
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Possibilities for rebalancing structural pressures
Session 6: Creativity and Institutional Design
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Responding to feedback about motivation and burnout
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Morale considerations and conflicts across different layers of the org chart
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Rejuvenating Creativity (Personal Development)
Saturdays @ 3:00- 4:30pm EST : Mar 15 – Apr 19 (6 weeks)
Session 1: Orienting Towards Creativity
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The idea of “having” creativity
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Possible paradoxes around intending to be more creative
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Signs and evidence that creativity is “happening”
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Possible benefits of not being creative (?!)
Session 2: Creativity as a Process
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Mutually schematizing structure of representation
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Creativity as skillfully moving between moments of mutually schematizing unfoldings
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What makes for skillfulness?
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What interrupts the process?
Session 3: Elemental Phenomenologies and Creativity
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Creating phenomenological contrasts to explore dimensions of the creative process
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e.g. Dry-sparse versus flowing-outpouring
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e.g. Contraction-closedness versus ignition-towardness
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Finding core or resonant representations of your creative process
Session 4: Creative Work Jam
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Attempting to use what we’ve explored so far, let’s actually do some creative work!
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Then debrief, reflect, diagnose, digest…
Session 5: Addressing “Blocked” Creativity
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Establishing outposts in a “creative desert”
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Finding deep wellsprings of creativity
Session 6: Healing Your Relationship With Creativity
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Accepting responsibility for creative
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Consider forgiving whatever has thwarted your creativity
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What your creativity brings to the world
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Any known or secret hopes?
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Modeling Other Minds (Coaching Development)
Thursdays @ 12:00 - 1:30pm EST : Mar 13 – Apr 19 (6 weeks)
Session 1: Inside Views and Outside Views
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Your biggest confusions about other people
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Subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity
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Options for understanding others in terms of inside views and outside views, strengths and limitations of each
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The feeling of being understood
Session 2: Relating vs Reacting to Difference
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Navigating overwhelm around differences
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Noticing associations and implicit assumptions about people “like me/us” vs “not like me/us”
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Experiences of conformity and relationship to the pressure to conform
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Holding boundaries and having own permission to be different
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Holding space for others to be different
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Session 3: Sources of Difference
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The practice of noticing difference
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Different experiences: early life, economic and cultural background
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Different developmental trajectories: major ruptures and disruptions, major adaptations
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Different goals, plans, and values
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Different choices and ethical positions
Session 4: Finding Similarity Within Difference
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Emotional, mood, and attitude inventories as sources of granularity for finding shared ground
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Possibilities for shared perspectives
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Building rapport from simple shared touchstones
Session 5: Developing Resonant Analogies
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Analogies as systems of correspondence
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Finding metaphors that give both parties meaningful forms of self-representation
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Developing a metaphor together
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Re-grounding shared metaphor in individual experience
Session 6: Humility, Hypothesis-Testing, and Backtracking
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Permission to be non-catastrophically wrong about the other
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Navigating feelings of (perhaps mutual) misunderstanding
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Re-grounding in kindness and care towards the other