How to Have Difficult Conversations
Vaccine Edition
Pre-recorded Workshop with Dr. Yvette Erasmus
How do you stay connected across ideological divides?
How do you have meaningful, constructive conversations when there is intense disagreement?
How can you change hearts and minds on the issues you care about most?
In this “How to Have Difficult Conversations” workshop series, we’ll be talking all about how to have the vaccine conversation – nonviolently.
Learn concrete skills and get strategies for effective listening, managing emotions, and understanding someone else’s perspective, as well as finding common ground, avoiding self-righteousness, and telling your own story.
You’ll also get conversation prompts, practical exercises, case examples, and self-reflections to help you to visualize and practice starting, sustaining, and ending challenging conversations. The principles we explore can be applied to all kinds of hot-button issues.
Even though we live in polarized, divisive times, we have the power to offer a relational, curious, engaged spirit in our conversations with others.
- We can focus on both the inner transformation, healing, and growing-up work that we are each able to do individually.
- We can skill-up our capacity to engage in the critically important dialogue and cultural change work needed for a healthy, sustainable, peaceful, compassionate global community.
- We can learn new moves, new skills, and new scripts for having relationally and emotionally intelligent conversations that bridge the divides.
Our intention for this workshop: To ground ourselves in a new process for having these conversations with compassion, clarity, confidence, and choicefulness.
What the workshop covers:
- How to Prepare for a Successful Dialogue: Emotional Readiness and Self-Trust
- The 5 Main Barriers to “getting through” to one another, combined with practical interventions and new moves to overcome each of them
- Locating the Conversation – what are we “really” talking about?
- The Magic Question you can ask to redirect any disagreement
What the workshop does NOT cover:
- We don’t address the pros or cons of various ideological positions, the “facts and figures” or “research” or “data.”
- We aren’t arguing positions about vaccines.
- We aren’t debating or discussing “(mis)information.” (But you do get some tips and scripts to help you address falsehoods and misinformation that you encounter.)
Join us as we explore how to communicate compassionately with the people we disagree with on the vaccine issue.
The live workshop was presented in August 2021. All who register now will receive access to the video replay, an audio file, and a transcript of the live workshop.
In case we’ve never met…
I’m a psychologist, teacher, and consultant who specializes in transformative education for human healing and growth, helping people embrace differences while staying grounded in their fundamental unity. My approach synthesizes mind-body medicine, somatic experiencing, diversity and inclusiveness, nonviolent communication, and integral-relational-cultural psychology, bringing what has been divided and fragmented into wholeness and harmony. Learn more about me here.
Money & Accessibility
Is this course more than you can afford? A scholarship may be available for you. Please email me, and I will do my best to make this workshop as accessible for you as possible.
Are you experiencing financial abundance and wanting to sponsor someone else? Please let me know, and I will gladly pass on your additional contribution to someone who needs it.