Holding Space: Navigating Conflict with a Generous Approach
Holding Space is a session about how we can have productive conflict, respectful hard conversations, and create space for profound political disagreements within our communities and relationships. It offers strategies and time-tested ideas for leaders to navigate some of the most challenging interpersonal moments. We focus on answering the following questions:
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What do you say when you fervently disagree with someone and yet need to stay in a relationship with them due to your role, job, or shared community?
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How do you create opportunities for exploration when a space is saturated with personal and political divisiveness?
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How do we maintain each other’s humanity in the moments we find hardest to do so?
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Holding Space provides practical, immediately actionable tools for navigating heated interactions. By first understanding the mindsets that help or hinder us in tough moments, we can then examine how to show up with integrity using a three-step framework for generous conflict.
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Key Impacts
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★ Build awareness of pervasive cultural mindsets that keep us trapped in us vs. them and divisive thinking
★ Better understand our needs and how they shape our ability to show up for others
★ Introduce our three-step CRD method for navigating conflict
The Secret to Participation is Facilitation
When we gather people together, whether it’s a meeting with our colleagues, leading a community gathering, or in a classroom or working with parents, we want to go into those moments confident even when we’re not sure exactly what will happen or what people are going to say. How do we create participatory spaces where everyone is free to share their thoughts, ideas, questions and disagreements without them feeling chaotic or unmanageable. How do we help some people find their voice in group settings and others to find ways to take a step back and make room for others.
This training focuses on how to create participatory engaged environments where regardless of what comes up, you feel confident that you can remain steering the session in a productive direction.
This training utilizes Facilitator Cards, a deck of facilitation tactics and approaches, to help participants ground in-the-moment strategies that they can use in challenging moments. By applying the Facilitator Cards techniques to real-life scenarios participants walk away with practical and tangible ways to approach nebulous and emergent challenges in their work.
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Key Impacts
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★ Understand the essential leverage points of facilitation and how to use them to change the energy of the room
★ Awareness of the three step process that facilitators can use to make a difference in challenging moments ACT - Acknowledge, Contain, Timebox
★ Practice making intentional decisions as a facilitator, working through real life-scenarios and experiencing different strategies for approaching challenging moments