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Introduction

What to expect

This course comes to you from a dedicated team of trainers and facilitators who have your best interests at heart: to learn and experience the power of better connections at work and home through Better Conversations. We want to make sure the sessions you experience with us are of a high calibre.

Here’s some things to expect:

  • Clear and easy to understand content.
  • No slides! We will be using flip charts to capture and support your learning we have learnt that this creates better engagement and allows us to adjust the sessions to your needs. This Course Handbook is designed to help you revise the content and capture your learnings.
  • A sequence of models and exercises that will build on one another, so that by the end, you’ll have new skills and awareness of how to have Better Conversations.
  • Exercises that allow you to learn and practice both as a whole group and in smaller groups (in breakout rooms).
  • Time for reflection on your learning at the end of each session.
  • Fieldwork based on real experiences between sessions to explore and practice the skills.
  • We may record for our course development purposes; we will always check the group give consent to do this. Discussion in breakout rooms remain private and are not recorded.

What’s expected of you

This course has been developed to support experiential learning. We keep the theory light–touch and focus on practising skills and reflecting on your experiences. We invite you to:

  • Participate and share some of your own experiences related to the course content; we trust that you will share only what you are comfortable sharing.
  • Be seen and heard during each module, like you would in a room-based course.
  • Respect each other’s experiences and the need for confidential and safe discussions.
  • Keep what you share relevant and of an appropriate amount of information for the exercises we will be using to train the skills.
  • Ask questions if you don’t understand.
  • Let us know if you have any time constraints or other needs that might affect your ability to participate and learn

Zoom orientation

  • If you are unable to download the Zoom app to your computer, you can use Zoom through a web browser.
  • Check your audio and video setup 10–15 minutes before the call. Zoom lets you join a test meeting to check this before you need to join a meeting. We advise you use headphones and find a quiet place to join the call from.
  • Familiarise yourself with the Zoom controls as they appear on your device.
  • Mute yourself when not speaking. We might mute you when we’re training the models or listening to another participant if we think that there may be some background noise through your audio.
  • Pin the Zoom window for the facilitator if it is helpful.
  • Try the Gallery and Speaker views – see what view you like the best.
  • Try the Chat function – we will sometimes use this to collect information from everyone. You can also use it ask questions or share insights.
  • Turn on Captions to allow you to see live captions and a live transcript of the session

More information can be found on the Zoom support pages here

Safe practice and confidentiality

We've found that sometimes people can be very enthusiastic in the use of the tools we cover. At this introductory stage, we'd like to gently caution you about how you communicate these tools to others. Better Conversations can happen just with the shift in noticing, so start there. We'll give you straightforward but powerful concepts and models which will help you have Better Conversations. As you develop new skills using the models and approaches, it is important not to impose your new skills, questions and listening skills on your conversational partners in a way that is too far from what they are used to. We’ll teach you ways to practice these skills with a light touch. We ask that you keep what you see and hear in this within the group you are working with. People may share some personal stories and information and we’d like to maintain a safe and trusting environment in which they can engage with the material and each other.

Intended learning outcomes

We have designed this course to:

  • Increase your awareness of your own state and how affects your conversations
  • Support you to notice and get curious about your conversational partner’s state
  • Develop your listening and questioning skills
  • Build on your existing conversational approaches and experiences
  • Determine your own outcomes for Better Conversations and how to achieve them

We’d be delighted to talk to you after the course is completed to understand how and if these have been met.

We’d be delighted to talk to you after the course is completed to understand how and if these have been met.

  1. State – how do your thoughts and feelings affect your conversations?

  2. Assumptions – what are you making up when you are in a conversation?

  3. Context – how do you make sense of it all?

  4. Listening with Curiosity – how can you influence a conversation?

  5. Intentional Conversations – how can you have a purposeful conversation?

Each session follows a similar format:

  • Welcome
  • Time for questions
  • Check in
  • Connecting to previous learning and experience
  • Introducing the topic and model
  • Group exploration and practice in the whole group and in pairs/threes
  • Reflections on the learning in the session
  • Suggested fieldwork and close

We invite you to stay for a few minutes after the session closes to share any further insights or ask us questions (the Afterparty).

Support between sessions

Please use contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions or need support

Your learning outcomes

We invite you to consider your learning outcome(s) in Module 1 by reflecting on the following question:

What kind of conversations would you like to be better after this course?