In any private practice or group practice, lasting success is based on strong interpersonal connections. Our clients make initial appointments for many different reasons (stress, pain, injury, physician referral, etc.), but there's one key factor that keeps them coming: a therapeutic relationship that works for them. Developing and maintaining such relationships requires a solid foundation of communication skills--skills that people are not generally taught, but that are vital to all personal and professional interactions. In this course, you'll learn how to effectively manage some of the most difficult communication challenges:
- giving and receiving feedback
- setting and maintaining clear boundaries
- responding assertively to boundary violations
- responding to aggression and hostility
As part of this process, you'll practice using a powerful communication tool that can help you navigate any conversation more successfully.
Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback: Feedback has developed a bad reputation. The term is widely misused and misunderstood, so that what many people call feedback is actually criticism or personal attacks. In contrast, genuine feedback can play a very useful and constructive role in our personal and professional lives. It gives us insight into how what we're doing affects other people--what they observe, think, or feel when we act in certain ways. With clients and colleagues, this can include anything from our hands-on techniques and professional advice to the way we dress, answer the phone, or schedule appointments. We-re often in a position to give feedback to clients as well. We might discuss how their ways of eating, exercising, and using their bodies in their jobs are affecting them, or how various behaviors related to their treatment (e.g., arriving late, asking personal questions, missing payments, etc.) are affecting us.
By opening the door to feedback, we can learn on an ongoing basis what is and is not working for each person. This continuing dialogue helps us retain clients and work more successfully with the other practitioners, managers, and administrators that we interact with each day. Another benefit is increased receptivity--the better we are at receiving other people's feedback, the more open they will be to hearing our observations and suggestions.
You'll leave this course with tools and strategies to help you:
- gather useful information even from poorly delivered feedback
- take critical comments less personally
- give feedback that is specific and factual, rather than vague and subjective
- deliver negative feedback without communicating anger or blame
- build empathy and ensure mutual understanding
Managing Boundaries Clearly and Assertively: In order to create a positive, safe, and healthy therapeutic environment, every practitioner needs to be able to set and maintain boundaries. By building expertise in this area, we can avoid a great deal of anxiety and frustration, provide a better experience for our clients, and gain increased satisfaction from our work. In this course, you'll deepen your understanding of three crucial sets of factors related to boundaries:
- Dual relationships: the benefits and risks
- Transference, countertransference, and power differentials: practical and ethical implications
- Boundary challenges or violations: how to respond assertively, without aggression or defensiveness
Why study effective communication? Many of the biggest challenges faced by health practitioners involve problems with communication. Each day we encounter clients with widely varying styles of communicating who are coping with frustration and disappointment. In this workshop, you'll learn valuable strategies for handling many types of conflicts that clients may bring into your office. At the same time, the skills you develop will help enhance your relationships with your colleagues, friends, family, and others in your life.
Responding to Aggression and Hostility: For many of us, the hardest thing to deal with in a conversation is hostility. We all react differently to other people's anger--some of us go quiet or try to calm the person down, while others become defensive or aggressive--but few of us manage to respond in a constructive way. Here you'll learn a proven strategy for guiding a communication away from criticism, attack, and blame toward mutual understanding and problem solving. You'll experience the strategy from both sides, getting practice in defusing someone else's hostility and learning how what other people do affects your own emotional state.
An All-Purpose Communication Tool
This course is based on SAVIŽ, the System for Analyzing Verbal Interaction--a powerful, comprehensive system for understanding and improving communication. For nearly 30 years, this method has helped individuals, groups, and organizations to reduce conflict, increase understanding and collaboration, and improve decision making. SAVI enables you to clearly identify which types of communication strain professional and personal relationships and which ones foster receptivity. In addition to the specific skills you learn in this course (related to feedback, boundaries, and hostility), you'll also come away with:
- greater awareness of your own habitual communication patterns (both productive and unproductive)
- increased sensitivity to others' communication styles
- understanding of the primary factors that cause a conversation to succeed or to fail
- skills for resolving several of the most common communication breakdowns
Teaching Format
To keep our trainings dynamic, fun, and engaging, we use a combination of short lectures, role plays, large group discussions, and extended practice sessions in pairs and small groups. You'll get plenty of hands-on experience with all the tools and strategies we teach.
Bonus: Free Follow-Up Seminar! (Date and Time TBD)
When you register for this 2˝ day training, you'll also receive a complimentary pass to a 75-minute follow-up phone seminar. The seminar will give you a chance to reinforce the skills you learned and apply them to real-life examples from your own work environment. After a brief refresher exercise, we'll answer any questions you have, provide some personalized coaching, and give practical tips on specific communication challenges. This is a great way to ensure that the lessons from the training will stay with you over time.
What to Bring: Come prepared with questions and specific concerns.
Instructor: Ben Benjamin Ph.D. and Amy Yeager
Class Dates: November 5-7, 2010
Class Times: Friday 2:00 pm - 6:30 pm; Saturday and Sunday 9:00 am - 5:30 pm
Location: Federal Way
Cost: $475 if registered by 9/24/10; $525 if registered after 9/24/10
Cost/Hour: $24.36/hr if registered by 9/24/10; $26.92/hr if registered after 9/24/10
Hours: 19.5
Note to Participants of Previous SAVI Workshops
If you have previously taken a SAVI workshop, you may opt to skip the Friday portion of the workshop and participate only in the Saturday and Sunday events. Friday is used to lay down the foundation of the SAVI communication skills that will be used in the remaining workshop. The cost of the Saturday and Sunday portions of the workshop is $400. Please call 206.853.6875 to register instead of registering online.
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