The Art of Personal Communication

With Robert Dilts, Deborah Dilts, Tim Hallbom, and Kris Hallbom

When you communicate in a highly effective way in your close relationships, you will have a much more happy and productive life. Less effective communications can lead to stagnation, struggle, disappointment and loneliness.

This experiential program will give you the opportunity to make the ordinary extraordinary, and deepen the special bond you have with your spouse or significant other. Whether you are in a great relationship, a challenging relationship, or in no relationship at all, you will find great value in this exciting two-day program. Come join us for a fast paced, fun experience where you are certain to gain new skills that will serve you in any important relationship.

The purpose of this program is to present a number of tools and strategies that will support and enrich your connections with those you care about.

You Will Learn How To

• Talk so your partner will listen, and listen so your partner will feel more free to talk.
• Hear the deeper and often hidden message in your partner's communications... and learn how to respond to that message in a meaningful way that honors your partner.
• Resolve difficult relationship issues quickly and permanently. (All couples seem to have "a deeper issue" that lurks under the surface.) During this time, you'll learn a powerful process for dealing with those deeper issues, along with the day–to–day issues that come up.
• Increase your ability to give important feedback that your partner will hear, while improving your own ability to listen.
• Learn new ways of opening the lines of communication and understanding that will reduce conflict.
• Identify what you want in a relationship, and then learn how to "create a contract" to insure that you get it.
• Learn an easy three–step process that turns the concerns that you have with your partner into creative problem solving opportunities.
• Establish practices for remaining grounded and present in the face of vulnerability and difficult feelings.
• Develop the ability to accept and hold faults, within yourself and others, without judging.
• Explore how to bring resources into the relationship that make the relationship stronger and more generative.
• Deepen and align your level of connection with yourself and others.
• Learn how to recognize and create a space for growth and potential in others, without expectation.
• Increase the capacity for “second position”: i.e., “crossing the bridge” into the world of the other.
• Expand awareness of “fourth position” and the “field” of the relationship.

Central to this seminar is the view that your relationships are a “field” or “third entity” generated between those involved, similar to the way that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce the third entity of water. The relationship becomes a container that holds the thoughts, emotions and experiences of those involved.

The way we relate to others, especially those with whom we engage intimately, is a mirror for how we relate to ourselves. This self–to–self relationship is frequently limited by those feelings that we don't know how to meet, accept, hold and love in ourselves. Learning to relate to those difficult feelings in a new way is a profound opportunity for growth.

Intimacy also produces vulnerability because we open ourselves to another person at such deep levels. Vulnerability allows us to be touched, met and seen more fully because we have dropped our defenses. It is that same vulnerability that makes us more open to be hurt or wounded. With the appropriate resources, we can learn through intimate relationship to be vulnerable and at the same time to feel safe within the container of the relationship.

Note: Whether you are in a great relationship, a challenging relationship, or in no relationship at all, you will find great value in this exciting three-day program. The purpose of this program is to present a number of tools and strategies that will support you in any important relationship.