Map Out Your Personal Growth

With Sharon Strand Ellison

Practice Objective: To go through a series of exercises designed to help you systemically evaluate your defensive and non-defensive weaknessness and strengths, uncovering hidden patterns that can create a map for your personal and professional growth in the new year.

Place: Oakland, CA (Workshop Site TBA)                                            
Dates: The Weekend of  January 14, 15, & 16, 2011
Times: Friday night, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m. — Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. — Sunday 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Self-Evaluation Learning Forumula (SELF) — Workshop Overview

When While personality inventories can be very helpful in giving people understanding of each other's diverse ways of functioning, the evaluation process often involves answering questions that put the them in one category or another, defining what is often referred to a the person’s “style” of interaction. Too often people take the "style label" to heart and see the characteristics that showed up strongest in the test as their inherent nature, such as when one person says, “I’m analytical” and the other says, “I’m emotional." The label can becomes a reason to justify one's behavior and actually block personal and/or professional growth. The self-measurement forms can also be misleading. The analytical person may simply pick choices on the test by preference for analysis over emotional responsiveness, but, in reality, have weaker analytical skills than the person who made difference choices based on their own value system.

The SELF program uses a system of comparing and contrasting the strength of various defensive and non-defensive attitudes and behaviors to gain clarity about how they interact to create patterns in our lives — many of which may have remained invisible. For example, in one moment we may label someone a “demanding" person.” In another, we may label that same man or woman as a very “compassionate person.” Is only one of the labels true? If both are true, how do being compassionate and demanding interact in the person’s relationship patterns? While each of us  has what we might call our own unique spirit, these patterns are "systemic" and often such an integral part of our interaction with others that those around us, and even ourselves, see it all together as our "personality," a significant part of our identity. Seeing our system of attitudes and behaviors as "personality" often leads us to hold the illusion that it is unchangeable — or if we did change, we'd "lose" our personality, our sense of self.

Using this inventory, participants get information that is more like a formula that can outline very personalized pathways for learning to transform the system of attitudes and behaviors that dictate our responses to others, ultimately determining much of our experience in life. It can be a map for personal growth that enhances our capacity for intimacy in personal relationships and competence and leadership professionally.

Participants will go through a series of at least 8 self-evaluation exercises, discuss (as much as they wish) the patterns that emerge, and determine goals about key systemic patterns to work on in the New Year. You will have a picture with many colors — in a sense — a moving picture. All the information is about characteristics and patterns that can be changed — eliminated or strengthened — in ways that build your character and integrity. Using it you will have a blueprint and a guide for empowering self-change.

A Note from Sharon: All of my work is based on the systemic understanding of patterns. Taking the War Out of Our Words outlines, first, the systemic way we have used the "rules of war" as the foundation for our verbal interactions. Second, it outlines how to make systemic changes that can enable us to have greater power without resorting to defensiveness, using a new paradigm for communication, Powerful Non-Defensive Communication. I also do a workshop, based on a book I have not yet published, called Changing Blueprints — Changing Reality, which is about how we systemically create blueprints that determine how we experience life — our own reality. That work is actually the foundation for the communication process I've developed. The Self-Evaluation Learning Forumula comes out of both my work with blueprints for reality and with the material in my communication book. I use the SELF every year and continue to gain surprising insights that help me change my own life and how I relate to others.

—With Care, Sharon

Registration:

1. Sign Up: Email: info@pndc.com    Subject Line, Include: SELF
2. Cost: $385.00  (Partial Scholarships Available)
3. Deposit: $100    (You may also pay the full amount if you like)
4. Payment Options: Call with Credit Card Information for Deposit OR Send Check

To Pay by Credit Card, Call Secure Line: 510-655-8086
Leave: (1) Name (2) Phone Number (3) Workshop Title (4) Credit Card Number (4) Ex. Date & (5) 3 Letter Code on Back

Send Check to: Sharon Ellison or PNDC Institute, 4100-10 Redwood Road, No.316, Oakland, CA 94619

You are welcome to contact Sharon directly for more information.

Sharon Ellison:   Phone: 510-655-8086 or 800-714-7334   Email: sharon@pndc.com

The Institute for Powerful Non-Defensive Communication
Phone: 800-714-7334 or 510-655-8086 • Email: info@pndc.com
Powerful Non-Defensive Communication is a trademarked name. © 1994-2009 Sharon Strand Ellison