Based on the Powerful Non-Defensive Communication process I outline in my book, Taking the War Out of Our Words, I have, over the years, developed a set of workshops and training programs that I consider to be core to the principles and practices inherent in my work. You'll find a summary of each one below, with a link to a more compete description. These programs are offered for the public and for community and professional organizations. Sharon Strand Ellison

PNDC Workshops & Training Programs

PNDC Introductory Workshop

Level II - Questions Workshop

Level II - Statements Workshop

Level II - Predictions Workshop

Level II - Combined Workshop

Level II - Turning Conflict into Conversation

Advanced - PNDC Trainers' Training Program

Other Complementary Programs Developed by Sharon Strand Ellison

Changing Blueprints, Changing Reality — Foundational Theory for PNDC

SELF - Self-Evaluation Learning Formula — Personality Test Based on PNDC

See Also — The Drop-Down Menu For: Training Topics

In addition, you can go to Workshops and Training in the menu to see more about the work Sharon and other PNDC trainers do with Individuals, Couples, and Parents/Families, as well as Community Organizations and Professionals Organizations in more than a dozen fields.

Powerful Non-Defensive Communication — Introductory Workshop

The basic Powerful Non-Defensive Communication workshop provides information on how our traditional communication model has been based on the "rules of war" and thus causes people to get defensive easily whenever they want to protect themselves. This traditional method of communication — which crosses many lines of race, class, and culture — causes much needless pain with the people we love, creates breakdowns in our effectiveness at work, and inhibits us from solving the local and global community problems we face.

In the workshop we will focus on how to shift from a communication model that is built on defensiveness and power struggle to a new paradigm for communication that has a completely non-defensive base. It allows us to use a uniquely powerful blend of vulnerability and honesty in our interactions.

In the workshop, we'll first look at the physiology of defensiveness and the impact it has on us, as well as the six typical defensive modes people use daily. We will discuss how common ways of communicating consistently create and accelerate conflict. This can cause us to become controlling and manipulative, even when we have good intentions. Then we will discuss the principles of non-defensive communication and practice eight formats for listening and speaking with far greater power, even when others do not "cooperate." This new way of listening and speaking can not only increase our self-esteem, confidence, and clarity, it is also often disarming and prompts others to be increasingly respectful and reciprocal.

Length of Training: The standard workshop is two days. It can also be condensed. To get more information about shorter versions, see: Content by Length of Presentation

For more information re: Workshop Content, See: What is PNDC? and Sample Agendas

Flyer for Public Introductory PNDC Workshop: This flyer can be sent to friends or co-workers. It can also be used by organizations when sponsoring a public workshop as part of their community service contribution. It is not geared to training for professionals.

Powerful Non-Defensive Communication — Level 2 Questions

Questions Workshop: Learn specific formats for asking questions that make it easier to quickly think of a question as an alternative to immediate defensive responses. These formats for questions offer a means to deepening your understanding of the disarming power of the non-defensive process and using quick, effectve responses as a way to go directly to the heart of any issue. Instead of struggling to find a single question to ask in response to what someone says to you, imagine being able to draw from a wealth of possible questions in any situation! You can use these questions to stimulate others to respond with openness and sincerity as well as simultaneously holding others more accountable for their own reactions.

During this workshop, we'll take each one of more than a dozen formats for asking questions about both the content and the process in any discussion. Then participants will practice each form, using their own examples. We'll discuss various examples so people can refine their skills. People will leave with many more options for asking good questions as well as some ideas for handling specific situations in their own lives at home or work.

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory Workshop

Length of Training: The standard workshop is two days. It can offered as a one-day training, but cannot be further condensed and still accomplish the goal of presenting and practicing all the formats.

Powerful Non-Defensive Communication — Level 2 Statements

Being able to state opinions clearly and strongly is a key factor in our success in any conversation, and absolutely crucial when it involves problem solving and/or conflict. Traditionally, statements are made with the intention to prove a point or convince others to agree, which in turn causes polarization, resistance and defensiveness. In a non-defensive model for communication, we focus on honestly stating our own position, as well as giving feedback, without trying to get the other person to change anything — attitudes, beliefs, opinions, or behavior. Ironically, when we don't try to get others to change or even to listen, we can have moe influence rather than less.

In this workshop we’ll work with the concepts underlying each of four formats for making statements. The first three involve how to give feedback that is honest yet respectful; the fourth one is for expressing our own reasoning, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. We’ll examine: (a) a method for using active listening that avoids common pitfalls in current communication methods, (b) how to name contradictions and other comments that “don’t’ make sense” in what a person says (c) how to frame and name assumptions and conclusions about contradictions, and (d) how to avoid a common pitfall when using "I messages" and state one’s own position with integrity, even passion. These four steps put information we want to give others in a "different package," one carries great power, but without judgment or any need to control how the other person responds. In the process healthier, more vibrant relationships can be forged.

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory Workshop

Length of Training: The standard workshop is two days. It can offered as a one-day training, but cannot be further condensed and still accomplish the goal of presenting and practicing all the formats for statements.

Powerful Non-Defensive Communication — Level 2 Predictions

Predictions Workshop: Most of us have a lot of “authority” issues, ranging from how we use our own personal authority to how we respond to the authority wielded by others. In this workshop, we’ll investigate our own attitudes about authority and learn highly effective methods of limit-setting, which can give us strength in any relationship. We'll look at the War Model Authority Continuum and examine four positions that represent how people typically use authority in ways that are destructive in that they create power struggle and prompt resistence to expectations.

Parent-Child: If you are a parent, this workshop is vital. Parents often love their children so much they get confused about how to set clear limits. As a parent you may lean toward being permissive or authoritarian, or fluctuate back and forth. You and your partner/spouse may be at opposite ends of the continuum. This workshop can help you get balance and clarity, even if you have a partner who doesn’t participate. With good limits, children and teens can become highly competent and respectful.

Couples: Because couples often do not set effective limits with each other, they put up with unpleasant habits and behavior for years. They argue and “nag” each other, contaminating love with resentment. As a result, many relationships become both co-dependent and polarized. This workshop can help you to set clear boundaries that enhance both independence and intimacy in the relationship.

Professional: In professional relationships, people also have a great deal of difficulty knowing how to set clear boundaries and are often afraid of “repercussions” if they do so. This impacts both peer relationships and team performance in getting projects done. Managers also have difficulty creating effective expectations and consequences. Learning effective limit-setting can enhance individual satisfaction, group performance and management skills.  

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory Workshop

Length of Training: The standard workshop is two days. It can offered as a one-day training, but cannot be further condensed and still accomplish the goal of presenting and practicing the formats for predictions.

Powerful Non-Defensive Communication — Combined Level 2

In the basic workshop, you'll have learned about making a transition from a War Model for communication to a non-defensive model. In the PNDC Combined Level II workshop, you can take your understanding to a deeper level and hone your skills using Questions, Statements, and Predictions. You can move from "How do I figure out what question to ask?" to "Let's see, which question should I ask first? Which one will take me most quickly to the heart of this issue?" You can get so familiar with the steps in the non-defensive statement that it becomes more automatic and old habits of withdrawal or argument begin to disappear. You can also eliminate inhibitions about setting effective boundaries at home and at work.

This workshop can be done with two different formats. First, it can be done as an experiential workshop, where we simply practice all three steps, using examples from participants and then debriefing them. As we go along, we work with questions about the concepts behind the practice as they come up. For example, people often look more deeply into how non-defensive communication changes how we use power in our interactions with each other, as a natural part of the practice.

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory Workshop

Length of Training: The standard workshop is two days. It can offered as a one-day training, and could be done as a follow-up half-day practice session, which would be valuable but not achieve the same depth of integration.

Turning Conflict into Conversation

Most people have had the experience of not speaking up about an issue for fear of making an existing conflict worse, or even starting a conflict. Out problem-solving skills have been stunted by using defensiveness as our primary protective mechanism, because our ability to resolve conflict disappears when we're defensive. It's a great catch-22. As people learn non-defenesive communication skills, they may still find it hard to imagine dealing with conflicts in a productive conversational way —intense perhaps, but not the kind of overwhelming, destructive process that conflict so often becomes.

In this workshop, participants will have an opportunity to identify unresolved issues they have with various people and pick one to work on. The conflicts selected by each person may vary significantly, with some being relatively small and others more serious. Next, using the workbook to provide a structure, each person will have an opportunity to go through a step-by-step process for identifying key aspects of the history and content of the issue and then outline an approach to resolving the conflict using non-defensive skill sets learned in the PNDC Introductory Workshop.

Participants will have opportunities to work alone, in pairs, and in their larger group, if desired. Individual feedback and group discussion will be used to reinforce the skills learned. People will go home with not only a better understanding of how to apply non-defensive questions, statements, and predictions to a specific conflict, but also how to approach conflict with more confidence that it can be an opportunity for meaningful conversation.

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory Workshop

Length of Training: This workshop is offered only as a two-day workshop and is limited to 16 participants.

PNDC Trainers' Training Programs

We offer Trainers' Training Programs for people who would like to learn to teach Powerful Non-Defensive Communication. Often, these potential trainers reveal a wide range of interests in teaching the process:

—Independent consutants and members of consulting firms.

—Individuals who would like to do in-house training for their own organization.

—People who would like to offer training programs in the context of their work for members of their profession and/or clients served. For example, a therapist might wish to offer programs for other therapists or for families. Family law attorneys or mediators might wish to offer programs for professionals who do alternative dispute resolution.

—Teachers might wish to teach the skills.

—People who wish to teach the skills in college or university settings.

—People who want to teach the skills so they can more easily share those skills in "small bites" in their ongoing work with children or clients.

—People who like to learn by learning, who wish to teach the material as a way to more deeply internalize the skills.

The process will include participants learning effective teaching methods, such as how to integrate the use of story, presentation of concepts, role-playing, mat work, feedback to hone skills, small-group practice and larger-group discussion (including how to respond to any group members who disrupt the process and/or otherwise undermine group cohesiveness). Participants will also practice teaching all of the skills sets.

Prerequisite: PNDC Introductory and Level II Workshops

Changing Blueprints — Changing Reality

with Sharon Strand Ellison

The book, Taking the War Our of Our Words, was only part of my original manuscript. The first part of that manuscript, which I intend to publish in the relatively near future, contained the material I teach in this workshop. Because the book has not been published yet and I have not offered any trainers' training programs for this material, I am the only person in the PNDC Consortuim of Trainers who teaches this workshop.

In this workshop, I show how we create the "reality" of our human relationships in essentially the same way we create the "reality" of a loaf of bread. I believe that we create these blueprints first, and foremost, for our own personal reality, and then, beyond that, we create group blueprints—for couples, families, work teams, organizations, and any group that has an "identity" as a sub-culture. Much of what we now call the "culture" of an organization is based on that organization's system of "blueprints" for how it functions. We also create blueprints for larger groups, for religions, races, and nations, as well as for humanity at a global level. In fact, the entire War Model for communication that I outline in my book is actually a "global blueprint" that I believe has been adopted by most of humanity, with devestating consequences. Thus, while this workshop is not focused on using non-defensive skills, it is a foundational piece of that work.

During the workshop, I demonstrate how we create reality in our human relationships by creating a kind of "blueprint" or map of reality for each experience we have in life — love, success, exercise, respect, freedom, even rain. Using a step-by-step process, I show how we develop these blueprints at a very early age. I demonstrate exactly how they they can give form to long-term, self-defeating patterns in our lives that have no-win choices built into them.

Each person then has an opportunity to work on a significant childhood blueprint that influences her/his life. This workshop can help you understand yourself at a core level, so you can be much more proactive and successful in changing your life in meaningful ways. The blueprint becomes a map for how you can change core elements in what you believe, feel, think, and do, and make dramatic alterations in how you experience life.

In addition, you will learn how to listen to others at a whole new level, by identifying the structure of the person's map of reality, by listening for the "blueprint" in the words used in the "story-line" of what the person is saying. You can achieve greater understanding across lines of difference, such as personality, gender, race, and age. Often when I ask questions, people who are new to the non-defensive process ask me, "How did you come up with that question?" After taking a Blueprints workshop, they say, "Now I know how you think of those questions." Understanding our own blueprints gives us a whole new world of options for living empowered, compassionate ives.

A Variation: I offer this workshop primarily to the public, as many people in organizations would prefer not to participate with co-workers in a workshop that deals so much with their own lives. There are, however, people who work closely together who do choose to participate as a group. Therefore, I offer an alternative, which is to present the process for determining blueprints using examples I select. Then I teach people how to listen to others in a way that opens up greater understanding of what others mean by what they are saying in any given conversation.

Prerequisite: None

Length of Training: This workshop is offered only as a two-day workshop and is limited to 12 participants.

SELF — The Self-Evaluation Learning Formula™

created by Sharon Strand Ellison

In many self-measurement systems, people answer questions that force choices that ultimately put them in one category or another, defining what is often referred to as the person’s “style” of interaction. While the goals are to help people understand their own basic patterns and those of others better—too often people take the "style label" to heart and see the charactistics that showed up strongest in the test as their inherent nature. A classic example would be 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 rather than working to achieve greater balance.

The self-measurement forms can also be misleading, because the person who is identified as analytical may not have stronger analytical skills than the person who is identified as emotional. In fact, the person identified as emotional may have stronger analytical skills. The analytical person may simply pick choices on the test by preference for analysis over emotional responsiveness. Likewise the emotional person may simply choose emotional responses over analytical ones in various circumstances presented in the test. Thus, people can function at very high levels of competency in areas that don't show up as their "style."

I have created SELF — a Self-Evaluation Learning Formula that gives each person a picture of the system of interactions between their various defensive and non-defensive attitudes and behaviors. SELF measures the strengths and weakness of many characteristics so that key patterns emerge. It works well with the Changing Blueprints, Changing Reality material because, essentially, it provides information that makes those blueprints clearer. 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 this person’s relationship patterns?

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.

Prerequisite: None

Applications: The Self-Evaluation Learning Formula™ is offered as a public workshop for individuals and couples. It is also possible for families to do the evaluation process together. It is available to professional and community organizations for the purpose of having groups use the system to look at their strengths and weaknesses as a team or collective. Offering much of the value of other popular systems of evaluation, SELF gives greater opportunity for taking individual and group functioning to a higher level.

Length of Training: As a public workshop, SELF is offered only as a two-day workshop, where participants will work with the measurements and then look at how they want to use the information to make changes in their own lives. As a measurement tool for organizations, the amount of time committed to using the tool, and the depth to which is is used, will vary greatly according to agreement.

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