'The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.' Ralph G. Nichols
Do you want to hear what is working in your business and what is negatively impacting it?
How can your business do better in these challenging times?
Would you like open communication, focused solutions and connected teams? Would you like to save time and money on projects?
Would you like more connected teams? Want conflict exploration, co-visioning and decision-making to flow more productively?
Healthy communication is a powerful process that can bring success to your projects in as few as 90 minutes. Build stronger relationships with your colleagues and clients with healthy communication.
In an average of 90 minutes, participants will experience a huge leap forward in authentic team rapport which leads to open, honest sharing. Sam will facilitate a trusted team communication process, uncovering blocks to success and empowering groups to connect for effective solutions. Your team will develop a deep understanding and generate ideas in a safe space
where everyone can be heard.
With a 30 year corporate background, Sam gives tangible and practical advice so everyone can take immediate action, work smarter and access more happiness and health.
What is Healthy Communication?
Open and honest communication is healthy communication. It leads more quickly to mutual understanding and respect for a difference in views, interests and needs, thus generating better solutions and ideas.
In a workplace rich with healthy communication, there is more cooperation, harmony, and productivity and less competition… keeping the workplace stronger and more successful and diverse.
Most people strive to do their best and will volunteer valuable information if given the right attention. Listening well enables you to acquire knowledge, so that you can make decisions that benefit your business and move forward in a more productive way. Give someone a chance to share in a non-judgemental and safe space and they will provide you with a wealth of ideas.
You can improve morale and productivity by understanding what motivates your people, what is working, and what is not. Employees will blossom in the right facilitated space... and happier staff leads to happier clients and customers.
What are the business benefits of Healthy Communication?
Develop Rapport and Engage Teams
Plan Projects and Problem-Solve
Generate Ideas and Uncover Blocks to Success
Why is Healthy Communication such a powerful business process?
In each session, a Council Practice is facilitated, recognising that each voice needs to be heard and we can embrace differences and find our own voices while opening up to others. The practice of council comes from the time-honoured process used by First Nations and indigenous cultures to generate solutions using a non-hierarchical circle of communication. This deep form of listening can connect people authentically in a way that strengthens relationships and builds stronger teams. Conflict exploration, co-visioning and decision-making flow more productively in the council environment. Communication between team members also flourishes more readily when council practice is embraced.
If you are clear and perceived as open and honest in the way you communicate, it increases the chance that the person or group with whom you are communicating will want to reciprocate, leading to a healthy dialogue. Clear, open and honest communication is healthy communication and conveys authenticity and integrity, which are essential foundations for true collaboration in the workplace. It leads more quickly to a mutual understanding and respect for differences in views, interests and needs, generating solutions and ideas and leading to increased productivity.
What happens in
a Healthy Communication Session?
At the beginning of the workshop, there is an exploratory discussion by all regarding what needs to be explored in the Healthy Communication space. What are the blocks and desired outcomes?
Basic intentions are agreed upon.
There are four intentions that hold the space together, which, when observed, create safety and allow truth and trust to build in this powerful practice.
Attentive listening, seeking understanding and accepting others as they are. Staying present and centred and giving our full attention helps everyone to express themselves more easily.
Speaking from the heart and using “I” statements. Anything that can be felt can be communicated, and anything that can be communicated can be managed. This opens the space for being heard and makes the session about being interactive rather than reactive. From this space, you stay engaged and connected. ‘Speak your mind but let your heart do the talking’. Letting the heart speak where difficulty resides is leading from within.
Speaking concisely. Being lean with our expressions helps us to attend to what is important and recognise that our truth does not need to be reinforced by repetition, since we are already being heard. It also allows time for all to share.
Spontaneity. Avoid planning what you will say or how you will speak. Focusing on your own story while others are speaking reduces your capacity to listen. Spontaneity encourages playfulness and realness and allows the “voice” of the moment to be free.
Sam is the facilitator, who helps co-create a safe space to allow honest, healthy communication to flow and the participants to engage in the common goals of the sessions.
How Healthy Communication
was born
Sam’s previous roles, she experienced the price of workers holding back valuable ideas and insights. Witnessing a loss of more than $1.5 million in project costs, despite executives voicing their concerns and not being heard, led her to explore and learn The Way of Council Communication (visioned into Healthy Communication by Sam). Hierarchical team structures can mean that honest sharing does not take place in team meetings—instead, valuable work insights are voiced privately in corridors and other informal workplace environments, leading to loss of profit, ideas and trust. A non-hierarchal communication process is often invaluable and far-reaching. Sam has facilitated for a number of organisations where privacy and confidentiality are utmost, including C-suite members and stakeholders. Her process deepens working relationships and aids in future communication and collaboration. It facilitates emotional understanding and connection, brings workers together and creates acceptance of each other for who we are and what we voice.
Healthy communication involves powerful steps from a number of processes, such as The Way of Council and NVC.
The Way of Council, is an ancient practice of speaking and listening from the heart. It is a practice that moves us to a deeper level of communicating. It supports diversity in ourselves and each other, creating the possibility for truly engaged relationships. Sam has facilitated the Way of Council process with a variety of organisations and groups. Deep, honest sharing, clarification, and new ways of understanding and moving forward have emerged in ALL CASES.
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Non-violent Communication, a powerful communication model developed by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD.
With an emphasis on deep listening, NVC creates a path for reconciliation and keeps a major focus on authenticity.