People Skills

Our Thursday evening sessions have been suspended for a time to make time for planning. We considering a set of special sessions on People Skills. 

Here is a text I have in mind for Special Sessions in the fall. People Skills: How to assert yourself, listen to others, and resolve conflict.

  People Skills

    This is a wonderful text, which some years ago, set a new direction in my personal and professional life. It teaches high level social skills which most people never learn or learn very late in life. Unfortunately, it is difficult to learn these skills by reading a book. At best, a book can only make you vaguely aware of them. Thus, it is like reading a book on say, woodworking. There is a vast difference between reading a book about woodworking and actually working wood. Yet, by working wood, you begin to understand what the book was trying to teach you. Thus learning is an interative process, working, making mistakes, reading, listening, and then working again. As Mark Twain said, "If at first you don't succeed—fail, fail again. So it is with People Skills, the best way to learn these skills by practicing them and the best way to start is in a class where we do roll playing. 

 

    These skills are difficult to pick up and make a habit. Your highest level skills tend to be the most recently learned and thus the less practiced. When we are tired, or afraid, or angry, or distracted we tend to slip into our old habits—less effective but habitual behaviors. So, by practice, you gain the ability to use your high level skills in the real world, when the stakes are high. 

 

    So, I am looking for a few people who would like to practice these skills in a few sessions this summer, and then help facilitate small groups in roll playing sessions in the fall. I believe that our churches should be teaching this stuff. Nobody else is. Although this book is entirely "psychological' there is a spiritual dimension to these techniques. On the one hand, high levels skills like this can be learned by dark hearted people which they then use to win trust and then manipulate people. However, the underlying darkness will eventually play its hand. Only a spiritually mature person can apply these skills with love. When the true Christian learns these skills it also gives them wisdom to see when they are being used selfishly.

 

Start by checking out the link above and look through the table of contents and read the excerpts. If it intrigues you let me know. If I can get a quorum we can start looking for times we can all meet. 

Holy Week and Thomas Merton

From now through Easter we will be using excerpts from the writing of Thomas Merton to moisten our contemplative practice. We will be using a special text from the series of booklets published by The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living.