Aiming Your Mind: Strategies and skills for conscious communication with practice exercises

This is an expanded version of the text bookk for an eight session training in basic communication skills. The course begins with identifying cultural challenges to being conscious about what we say when trouble arises. The skills cover how to stand your ground in conflict, bring curiosity, create understanding, and find results that satisfy both parties, or manage conflict that doesn't resolve with respect. It includes how to take a non-negotiable stand (as in parent discipline or teachers following rules) in a way that minimizes damage to the relationship. Based on Thoma Gordon's Parent Effectivness Training, "In the end, all we have with each other is a relationship." The author says "How we communicate shapes the course of our lives."