EMERGENCE Apprentice Facilitator Training Program
INTRODUCTION
People speak and hear through unconscious belief systems (conceptual lenses), value systems (value lens), and particular types of conversations. This happens instantaneously and is the result of how the mind operates. Our memory is the storehouse of these 'patterns' .
We interpret reality through these patterns. These patterns were created when we were young and generally were a reaction to getting our needs met from the people in our environment.
When we meet someone new, we say "hello" if it is a social situation and we are introduced by someone we know. Our value may be 'politeness', the conversation type could be a 'welcoming conversation' and our conceptual lens could be "potential relationship".
In another context if meet the same person on the street we will not even acknowledge their presence . We have different communication patterns with someone who is a 'stranger' versus a 'friend of a friend'. Some people have a pattern of never communicating with strangers and thus hardly ever meet new people. When you are 5 this might be a good idea, when you are forty it can stop many opportunities from occuring.
Some communication patterns are very useful in some contexts and others are limiting. The very limiting ones may be the reason we never attain the potential that is within all of us. How well we communicate is one of the most underrated and misunderstood aspects of our lives. If we don't have a way to change our patterns, we will continue to be run by them the rest of our lives.
CONTEXT & FEEDBACK
So where can you go to learn your limiting communication patterns? How can you re-pattern how you communicate? An essential place is being in the right context so that your defenses are down, and receiving feedback in a way that you can first see your patterns as they are occuring.
Most of the time we are so 'involved' (unconscious) of the conversation, that we are not aware of 'how' we are communicating. There may be subtle 'conversational killers'' that we constantly use that actually stop intimacy, connection and deeper communication but we never know it. There is no feedback and if there is like, "Stop interrupting me...." we brush it off saying, "I always do that."
An interruption in a brainstorm in a marketing meeting at work is very appropriate. To a 7 year old in the middle of a very important story it may alter how they speak forever.
A key ingredient to communication is 'attention'. Attention is where we focus the mind. We have this incredible tool, this mechanism that is fundamentally amazing, and yet because we are using the mind to examine the mind, we often get trapped, because our attention isn't directed inwardly that much to reflect on how we think or communicate, but externally, on objects outside ourselves that we think or talk about or to. With our attention constantly directed externally, we lose sight of the actual tool that is controlling how we fundamentally operate.
So what the Harmonizer Table does is it slows thought and communication right down so it is there in front of you. You pull cards which represent concepts and values in your mind and you see them as lenses to speak through right in front of you. It may seem complicated but it isn't once you do the process which is basically flipping cards and then talking about what those cards mean to you in relationship to your question.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE HARMONIZER TABLE
1. Is to break your normal habitual pattern of seeing, thinking and talking with one another.
2. To teach groups of individuals to see from multiple perspectives and 4 levels at the same time in regards to issues, problems and/or questions.
3. To teach people to create new ways of talking about their values and beliefs.
4. To create a synergistic field of communication where people feel safe to share in a deeper way.
5. To have a communication tool which groups use to have types of conversations which cannot occur in a normal seeting.
