To review the session handout(s), click on the icon below:
Kenneth Cloke Session 4.5 - Handout.doc
Presenter:
Kenneth Cloke, Center for Dispute Resolution, Santa Monica, CA
Every conflict we experience provides us with opportunities to practice empathy and honesty, strengthen communication skills, become more open-minded and open-hearted, and exercise wisdom, clarity, balance, and inner peace under difficult conditions. Every conflict therefore leads potentially not only to de-escalation, settlement and resolution, but to transformation and transcendence. While resolution reshapes the issues or content of conflict, transformation changes its form or contour, while transcendence alters its meaning or context. It does so by undermining the attitudes, intentions, and approaches that sustain it; and by inviting learning, open-hearted communications, and evolution to higher levels of conflict and resolution. Transcendence implies rising above, no longer participating in, overcoming, moving beyond, evolving, growing, leaving behind, and letting go. It means releasing negative, closed-hearted, antagonistic, withholding, impasse-generating attitudes and intentions toward our opponents or ourselves. Thus, any communication that makes transcendence possible leads into dangerous, uncharted territory in which traditional techniques are of little use. Transcendence begins by using empathy to locate leverage points beneath the soft spots in equivocal statements, power words that communicate intense emotions, pointless exaggerations, wounded accusations, overly energetic denials, and hostile, defensive attitudes. All of these, if heard correctly, become questions, confessions, and invitations to deeper, more heartfelt, poignant and profound conversation. This session will outline ten paths and a number of practical techniques for encouraging transformation and transcendence.