Parenting for Peace is an FSP tradition with the mission to bring outside speakers and thinkers to our community so that we can be a community of learners together and make our implicit shared values more explicit, integrating our values further with our practices at school and at home. Typically, we host a Fall Parenting for Peace event for faculty and families, while our Spring event is open to our wider community.
This Fall, about twenty-five parents, faculty, administrators, and board members joined Peggy Smith for a series of workshops. Peggy is a former teacher and founder of Open Communication, an organization that teaches Nonviolent Communication, a method designed to increase empathy and improve quality of life among both people using the tools and the people around them. Together, we spent three Thursday evening workshops learning about “Calming Strong Emotions with Resonant Language.”
The phrase “resonant language” originates with the image of two cellos, one in its case and one being played. The cello in its case will start resonating with the sounds it hears, a “warm accompaniment.” Relational language strategies help us turn to each other (and ourselves) with more warmth. We can choose how we resonate and how our resonance can help others.
When we accept with kindness how the person we are talking to feels, making resonant guesses, we can gather more information and stay in better relationship. At their essence, Peggy’s strategies and teachings were all about “empowering people to be the authority on their own reality.” We can play an active role in each other’s lives, as partners, parents, colleagues, family members – by helping others calm their own nervous systems. And we can also do this for ourselves!
More detailed participant takeaways below will offer a glimpse of the strategies and new ways of seeing that came out of this course. A huge thank you to Peggy Smith for her generous, candid, funny, and heart-warming teaching style.
“Nonviolent communication takes time and practice. It is using relational language and strategies to hold your own feelings and needs and honor those of others. In this way we find a path forward to deeper understanding and empathy of one another, especially in conflict resolution.”
“This workshop helped me examine and be aware of my habitual responses to life and to others in my life. I especially appreciated the sections that gave examples of empathy blockers and the four chairs of thinking/responding. They were great mirrors for myself and I appreciate having some new lenses and language tools to practice and create new habits of response--ones that will generate greater harmony in others and in myself.”
“I loved the practical and simple (but not necessarily easy) strategies such as to pause, name the feeling or need, rather than focusing on resolution or on brushing past the situation… What a wonderful teacher and group of participants!”
“There is a less transactional way of living available! … I can learn to ask for what will support me and hear better what would support others.”
“I have taken a similar class in the past dealing with conflict resolution and found Peggy's approach to nonviolent communication refreshing and new. Peggy came across as very insightful and engaging. Her class has given me more options and tools for dealing with conflict(s)... and how to self center in an effort to strengthen connections.”
“Remarkable new way of thinking about every day interactions. I found the conversation stimulating and thought-provoking and will certainly be attempting (with baby steps) to integrate this into my life. Many thanks for this eye-opening experience.”