Satir workshops

Metaphor

• Lightning and bacteria provide the fundamental food for all of life on Earth: fixed nitrogen.
• Plants eat the nitrogen, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and omnivores eat both plants and herbivores.
• Pull nitrogen and/or bacteria out of the pyramid, and the whole thing collapses.

This metaphor associates well with “consciously including emotional intelligence in grass roots organisational development” and I can easily imagine a chemistry of process like ...

That bacteria take up and use foreign DNA released into the environment when other organisms die, that is "old knowledge". Scientists knew this "horizontal gene transfer" occurs naturally in soil after lightning strikes, and thought it was a rarely used mechanism. Recent genome research indicates that application of this strategy is widespread and plays a major role in evolution of bacterial genomes.

Intended participants

Moderators, mentors and facilitators wishing to cross train and gain Satir ways.

Design

Each of the below “themes” would at least take a full day in order for participants to have a well-rounded first experience with using a particular Satir technique or model. Temperature readings are used throughout as reflection tool.

When we get together, participants either choose one theme for two days -- which allows us to investigate that one chosen technique or model thoroughly, or choose a theme per day, or even choose just a quick taste of the essentials in two themes per day.

Then, depending on the theme choices, we transfer just a minimum of information in a “show, don't tell way”, we reflect shortly, and then we immediately dive into practicing with issues brought by participants using an experiential learning cycle.

Some themes can be combined, like coping stances and ingredients of an interaction go well together, coping stances and sculpting also, and all three can easily be combined in an overall theme of “effective communication using Satir tools”. -- For now that gives us enough flexibility. And it's easy to narrow down and focus from here.

We offer potential participants an overview of the themes beforehand.
See the map!

Possible day themes

Temperature reading

Purpose: facilitating congruent communication and assisting individuals in becoming more open; legitimising our whole human being; supporting healthy group processes.

Experience: A tool that can easily be practiced at home with family. It can provide an emotional baseline over time for effective self-image checks and reflections, when “temperature” is “read” regularly.

In our experience temperature readings work well for

More on Satir temperature readings

Satir change model

Purpose: centering/holding the space more effectively when accompanying a group of people innovating or going through change

Inspiration is not born in a vacuum; excellent ideas are seeded by other excellent ideas and fertilized by still more excellent ideas. In essence, excellent ideas are born from transforming ideas in chaos. And effectively surfing chaos happens only after one "let's go" of control, because we are capable of inventing only those "things" which are the product of our internal manifestation of our conscious assemblage of reality. We can release the conscious assemblage, or rather "let it go", by intending outcome in the flow.

The Virginia Satir Change Model focuses not just on systems of people but also on individual people, making it a robust model, and safe in terms of honoring people.

Experience: Extensively used as an internal and independent consultant in various contexts and in its many many forms and disguises. Resistance is futile, you will center yourself ;-)

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Coping stances and sculpting

Purpose: solving hard to solve (organisational development) problems by folding the situation in the human domain. With low self esteem we behave in blaming, placating, super-reasonable or irrelevant ways. When using open communication we're congruent with our selves (authentic), and we can level out (the amplitude).

Experience: The more we learn to (re)cognize stances and their finer shades, the better and faster we can level out our responses when, as we humans tend to have happen to us, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of incongruence (again). Quite a balancing act and lots of practice, practice, practice .... Once we get the hang of the basic stances we can start using Satir sculpting for solving some really really complex problems that previously seemed impossible to solve.

Ingredients of an interaction

Purpose: untangling mis-communications and/or conflict resolution. In “ingredients of an interaction”, Virginia Satir distinguishes several states of internal processing in any significant interaction. In my experience the details of significant interactions are not easy to linearly unravel when abstracted afterwards. These states can be used concurrent as well as sequential, and we externalise unraveling internal states using a map on the floor.

Experience: We introduced and trained this tool under somewhat harsh conditions when rumors were flying high. We also use “ingredients” regularly in group sessions for practicing conflict resolution by imagining reconciliation for a brought issue (only when we have at least one person willing to play “the other” party in a described conflict)

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Satir mandala

Purpose: increasing understanding of resources and the constraints resources create, as well as the knowledge and ability to find what to add to resources in order to extend previously perceived limitations and boundaries.

The mandala of the Self describes Satir's holistic concept of the resources that are universal to all human beings. Variations are as many as people, but the basic resources are the same. For Satir, this implied that

Satir's graphic picture of the mandala comprises eight concentric circles. In the center is the "I am." The "I" represents every human being -- the person, the sacred and holy Self!

Experience: The Satir Mandala helped Nynke create an organisational mandala for quickly building agile gestalts of an organisation. 

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