And here’s part 5 of the Transforming Communication interview…
…Richard: But here’s the next thing: what we then found was in the questionaires with the students, the students reported after six months that they no longer had the conflicts with each other that they had before that time.
And they had not even been through the training. They had simply experienced consistent teaching from that group. So we compared these to students who were going through with teachers who had not done our training. And the difference was dramatic.
The school that we were doing this study in already had a programme in place to deal with bullying, one of the big problems in schools that I find around the world when I’m teaching. But that programme that the school had in place wasn’t dealing effectively with bullying in the other areas.
And here’s the reasons: the teachers’ only method for dealing with students was essentially to bully. And then they would tell the students: don’t bully. That doens’t work…
Michael: …the pot calling the kettle black…
Richard: Exactly that. So what we showed those teachers what to do was how to create the kind of relationships towards their students that they wanted their students to have with each other. Now you can imagine then, as I said, we have research about these skills that comes from the fields of working with couples.
So that’s another whole area. That’s a pretty exciting area to be working with as well.
Where people nowadays would like to think that they can create a longlasting couples relationship and they know that there’s around a 50 percent chance in the Western world that those relationships are not going to last. So, that’s the real situation that they’re in and they probably also know that if they go to a councellor about that, that in most cases that’s not going to help.
So, most of the people who go to a marriage or relationship councellor are going to find that in the next two years that their marriage finishes, that their relationship finishes. So, I want to be able to help people to do better than that as well in that area.
There are so many differently places where these skills can be taught. In New Zealand we have the Theological College which trains ministers from Christian churches around the Pacific. And they are all trained in transforming communication now. So that means that we have this group of people out there who are doing pastoral councelling, who are building a community of people together, and they have the skills to create cooperative relationships in that kind of community.
That’s another whole area for this.I work with some large corporations in New Zealand, and there I’m working basically with management. What I’m again focussing on is how they create a team that achieves things because people want to come to work. From the research on what keeps people in the same job, if we check, and that’s a big issue in the world today, will these people that you’re training and spending money on now be here even in your organisation in five years?
Here’s what we find: it’s not the money that you pay them that’s going to keep them there. When they wake up in the morning and they think: do I want to go to work, one of the biggest thing on their mind is: is this the kind of group that I want to be in for the day.
Michael: Would another way of saying that be: it’s the kind of relationships that they have at work that affect the quality of their working life?
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Find out in part 6 of the Transforming Communication interview…