Transformative Listening

A Program for Career Professionals, Healthcare Providers, and Educators

A Program to Accelerate Effective Change

This is a program in developing your capacity to hear others in a way that fosters trust, innovation, and change. It’s for leaders, mentors, educators, and anyone wanting more effective strategies and support as they work to create change. 

This course helps you move beyond old ideas about being a good listener. These old ideas might include beliefs like, “it's better to shut up than share,” “good listeners don't focus on themselves,” or “people listen mainly to fix problems.”

You'll learn to develop a new and radical form of power: effortlessly identifying people’s blocks, goals, and talents. You'll learn to see what others don't and create the conditions for the best possible outcome to emerge. You'll learn to create, enhance, and inspire rather than fix, force, or direct. You’ll learn to be a transformative listener.

Learn more at our FAQ below.

“Transformative listeners notice what distracts us and others from the present moment, which is where change is possible. Once present, we hear new things and operate in open and creative ways. This way of engaging encourages trust and invites others to join us in co-creating new solutions.”

About the Facilitator

Lesley Curtis (she/her) is the co-owner and founder of Sagely. She holds a doctorate from Duke University, where she focused on storytelling and abolitionist movements. Today, she is a consultant and healer, using compassionate witnessing to resolve intergenerational patterns. She teaches a method of self-regulation that encourages witnessing through a trauma-informed lens.

In her work with transformational leaders, Lesley invites clients to identify their individual door of entry to trust-building work, helping others become a calm in the storm necessary in tumultuous times. Our deepest wounds, when shown love, become our biggest reservoirs for compassion. Compassion expands our capacity to hear what's necessary to create the conditions for change.

Program Details

Your power comes from creating the conditions that help people meet their goals–not fixing other people’s problems.

This course introduces a framework for creating change by teaching you to apply trauma-informed methods to hear the belief and emotion beneath a story. You’ll learn to identify habits of attention that are often the residue of prior pain, such as sexism, racism, discrimination, violence, poverty, or grief, even intergenerational. 

Humans decide who and what to pay attention to based on our perception of threat. This course invites you to imagine:

  • What does it feel like to be in an environment where we do not feel threatened? 

  • What does it take to create a non-threatening environment? 

  • What becomes possible in the absence of threat?

In this program, we will cover:

  • How to apply a trauma-informed lens to what you hear

  • How to notice and transform your own habitual responses to threat or perceived threat

  • How to identify the presence of prior pain based on habits of attention

  • How to apply your own healing in order to listen more deeply

  • How to invite redirection without judgement 

  • How to encourage the imagining of new solutions

This program has two versions: live and asynchronous. The live programs focus on a particular topic related to the careers of the participants. These might include healthcare, philanthropy, or education. See the FAQ below for more details about our program options.

Live Program Options

Our summer live group programs focus on a particular subject area or topic of interest. Please find details about our summer programs below.

Transformative Tools for Trust-Inspired Philanthropy
$3,500.00
One time
$1,750.00
For 2 months

Join us in this 8 week program and learn how to be a source of trust. Our program is one hour a week, beginning in late June. You'll examine how the emotions attached to the concepts of money, financial security, and abundance influence our leadership. You'll learn how to confidently work with your own experience, encourage a balance of giving and receiving, rightsize your and others' contributions to avoid burnout, and expand people's capacity to receive.


✓ Learn with like-minded leaders
✓ Experience trust while you learn to create it
✓ Join from anywhere, catch up easily if you miss
✓ Have your questions answered in real time
✓ Benefit from added visuals and articles on the program page
Transformative Listening for Healthcare Providers

Join us once a week for eight weeks and learn how to lead without burnout, care without sacrifice, and model transformation. Sign up available May 6th.

Transformative Listening for Intergenerational Healing

In this biweekly group program, you’ll learn about how trauma manifests itself in ways that are so routine, sometimes going back generations, that we’ve often never known the world without them. Once you learn to see their origin and build your capacity to be with the emotions underneath, sustainable and inspiring transformation occurs. This program begins in August. Sign up available in June.

Online Asynchronous Options

Transformative Listening Gold Standard
$750.00
One time

This is our full asynchronous program in transformative listening. The course is 5 chapters divided into short, manageable lessons with visuals, images, guides, reflection questions, articles, and more.


✓ Complete at your own pace
✓ Easy to understand short lessons with visuals
✓ Clear frameworks and reflections
✓ Resources like articles, podcasts, and quizzes included

 FAQs

  • Our online program is for anyone who wants to be a source of healing and inspiration in their organization. Our live programs are designed to address specific concerns related to healthcare, social justice, and financial abundance. We offer themed groups and design programs that apply our transformative listening model to your organization by request.

  • Our asynchronous online course is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who wants to learn at their own pace. You do not need to schedule it and you can return to the material as you like. You can download images, take notes, and review frameworks at your own pace.

    Our live participants join a group of 3 to 7 leaders who are interested in applying this material in their current work. They get to experience a group setting where they feel truly heard while also learning about being a transformative listener. Group participants have access to all the same material and get to inquire about their specific challenges in real time. Additionally, our live programs, created by request, tend to focus on a particular topic of interest to the participants.

  • Our live programs are either eight weeks, one hour every week or, for more in-depth topics, 90 minutes every two weeks. They are virtual and include people from across the United States and England. We schedule them by request and open them up until we reach our max capacity of 7 people. Every session is recorded for easy review if you need to miss a session.

  • The online version of this course takes about 6 hours to complete at your own pace. The material requires reflection and integration, so you should plan to engage with it as you have the time and energy to focus.

    The live virtual program is between one hour and 90 minutes for 8 sessions.

    To schedule a program for your team, or to inquire about a package version of our online program, please email connect@sagelycreative.com.

  • Yes! We offer both group packages and hybrid versions with live reflective sessions. Please email connect@sagelycreative.com for more details.