Transformative Listening
A Program for Career Professionals, Healthcare Providers, Nonprofit Leaders, 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: people wanting more effective strategies and support as they work to foster collaboration.
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,” “there are certain things we can never talk about,” 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.
“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.”
Program Details
Your power comes from creating the conditions that help people meet their goals–not fixing other people’s problems.
This program 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 Virtual Groups
More details about our Fall options will be available soon!
Online Asynchronous Options
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.
Learn about our transformative listening program for healthcare providers.
FAQs
-
This program is for leaders and professionals whose job it is to encourage a healthy, enjoyable, collaborative, and innovative workplace culture. You will learn how to do this on the individual level, with clients, patients, and students—and on a broader scale.
-
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 leaders who are interested in applying this material in their current work. Live 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, often focus on a particular topic of interest to the participants.
-
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 classes are between four and eight sessions and include reflections. Live participants get direct and individual feedback on their challenges.
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.
-
Yes, we offer workshops on culture building that are inspired by this same self-focused relational method. You can learn more about our workshops here.
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 educator, 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.