Listening and Building Allies with People We Strongly Disagree With

There is so much divisiveness in the current period. Many people only talk to or interact with the people who already agree with them. This makes it extremely difficult to learn new ideas, have challenging conversations, or be positively impacted by other people’s thinking.

In this workshop, we will demonstrate tools for listening to people we disagree with and identifying why it’s so hard for us to listen to certain people or ideas. We will have a chance to identify and learn practices for healing the emotions that can get in the way of our listening. We will learn specific skills for drawing people out when we disagree with them, and then, deciding when and how to offer our own best thinking.
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Cherie Brown is the founder and CEO of the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI). For 41 years, NCBI has been a national leader in offering training programs to K- 12 schools and college campuses on bridge building, coalition building skills. For the past several years, Cherie has offered this workshop at the U.N. in NYC during climate week.