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The New Conversations
Initiative
an online resource center for
cooperative
communication skills
www.NewConversations.net
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Free, open source, workbook, articles and training materials,
plus online bookstore to help you...
▣ communicate more creatively, successfully, and compassionately,
▣ encourage dialogue & civility / resolve conflicts / prevent violence, and
▣ build a more cooperative life in your marriage, family and workplace
A public service of Human Development Books, publisher and bookseller,
and the Cooperative Communication Skills Extended Learning Community.
We support the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.
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Most popular resources for individual and group study
about effective interpersonal communication skills...
The Seven Challenges Workbook: A Guide to Cooperative Communication Skills for Success at Home and at Work (100 pages, PDF & HTML) by Dennis Rivers. (free in PDF and web page formats, printed copies: $12+postage. In India: Rs.325.) How to change your world, one compassionate conversation at a time.
Compassionate Listening: An Exploratory Sourcebook
About Conflict Transformation (33 pages, PDF & HTML) by Gene Knudsen Hoffman,Leah Green and Cynthia Monroe. (free)
Human Becoming An anthology of excerpts from Jungian psychotherapist David Richo's many books on our journey toward becoming whole and human. (90 pages, PDF, free)
The Geometry of Dialogue: A Visual Way of Understanding Interpersonal Communication and Human Development. By Dennis Rivers. Exploratory study using mandala-like flow charts to map and facilitate human interaction. (220 pages, PDF, free)
New Conversations Library Free e-books, essays and scholarly papers in PDF and html formats, and a variety of links, for a world in need of transformation and reconciliation.
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NEWS ITEM:
How much difference does conversational style make in a person's overall health? Recent research indicates that, for married women in the U.S., it is literally a matter of life and death:
A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.
In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk. (read article) [my emphasis in red]
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A New Bookstore Section on Civility, Dialogue and Social Conflict
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Guest Articles/Essays/Web Sites:
Active Listening for parents of toddlers (from the New York Times)
The Role of Dialogue in Resolving Community Conflicts (from PBS)
Melinda Smith is a conflict resolution expert who has worked in Kalispell, Montana, to help the residents to come to an agreement about sharply contested land-use issues.
Positive Deviant is a magazine article about the transformative power of deep listening, as it occurred in a program to reduce child malnutrition in Vietnam. It is one of the clearest examples I have ever read of what is now called "appreciative inquiry," which advocates that helpers pay disciplined and systematic attention to the strengths, capacities and past successes of those people they wish to help.
Citizens' Coalition to Reaffirm and Extend the Geneva Conventions offers a way of addressing the global problems of violence and torture. Our latest article is The Trouble With Torture... Psychological and political arguments against extreme interrogation and preventive detention
Sandhi Institute Nonviolent communication training and community building in war-torn Sri Lanka.
[Please suggest great articles you have read / sites you have visited for this section. Submit suggestions through out contact page.]
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Resources for Communication Skills Classes and Groups
Need conflict resolution and civility help right now?
Try our Conflict Emergency Kit.
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Invitations & suggestions on how you can participate today in the Cooperative Communication Skills Extended Learning Community
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Volunteer translators wanted: The Seven Challenges Workbook is now available in Spanish and Portuguese (in both printed book and free PDF file formats) thanks to the wonderful generosity of our volunteer translators, Ilia Morales Figueroa, Annette de Paz and Irene Schardijn. We invite translation of our books, articles and teaching materials into all languages. (No language community is "too small.") We will be delighted to make your translation available free of charge as a PDF file and/or web page on this site, and to arrange for it to be printed on demand. If you are studying for an MA in translation, please consider translating one or more of our documents as part of your MA program. (For more information, please e-mail your resume and proposal to rivers@newconversations.net).
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web us/blog us/recommend us -- Spread the word about free teaching and training materials. You can encourage the development of more cooperative communicating in families, organizations and nations around the world by placing one of the following links to the Seven Challenges Workbook and to our library of free resources on your personal, organizational, school, college, university or business web site and/or blog. Copy one of the following links and insert it in the appropriate page on your site. (Thanks and blessings)
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Journal of Cooperative Communication Skills (free)
January 2006 Issue
A new translation, the next ten years, and
you are already a communication skills trainer
July 2005 Issue
Beyond the Hall of Mirrors
Reflections on War, Terror and Human Interaction
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Communication Skills Global Bookstore (includes new entries on listening, question asking, and violence). Presented in cooperation with Human Development Books, Berkeley, CA, publisher of The Seven Challenges Workbook, and sponsor of this site. Books available in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Germany, France, and Japan through HDB's Global Find-A-Book Service. Your book purchases at the Communication Skills Global Bookstore support this site.
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Cooperative Communication Web Site Vision Statement
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Thanks to our many cooperating organizations
NewConversations.NET is proud to be a participant in the following communities:
Communication Initiative
Research Community on Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
Cape Town Open Education Declaration
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www.karunabooks.net is an online library of free books and essays exploring themes of creativity, consciousness and compassion. (Includes all of Dennis Rivers's books and essays.)
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From the editor: Welcome to New Conversations, a site that explores new ways of listening, talking, expressing appreciation and resolving conflicts: at home, at work and in the world at large. New Conversations draws on the creative life work of such teachers as Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Robert Kegan, Marshall Rosenberg, and the Quaker peace activist and writer, Gene Knudsen Hoffman. All are advocates of a transformative civility.
The world we live in faces a rising tide of complex problems, from families in crisis, to nations at war, to both individuals and societies deeply in conflict with themselves. In the United States, where I live, all of this is made painfully clear by the recurring problems of mass murder and political assassination.
As I see it, we are trying to resolve these problems of social conflict with the very same (not-so-great) communication skills that have helped to create the problems in the first place. This site offers visitors a wide range of free, new, teaching and training materials that explore the journey toward genuinely new conversations, a journey from coercion to cooperation, and a journey into new skill and awareness. This site emphasizes distributing communication training and teaching material free of charge in an "open source," creative commons, royalty-free format, as PDF files that can be shared with others, and as printed documents that can be copied.
You will find material here about such topics as compassionate listening, conciliatory self-expression, creative questioning, radical gratitude, and deep forgiveness. I strive to present this material from a "be the change you want to see" perspective, so that you can start today, not needing to wait for anyone else to change first. As you apply the knowledge you find at this and similar sites, may you bring the light of new awareness and reconciliation wherever you walk.
Dennis Rivers, MA, Web Site Editor
and owner of Human Development Books
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=== SITE MAP ===
Thank you for visiting www.newconversations.net, a global resource for free information, articles and books about cooperative interpersonal communication skills.
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