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110 S. 2nd Street
Geneva, IL, 60134
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630-232-2350

Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together

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Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together

UU Society of Geneva

This free workshop is split across 3 separate sessions: Saturdays, May 1st, 8th, and 15th, from 1pm -3:30pm. Sign up here.

Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 895 9658 5974

Difficult Conversations: The art and science of working together is a free workshop offering a powerful set of research-based principles and strategies that will allow you to engage in meaningful dialogue with anyone — regardless of social or ideological differences.

 Focusing on the question, "Who do we need to be to have the conversations we need to have?", those who take the workshop will:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics that turn conversations into conflicts.

  • Discover how one critical shift in thinking can turn a negative interaction into a creative and constructive engagement.

  • Understand how our personal story can be a tool to both build bridges and burn them.

  • Learn how to look "beyond" our personal story to access more easily and deeply our innate capacity for connection, creativity and collaboration.

 While the book is not required for the class, you can order the book Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together here.

About the Difficult Conversations Project

The Difficult Conversations Project is an initiative to help people have respectful, productive dialogues on the challenges that confront our communities, our nation and our world.

Author Kern Beare says that: “The initiative was born following a one-month conversation road tour I took with my son in January, 2017 to better understand our nation’s divide. The conversations we had affirmed for us the unifying power of dialogue, when we have the skills we need to work through the inevitable conflicts and emotions that arise. The workshop — Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together — was launched in the summer of 2017 to help people gain those skills. Since then I’ve led the workshop dozens of times with people who span our nation’s rich social, political, racial and ethnic diversity. Encouraged by the consistently enthusiastic response to the workshop, I’ve turned it into a book to extend the reach and depth of its central concepts.”

You can read more about the Project here.

About Kern Beare

Kern Beare is a former Silicon Valley communica­tions professional with deep roots in the fields of interpersonal communication and conflict resolution. He's the founder of the Difficult Conversations Project and leads non-profit seminars and workshops on how to heal relationships and unleash our capacity for creative collaboration.

Kern’s work in this field began in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, when he received a two-year fellow­ship from the Beyond War foundation, a fellowship that led to running educational programs on the obsolescence of war in the nuclear age and the imperative of learning to resolve conflict without violence. 

In the 1990s, Beyond War became the Foundation for Global Community, extending its mission to include social and environmental issues. He served on the board of the new organization and helped to develop an expanded offering of educational workshops.

In the early 2000s, Kern co-founded Global MindShift, a nonprofit enterprise that offered facilitated online work­shops on the essential skills we need to survive and thrive in today’s interconnected and interdependent world.

In 2016, following the U.S. Presidential election, Kern launched the Difficult Conversations Project, an initia­tive to help address our national divide. 

Kern holds a BA in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He and his wife Amy have two grown sons — Joseph and Will — and live in Mountain View, California.