When Safety Isn’t Enough | A Neuroscience-Informed Approach to Moving Communities from Self-Protection to Shared Responsibility

Course Description and Couse Learning Objectives: 

Public participation practitioners already know that connection and psychological safety matter. But when communities face uncertainty, conflict, and change, initial safety is not enough. Under pressure, people often narrow their thinking, protect their identities, harden their stories, and collapse too quickly into defensive positions or premature answers.

This course goes deeper than conventional conflict management by exploring why uncertainty affects the brain, body, and behavior of groups — and what facilitators can do in response. Participants will learn practical ways to keep people relational, emotionally steady, and open to the needs of the whole through silence, breath, story, circle practice, emotional naming, and inquiry beneath positions. The course offers a neuroscience-informed framework for helping communities move from self-protection toward shared responsibility, better judgment, and decisions that can serve the common good.

We will explore practical facilitation interventions that help groups stay open under pressure, including:

• using silence, breath, and pacing to shift the energy of a room;
• designing openings that create emotional steadiness before difficult content begins;
• helping participants create distance from their thoughts so they are not trapped inside their first reactions;
• transforming conclusionary statements into deeper inquiry about needs, values, fears, and hopes;
• working with stories and resentments so participants can see one another more fully;
• using structured sharing to help people name feelings without turning the meeting into therapy;
• creating forms of belonging that make disagreement more bearable;
• helping groups stay with uncertainty long enough for more creative and durable options to emerge.

Cost: $175 Members  --  $250 Non Members  --  $100 Student Members. 

PLEASE NOTE: IAP2 USA members must be logged into iap2usa.org as a member to register at the member rate.

Members from other IAP2 regions need a code to register which can be obtained from info@iap2usa.org. 

 — Cancellation and Substitution policy —

Trainer: 

Jeffrey L. Stec | Experiential Culture Creation Facilitator at CONNECT DEEPLY, ACCOMPLISH MORE

As a practicing family lawyer and certified mediator, Jeffrey learned that the quality of the connection between people mattered more than the content of their conversation. After 15 years of teaching lawyers empathy-based collaborative negotiating, he began working with governments, non-profits, and other public facing institutions to facilitate difficult public conversations. 

His recent experience seems to indicate that raditional efforts at psychological safety are essential to successful conversations and team/community performance, but they are not sufficient to solve complex problems or generate breakthrough creativity.

His exploration of consciousness, neuroscience, and psychology suggests that what groups often lack conversational structures that help them keep their awareness open in the face of inevitable uncertainty.