Gestalt Meeting Facilitation

Does every meeting in your organization get tense? Are people talking right past each other? Everyone gets defensive? Very little knowledge is exchanged, just opinion and judgment? We’ve been there too.

A Gestalt Retreat, in person or virtual, helps groups of people come to a more complete understanding of other peoples’ points of view, enhancing their own knowledge, while building or repairing relationships.

Trained facilitators help groups maintain a posture of openness and understanding, while exchanging information with more context and nuance than is typical. No judgment. No diminishment of others. No fear of reprisal. Just forward movement.

Gestalt Language Protocol is built on the idea that telling someone else what they should think or do is likely to cause rejection of that information, no matter how good that information is. Here’s how our psychologist, Dr. Otis Fulton, explains it: “We want personal autonomy, a primary driver of satisfaction. When someone tells us what we should do, that threatens our autonomy and causes reactance, a rejection of that information. However, sharing specific experience instead of giving advice or direction creates a situation that is not threatening to another person’s autonomy and doesn’t cause reactance. However, we find it hard not to summarize our past experiences into a nice, tidy, autonomy-threatening package of advice and direction.”

Let’s help your group get to its goal, with shoulders down.