The dynamic partnership of Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts comes together in this special 3-day workshop to explore how individuals, relationships, and organizations may engage in profound and significant transformations. The training is grounded in the assumption that change at deep levels, such as core values and identity, does not take place through normal methods of instruction, tutoring, mentoring or even coaching. These deeper transformations are promoted by the principle and practices of sponsorship, which involves awakening the soulful sense of self-in-world and world-in-self, and then developing the bridges that connect the two. A sponsor activates the contexts, contacts and resources that allow a person or group to focus on, develop and use their own abilities and skills.

The workshop will focus on how sponsorship may lead to generative change at personal and systemic levels. Participants will develop a "sponsorship toolbox" which includes many different ways for entering, sensing, listening deeply, properly naming, awakening, and triggering dynamic reorganization in a system.

At the personal and interpersonal levels, topics will include:

-- "hooking up" to a larger relational field
--using either positive or negative experiences to attune to "soul" or "center" in self and others;
--how connecting to "field" and "center" transforms "problems" into "solutions";
--creating and maintaining a safe "sanctuary" for holding and healing "negative experiences" --accessing and maintaining connection with resource fields, including competent ego states, while relating to "problem";
--how to identify and disconnect "alienating" negative influences from the symptom;
--mid-wifing a symptom into a solution;
--keeping the work alive;
--bringing the awakened connections into the larger community.

Techniques for working at the systemic levels include:

--The Values Audit
--Listening Partnerships
--Reframing Self-Criticism
--Generative Sponsorship and Group Sponsorship

This seminar will provide these skills, and others, which help and support a person to develop and grow through the various forms of sponsorship. We expect you will be astonished at the results you achieve!

About the workshop leaders.

Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts were two or the orginal students of NLP in Santa Cruz in the 1970's. Both were students of Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson. Gilligan went on to receive his psychology doctorate from Stanford, while becoming known as a leading figure in Ericksonian psychotherapy. Some of his many publications include therapeutic trances: the coooperation principle in ericksonian psychotherapy, Therapeutic conversations, The courage to love: principles and practices of self-relations psychotherapy, and The legacy of Erickson. Robert Dilts has earned a reputation as a central figure in NLP. In recent years, Gilligan and Dilts have reconnected and begun an exciting collaboration in integrating their work in some truly generative ways.

Together, these two men constitute an extraordinary partnership. We are incredibly excited to bring them together in this workshop, which promises to be an exceptional event.