Understanding Human Behaviour in Relationships

I'm on another course at this very moment. This time Fircroft College for three day residential on Understanding Human Behaviour in Relationships.

I am enjoyed getting to know the other students. We are doing lots of group work but there is some stretching formal input too. The course is coming from a comes psychodynamic perspective and is giving us some brief tasters of NLP, Transactional Analysis – not just parent, child and adult but also the Drama Triangle.

Neuro-lingustic programming is completely new to me and it was fascinating looking at the four pillars:

1. rapport – building relationships with yourself and others,
2. sensory awareness – becoming more aware of the now,
3. outcome thinking – focussing on what you want to achieve
4. behavioural flexibility – trying out new things.

This morning we did some assertiveness training. I found this the most useful part of the course. I came away with a list of tips to practice and use in conversations. I will go through these with Nettes and use them.

Anger Management

For the first week of my summer break I spent a few days at Fircroft College doing an anger management course. Not that I’ve got any great problem with rampaging around. But I enjoy studying and wanted something that would give me some practical insight into myself. It was a men only course with eight students and one male tutor. I found it a very good environment and felt able to discuss matters deeply in a relaxed manner.

The basis of the course was transactional analysis popularised by the book ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. Interestingly we looked quite a bit at assertiveness training which all about expressing yourself in a way that so that you get a ‘win, win’ outcome rather than being passive and/or aggressive. You see, if we can express our anger assertively we don’t bottle it up or just lash out we actually use it very positively to effect change in our world.

In the course we looked at some scenes from the movie ‘Anger Management’ with Jack Nicolson. And I bought a copy at a discount price but I haven’t watched it all through yet.