Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Author unknown

Drawing on work with hundreds of leaders and my own personal leadership journey, I developed a groundbreaking leadership development methodology, called Designed for Connection℠ .

My approach helps leaders expand the S P A C E between stimulus and response.

And in that space is the possibility to break free from unconscious reactivity – like fear, defensiveness, blame, shame – and unleash potential to accomplish shared goals together.

Knowledge alone is not enough!

 

No one learned how to drive a car only by reading and talking about it. Navigating emotions and messy relationship dynamics requires practice too.

 

Designed For Connection℠ provides a step-by-step roadmap of structured frameworks and high-impact whole-body practices that transform limiting beliefs and behaviors and create possibility.

Copyright ©2020 Erica Peng

  • Knowledge: Neuroscience. Systems Thinking. Interpersonal Skills. Intersectionality and Power Dynamics.

  • Self-awareness: Become conscious of blindspots that undermine your best intentions and efforts in life and work relationships.

  • Practice: Develop concrete skills and behaviors through proven frameworks and body-based somatic practices.

  • Feedback: Learn whether you are having the impact you desire.

  • Self-Reflection: Deepen your capacity to build trust and connection through structured reflection and writing practices.

Designed For Connection℠ helps you embody
essential life skills and awareness to transform
how you connect with yourself and others.

+ Develop internal resilience and capacity to calm reactivity amidst overwhelm, uncertainty, and discomfort

  • Anchor in self-worth and be more comfortable in your own skin
  • Increase awareness of your emotional and physiological reactions
  • Regulate unconscious reactivity and assumptions that can lead to misunderstandings, and conflict
  • Interrupt and transform limiting beliefs, behaviors, and thought patterns including an inner critic, shame, self-doubt
  • Own your reactions and judgments with curiosity and inquiry, and transform tendencies to blame yourself or others

+ Develop concrete skills for building and repairing meaningful connection

  • Be more comfortable expressing emotions in ways that build meaningful connection
  • Listen deeply, witness, and validate others’experience, even when different than yours
  • Own your impact on others with curiosity, less blame and defensiveness
  • Give and receive feedback to strengthen the relationship
  • De-escalate heated exchanges and repair connection after breakdowns
  • End connection with intention and care

+ Become aware of and steward interconnection with a greater natural system

  • Awaken joy, hope, and possibility in others from experiencing a sense of belonging as part of a shared humanity and ecosystem
  • Express your leadership in ways that affirm others’ worthiness and wholeness
  • Ignite a path forward with clear, actionable steps to boldly interrupt stereotypes and discrimination from systemic oppression that perpetuate disconnection and polarization
  • Model conscious choices with a long view that preserve and protect all forms of human and non-human life

Designed For Connection provides structure
and guidance for a process of transformation.

 

Unconscious
Reactivity

 
 

➔

Conscious
Choice

 

Become conscious of – and transform – unconscious factors that shape reactivity and behaviors, and undermine connection within yourself and your relationships.

These factors include:

  • Your brain and nervous system’s self-protective survival mechanism that can lead to impulsive and damaging behaviors: defensiveness, judgment, blame, contempt

  • Limiting thought and behavior patterns: Imposter syndrome, inner critic, shame, self-doubt, blame, self-righteousness

  • Elements from your social context: Family culture, community, institutions and power structures, history, individual and collective trauma

 

Theory

 
 

➔

Practice

 

Knowledge alone is not enough!

Engage with body-based and somatic practices that can re-wire habitual and impulsive ways of reacting, and develop new ways of connecting that transform your life and relationships.

 

Isolated

 
 

➔

Connected

 

Collective Blindspot

A culture of hyper-individualism in the U.S. reinforces isolation, loneliness, imposter syndrome, shame, self-doubt, and other damaging patterns of behavior. Most of us have unconsciously internalized these behaviors and have no idea.

Designed For Connection equips you with skills and practices that enable you to become aware of these blindspots and biases, and transform them with behaviors that build connection with yourself and others, across differences.