Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is the power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
- Author unknown
What are the benefits of Designed For Connection?
Emotional resilience and meaningful connection at multiple levels of your life.
+ Develop Internal Resilience and Capacity
- Build a solid core grounded in self-worth and meaningful aliveness
- Increase awareness of your emotional and physiological reactions
- Regulate your nervous system to better navigate stress, discomfort, uncertainty, misunderstandings, and conflict
- Interrupt and transform limiting beliefs, behaviors, and thought patterns
- Own your reactivity, assumptions, and judgments with curiosity and inquiry
+ Build Meaningful Connection
- Be more comfortable acknowledging and expressing emotions in ways that build meaningful connection
- Validate others’ emotions and experience
- Connect across differences and misunderstanding
- Own your impact on others with curiosity, less defensiveness
- Navigate differences and conflict with more ease
- Give and receive feedback to strengthen the relationship
- Repair and end connection with intention, care, and self-worth
+ Lead with Systems Awareness and Possibility
- Feel energized and inspired from experiencing connection and belonging as part of a shared humanity and ecosystem
- Express your leadership grounded in self-worth, self-trust, and being comfortable in your own skin
- Awaken individual and collective possibility as a shared humanity
- Understand how perception, reactions, beliefs, thoughts, behaviors are shaped by social context including messages based on social identity and stereotypes from systemic oppression
- Ignite a path forward with clear, actionable steps for for applying skills and practices to life and relationships
A Collective Blindspot
When our brain and nervous system are in
fight/flight survival response, it blunts our ability to feel empathy or be in connection. The problem is, most of us don’t realize when it’s happening. And we haven’t learned what we can do about it in these moments.
What gets in our way?
Your brain is constantly scanning for threat and danger. Some areas that are often perceived as threats include uncertainty, loss of control, unfairness, and differences based on social identity and stereotypes.
What’s important about the fight/flight survival mechanism is this: Whether it’s a real - or perceived - threat, the brain reacts with “threat response.”
Within micro-seconds, this sets off a chain of self-protective fight/flight reactions within you.
You might react with defensiveness, criticism, contempt, blame—even violence—directed towards yourself and/or others.
Or by shutting down, withdrawing, feeling shame, an inner critic, self-doubt, etc.
What the brain perceives as threat is shaped by our environment, society, and family (our “social context”), including social identity, stereotypes, history, and individual and collective trauma.
Threat responses happen faster than our cognitive thinking can figure out what’s going on.
If you’re not aware of your reactivity and aren’t able to pause, it’s easy to get swept away by default impulses to protect and defend. Even if there is no immediate or real threat.
The capacity to PAUSE and “self-regulate” one’s own threat response—and “co-regulate” to help calm each others’ threat response—are perhaps the most important skills for a new generation of leaders based on building —and repairing—meaningful connection amidst inevitable threat responses.
How to break free?
Knowledge alone is not enough.
You didn’t learn how to drive by reading and talking about it. You got in a car and actually practiced with someone guiding you.
You also probably didn’t start by driving on a highway for the first time. You probably started off slowly in a parking lot or a quiet street. There are a lot of safety precautions for driving. Including everyone learning shared rules of the road and taking multiple tests based on knowledge and practice.
Why isn’t there a version of Driver’s Education for relationships and leadership?
The starting point for building - and repairing - connection, especially amidst threat response and/or stressful conditions, must be shared skills and practices that calm and “regulate” our nervous system. And build safety and connection along the way.
Designed For Connection
A path to meaningful connection through
practices that regulate your nervous system
Designed For Connection provides a progression of highly impactful and proven steps for learning and practice for building skills and capacity for regulating the nervous system and threat responses, and building meaningful connection:
Knowledge & Self-Awareness help you know how threat responses play out within you and what you can do in those moments
Somatic* practices (individual, interpersonal, and small group) help you practice and build skills and behaviors for self-regulating your own nervous system and engaging specific interpersonal behaviors, like listening deeply and expressing gratitude, that can co-regulate each others’s nervous systems.
*Somatic comes from the Greek root “soma” = of the body
Feedback from your own body, and from others, provides critical information about how you are reacting, and impacting yourself and others
Self-Reflection helps deepen your learning from feedback and practice, and make intentional choices about how to respond
Copyright ©2020 Erica Peng
“It takes focus but I see the difference this approach makes. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. There’s no limit. This is life-changing.”
Move from
Unconscious
➔
Conscious
Become conscious of unconscious factors that undermine connection—within yourself and your relationships.
Neuroscience: The brain and nervous system react to potential threat with disconnecting or damaging behavior. All the time.
Social Context: Perceptions, reactions, beliefs, behaviors are shaped by social context: social identity, stereotypes, past experiences, individual and collective trauma, history, world events.
Systems Awareness: Complexities from interdependence exist at all levels of a system: Self, Interpersonal, Group-Family-Team, Community-Organization, Society, Ecosystem, Country, Planet, etc.
“Erica’s coaching helped me become aware of my blindspots and met me where I am in my leadership journey. She guided me along by introducing foundational practices, practical exercises, and concepts that have heightened my meta-awareness of invisible interactions that are happening.”
Theory
➔
Practice
Knowledge alone is not enough!
Designed For Connection provides straightforward and structured whole body and somatic* practices that re-wire your brain and develop new ways of connecting that can transform your life and relationships.
*Somatic comes from the Greek root “soma” = of the body
“Erica’s somatic coaching provides a framework and structure around what happens to our bodies during conflict or difficult interpersonal dynamics. Once I recognized my own body’s reactions then I could choose curiosity instead of simply reacting to the triggers.”