The weekend of March 11 & 12th I attended a continuing education seminar in New Hope, PA, hosted by the Cortiva Institute (Cortiva Education) who recently purchased my alma mater, the Somerset School of Massage Therapy. One seminar in particular that I enjoyed was presented by Ben Benjamin on “Creating Relationships That Work”.

The focus and majority of time during this presentation focused on the SAVI grid. SAVI for System for Analyzing Verbal Interaction, developed by two Philadelphia based women, Anita Simon Ed. D, and Yvonne Agazarian, Ed D.

I was quite pleased by this presentation because it is my long-term goal to move into the direction of “relationship ‘counseling’ “. I was further intrigued when I found out that this hub existed in Philly, because my initial research into continuing ed in this field brought me to several schools and professionals from Philadelphia…now the connections were forming in my own mind…perhaps I will be a SAVI Communications trainer in the near future.

What I learned that weekend is that the majority of the people I have interacted with on a daily basis seemed to operate in the “red light district”. I became increasing aware of my own and others actions and reactions that we operate, sadly, in the red light district: a vicious way to communicate with others which involves sarcasm, attack and blame, complaining, gossip, mind-reading, discounting, yes-butting, and interrupting to name a few! It’s a wonder that we can create positive changes or paint good images of ourselves for ourselves or in the eyes of others at all! We really need to learn ways to hold intelligent conversation that bring us into the yellow and green light districts affirming each other’s ideas and experiences, offering proposals and opinions for conflict resolution. “And I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation” (Germaine by Sinead O’Connor: Universal Mother).

SAVI is an important tool to be used not only in a professional setting but should and could be easily applied to personal relationships and interactions.

If you would like to find out more about creating relationships that work check out the research on and about the formation of SAVI at www.savicommunications.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Communication Connection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.