Authentic Revolution
Every map has a neighbor. This one is Authentic Revolution: a republic where connection is treated as a skill and rehearsed like one, weekly.
I helped build it. I wrote a lot of what it teaches, I designed the dojo, I founded the academy. I do not teach there anymore; I coach and consult on my own. The work stayed, which was the point of writing it down. This is the border post.
THREE STOPS BELOW, THEN THE CROSSINGThe barrier is up and the line is dashed.
Over the border they call it Authentic Relating: games, run in circles, that get strangers to the honest part of a conversation in minutes instead of years. A republic of practice rooms, some online, some in person, more than a decade old. I helped build the place. I wrote the book on conflict, I designed the weekly fight, I founded the school for the people who hold the rooms. Then I handed the teaching over and went back to my own work. A dashed line is still a line; it is just one you are meant to walk across.
The Fight Lab.
Every Wednesday, ninety minutes, free, online. You bring the fight you keep having, or the one you can see coming, and the room picks one. Somebody plays your co-founder or your mother; you try the line you never manage; the room stops, looks at what happened, and runs it again. One week it is two people. The next, the group you lead: the overtalker, the challenge to your authority, the room gone quiet. You can come and only watch. The one rule, the one I wrote into it, is that everybody stays on the same team.
The slate, and the manuals on the bench.
The book is my method on paper: what a conflict says against what it means, mirroring that lands, requests and boundaries that survive being tested. Over the border it runs as eight two hour sessions with a seventy page manual and the fight labs folded in; you pay what your heart says it was worth. The Facilitation Academy, which I founded and no longer run, is for the ones who hold the circles: two hundred games in a manual, a leadership training with one staff member per participant, thirteen years of it. Other facilitators teach it now. That is what a school is for.
The map says human better, together. Every territory on it is a place where I do the work for you or with you. Authentic Revolution is where you do it yourself, with company, badly at first and then less badly, which is the only way anyone has ever learned a craft. You cannot rehearse a duet alone. Over the border there is a room full of people who agreed to be your other voice, every Wednesday, for free, and not one of them is me. That is together with the metaphor taken out.
The Art of Difficult Conversations
My book and my method, run over there as eight sessions with a seventy page manual and the fight labs folded in. You pay from the heart.
Take the course ↗The Fight Lab
The weekly practice dojo I designed. Bring the fight you keep having, or bring nothing and watch; either way you leave with a line you can say out loud.
Enter the dojo ↗The Facilitation Academy
The school I founded for the people who hold the room: two hundred games in a manual, eleven facilitators teaching, one staff member per participant.
Cross to the Academy ↗The teaching itself is over here
Those three doors lead to the material. They do not lead to me. What I do now is coaching, consulting and design, and the School is where I keep the map of it. If you want the person rather than the curriculum, do not cross; turn around.