Monday, October 7, 2013

Communications, What Do I Know?

Brenda and I were asked to lead a workshop on communications at the Navigator Marriage Seminar at our church site.  As Dr. Robert Griffith, marriage seminar expert, will tell you, we, or better I, have lots of negative communications examples.  Dr. G even uses some of these in his seminars.

I began my research. As a professional researcher, I do what I typically do, I contacted three friends to ask advice.  One, the one with the most qualifications was too busy, which is understandable.  The second sent me some slides, some of which I promptly co-opted for our workshop.  The third guy gave us some info from his own many years of marriage.  I was grateful to all.


From all this material, plus my own recollections from Scriptuire, I put together 34 PowerPoint slides with stories, cartoons, funny pictures, plus the group communication activities and thought-questions supplied by the friend.  I cued myself to tell some of my own communication failure stories, and I was psyched!  We had an hour 45 min to do the workshop and that would give us plenty of opportunity to do some fun interaction and get the attendees involved in doing more than listening.  I love doing this kind of thing, and prepping it allows me to hear mostly clearly from G^d.

Two days before our seminar, there was a MAJOR fire in Nairobi Airport, where the speaker was flying out for Gabs.  Oops.

Fortunately, our associate pastor is a professional counselor and was more than able to step in and do a fine job.



Our workshop was scheduled near the end of the seminar, and the schedule got a bit behind.  By the time to begin.our time went from 105 min to about 45 min.  Near the end of our time, 10 more minutes were added on, but we just had to keep adapting to what we had.

The truth always is, that we do our best and leave the results to the Holy Spirit.  How did it go?  Who knows?  Ask me in a thousand years.

2 comments:

  1. You are one of the most effective communicators I've ever seen--and I've seen one or two. I bet the presentation was great.

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  2. Thank u Wes. Yu ar two kinde. I jus tri two due what I se yu due in komunicating. Yu ar a gud egsample. I apreceeate yu.

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