As a nurse, consultant, and author of several books on communication and leadership in healthcare, I’ve been teaching soft skills like empathy, confidence, self-awareness, and perspective-taking for about 20 years. In healthcare, people need these skills for critical outcomes. To listen to patients, report concerns, address bullying and burnout, and create cultures of safety.
I am convinced that if we are going to prevent gun violence or violence of any kind that people must experience dignity and I know one way to help. I am writing this article to provide teachers, coaches, pastors, anyone who works with groups an experiential teaching tool. One they can use to promote dignity. I’ll do this in the following three steps.
1. Preventing Violence Must Include Promoting Dignity
First, it is important to understand that efforts to address gun (or any) violence must include prevention methods beyond limiting access to weapons and onsite police. While I support these measures, we also have to do everything we can see other ways of prevention. I’m talking about preventing kids from getting to a place of despair. Where they develop a focus on saving money, so they can walk into a store, and buy guns to kill people.
We need to prevent people from feeling isolated or being bullied and help them to develop empathy and feel connected. So many of shooters have social and emotional histories that contribute to rage. Experiences where they feel disconnection and isolation. Experiences that exacerbate, maybe cause mental health issues. And contribute to people ruminating on revenge, purchasing assault weapons and walking into a church, supermarket, or classroom to murder as many people as possible. While I can’t speak to a quantitative relationship between being bullied and aggression, I don’t have any hesitation to state that the more experiences people have feeling dignity for themselves and others, the better! But, how can something like dignity or empathy be taught?
2. Experiential Teaching for Dignity
Second, teaching skills like empathy, dignity, confidence, and perspective-taking requires a non-traditional approach and I want to share my observations on what is and isn’t effective. When I began teaching these skills to nurses and other healthcare professionals at the turn of the century, I used traditional teaching methods like, lectures, reading assignments and testing. I soon discovered that me talking about empathy etc. was not effective. Since I took improv classes as a hobby, I tried integrating simple activities. This is when the light bulbs went off! Instead of eyes glossing over during a powerpoint, I’d get feedback like;
- “That’s the first time I ever felt heard.”
- “I realized how my communication style might impact others.”
The more I taught, the more I could see that providing positive improv-based social experiences where people could practice skills with peers or friends was what worked and brings me to my final point.
3. Teach “Dignity Exchange”
Third, a few years ago, my friend and Certified Mindfulness Teacher, Liz Korabek-Emerson, MFA and I were collaborating on public workshops combining improv and mindfulness. We began to adapt ‘Status’ activities, growing on the work of Keith Johnstone and Kat Koppett in our classes on non-performers. These activities can be quite powerful and sometimes provocative for highlighting power dynamics between people.
Liz and I wanted a gentler experience and over time tried out different ideas. Eventually, we developed an activity we call “Dignity Exchange”. It doesn’t take a lot of time or expertise and leads people to a visceral moment of feeling their own dignity and seeing it in others. And once it has been done once with groups it can be repeated over time with different pairs or new members quite easily.
It starts out with a little group preparation and followed by “Dignity Exchange” in pairs which takes about a minute. At the end of this compelling minute, we have seen people hug, shake hands, high five, or bow with their partners.
Some are teary with statements like, “It felt so natural, I’ve never experienced dignity like this!’ or ‘We need more of this” A few years ago I presented a train-the-trainer program for the Human Dignity and Humiliation annual conference at Columbia University. The presentation included teaching instructions and video demonstrations which I would like to make available with the hope that teachers, coaches, facilitators, or others who work with groups will use it as a resource, adapt for their audiences and use it as a resource to help promote dignity and prevent violence. More detailed instructions and video demonstrations are available in this link.
Please contact me if you’d like to hire me or have questions.
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