The technique taught to participants was an adaptation of the Imago technique developed by relationship therapists and married partners, Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. It was originally used as a therapeutic technique, but they now teach the process to general audiences after realizing this listening skill is useful for anyone in any type of relationship. My career in public health heavily involves skill-building within systems and communities, so I took Hendrix and Hunt’s Safe Conversations course. For this project I made some modifications:
- Participants did not “ask for appointments” as the process normally stipulates because these appointments were already specifically set aside for the purpose of learning this practice.
- Instead of taking turns speaking and listening, I wanted to do do this project in a “pay it forward” style – so the listener in the first pair becomes the speaker in the next pairing and so forth, demonstrating how practices and behaviors can disseminate through an organization’s culture.
- Due to being in a virtual environment participants couldn’t make eye contact, but were asked to make “virtual eye contact” by focusing on the speaker and silencing phones and other distractions when possible.
- We incorporated the watercolor meditations to create artifacts of each conversation. The watercolor from one conversation became the background of the next.