Invitational Relationship Skills

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Overview

Friends, today’s relational environment is too often negative and isolating, and in need of repair. Too often, we “well intentioned individuals” assume that connecting with others is just a matter of putting ourselves out there. Too often we unintentionally embrace one another in a presentational and confrontational manner while thinking we are doing good.

We too often feel urgency and pressure by what we experience, especially when others are oppositional to deep beliefs or lifestyle choices. We may feel called, at times, to stand up for “truth,” lacking “gentleness and respect.”

Approach and motivation matter.

Interactions lacking an invitational approach:

squash one’s best intentions to love neighbor as self
create insiders and outsiders
hinder trust building, essential to relationship
consider the other as the problem while justifying and rationalizing one’s position as “righteous.”
assume blame unnecessarily.

We can do so better in community and for one another. This course is an introduction to the Art of Invitation: Building enduring relationships and connected community.

Who is the course for?

This course is for anyone who knows that satisfying relationships don’t happen by accident. Relationships and community are like flowers in a garden, they need key elements to grow and develop. This course is for anyone who wants to gain relationship building skill and unawareness to live invitationally with others. This course introduces concepts and tools grounded in faith and science to connect better in community and experience satisfying and healthy relationships.

Do you want to:

change old habits of relating where good efforts have not always materialized in positive outcomes?
learn a framework to neighbor well while honoring the 2nd greatest command…. to love your neighbor as yourself?
learn practical steps to repair negative energy of community and build satisfying relationships?
join us and others who learn and live the Art of Invitation?

Welcome!

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Course Overview

Two Questions

What questions do you ask yourself when there is a relationship conflict or a void in community?

What’s in this lesson? Video ( 1 minute) + Reflection

Mindset Matters

Mindset toward self and others is significant to relationships.

What’s in this lesson? Video (3 minutes) + Consideration

Insiders and Outsiders

Recognizing insider and outsider experiences is basic to durable human connections.

What’s in this lesson? Video (11 minutes) + Consideration

Embracing a Process

Learn 4 steps to build tools and skills in the Art of Invitation

What’s in this lesson? Video ( 2 minutes) + Reflection

Are You Ready To Start?

Course Content

About Instructor

Debbie

Debbie Teike, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, invested more than ten years developing The Art of Invitation: Building enduring relationships • Connecting community. Debbie has extensive experience working in long-term care, elder abuse and neglect, hospice care and congregational social work. She grew up in Decatur, IL and graduated from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (B.S. in Social Work) and Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work (M.S.W.)-St. Louis, MO. She is married to her husband, Mark, and has three children, Erin (Jamie), David and Shanthi and two grandchildren, Eloise and Francis.

1 Course