This programme has been lovingly designed for parents who are feeling overwhelmed and are ready and motivated to bring about deep, long term change within themselves, their relationship with their children and in their family lives, and are eager to devote significant time, energy and care to bringing this about.

This programme is likely to be a good fit for you if:

• You are longing for a loving and easy connection with your children, but you are not sure about the best way to bring this wish into your daily, lived reality.

• ​​You are experiencing chaos and lack of order in your daily life: you are often running late, there is mess everywhere and your family seems to disagree about everything.

• You know you are ready to change these dynamics but you are unsure what is the first step.

• You are curious and eager to learn about your child, yourself, and the science and art of connection.

• You are ready and willing to make changes in your life, and may have been actively seeking out support for some time now (through books, youtube, courses, therapy etc) but are confused about how to piece it all together.

• You feel uncertain or confused about the different parenting methods you see around you, with people in your life giving you all sorts of contradictory advice. You want to find a way that works well for you and your children.

• You are attracted to the principles of gentle-parenting approaches (e.g. peaceful parenting, simple parenting, conscious parenting, mindful parenting, attachment parenting or NVC parenting) but you want some support to apply and integrate the principles smoothly, deeply and permanently into your daily life with your children.

• You want to be confident in your parenting, even in moments of conflict or when there is challenging behaviour.

• You find yourself using parenting strategies that don’t align with your values or your vision of what you want your life with your children to be like (e.g. shouting, hitting, guilt and shame tactics, rewards and punishments, overusing screens, bribes etc) but you are struggling to find other ways that work.

• In quiet moments, your mind may wander to anxiety about your children and what might become of them (e.g. If they are like this now, will they become delinquents?? Will they ever be able to cope in the real world?) or may become lost in swirls of guilt and shame (Why did I shout again? What is wrong with me?!)

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If you recognise yourself in any of these statements, this course is likely to be a good fit for your goals and aspirations.

To get the most out of the From Chaos to Connection program, and to bring about deep, long-term changes in yourself, your family and your relationship with your children, we recommend that you set aside at least 2 hours per week for the 9  week Self-Study Course​:

• Reading through the weekly emails we will send you to set out the focus for your next week (about 15 mins per week).

• Watching the video lessons (~1 hour per week).

• Reading learning material for the sessions and working through the practice exercises (about 30 mins per week). 

• Daily journaling and self-reflection exercises (e.g. first thing in the morning or before bed) (~15 mins daily).

Additional for the Community Cohort Version and Individual Accompanimant verson:

• Attending homegroup practices and engaging in the community chat group (~ 1 hour per week). 

• Attending the live (group) coaching session (~2 hours per week).

Registration. Once you register for the course, you will receive a welcome package including all the information you need before the course begins, some reflection questions to help you (and us) assess where you are at, and a self-connection pack with resources to help you to start a self connection routine straight away.

Week 1: Exploring your vision. In the first week together, we will welcome you, settle in, and explore what you need in order to get the most out of the programme, explore your vision for your family and your specific goals and intentions for our time together. We will place you in a homegroup and you will have time to find your way around the programme. We will introduce Compassionate Communication (or Nonviolent Communication) as the primary model we will use throughout the course as a way to support and strengthen the caring, peaceful relationship we wish to create with our children.

Week 2: Connection. We will start off by exploring the importance of the relationship that we have with our children as a container for their growth and development, and the impact on them (and on us, via their ‘behaviour’) when there are challenges with the connection. We will examine what makes a child difficult (or easy) to parent, what is happening in their brain/nervous system during interpersonal challenges, and what is within our power to change. We will also look at systemic factors that impact the relationship context, including our own conditioning, trauma and socialisation and the impact of external factors. 

Week 3: Two ways of being in the world. This week, we look at how our beliefs and judgments about the world create a lens through which we see, understand and interpret our child. We explore two very different ways of being in and experiencing the world (represented in Compassionate Communication by the Jackal and the Giraffe) which correspond to two fundamentally different ways that our brains and nervous systems operate. We will examine the impact on our relationship with our child from these two different modes of being. We will explore how an understanding of our deep human needs can support a different way of being with our child and look at ways we can support flexibility and choice about shifting into a giraffe/needs-based consciousness in relationship with our child.

Week 4: Feelings, self regulation and co-regulation. This week, we look at the ways that we are separated from awareness of our own inner life: the vital emotional and bodily feelings that are the way our bodies communicate with us. We examine the importance of these body signals in bringing information into consciousness about what is important to us and how we might use this information to express ourselves, to self-regulate when we are triggered and to support our children to regulate themselves when they are activated (“co-regulation”).

Week 5: Integration week: We build in a pause mid-way through the program for integration, to catch up and to practice. 

Week 6: Observations and appreciation. This week we will explore the importance of separating our observations of our child from our evaluations/interpretations. We will look at the role of evaluations in conflict and how clear observations can support a more peaceful, harmonious and productive way of being with each other. We also look at the power of expressing appreciation and gratitude for our children, and how this can offer a more nurturing and life giving approach compared to praise and rewards.

Week 7: Empathy for self and others. In this session, we look at what happens within us when our children are doing and saying things that we find upsetting. How do we understand and interpret their actions? How does our interpretation impact our responses to them? How does our response further feed into their behaviour, and impact the relationship between us? We will explore ways to shift from rage, frustration and anger to curiosity and openness. We will also look at the importance of empathy to children’s development and learn some skills for offering empathy and understanding to our children even in the most challenging moments.

Week 8: The power of clear requests and authentic self expression. Many of us find it very difficult to make genuine requests of our children, leaning instead into passivity and permissiveness, on the one hand, or demand, force and authoritarian commands on the other. In this session, we look at the power of requests as a way to offer our children an opportunity to enter into a relationship of cooperation, mutual care and generous giving from the heart with us. We uncover some of the blocks we have to make requests with our children, how we can get stuck in “demand energy” and the impact of this on our power to create a caring relationship context and having our needs met. We will practise making clear, doable requests that capture our deepest needs and longings and offer us a way to make concrete steps to bring more joy and fulfilment into our relationships.

Week 9: In our final week, we will focus on integrating everything you’ve learned, reflecting on your progress, and celebrating your achievements. You'll walk away with a toolkit of strategies, a new vision for your family, and a roadmap to guide you forward on this journey. 

Yes, life as a parent can be full, and that’s why this program is designed to work with your schedule. It takes about 2 hours a week, but you can tailor your experience based on your availability.

If you're short on time, you can revisit all course materials for an additional 16 weeks after the program ends—giving you plenty of time to revisit and integrate everything twice after the initial 9 weeks. 

If you sign up for the Community Cohort Program, you will be investing an additional 2 hours of time. If you miss a live video session, don’t worry, they will be recorded and you will automatically receive an email with the recordings of each live session.

You are free to adjust each week depending on your energy and focus, making this a flexible, relaxing, and ultimately rewarding experience.

And...everything you learn here will save you so much time and energy moving forward!

A crucial part of this program is learning to care for our needs, and this means learning to slow down sometimes; to pause and take a breath, to tune into ourselves and our bodies, to check our calendars, ask our friends and partners, notice what we are saying "yes" to and what we may therefore be saying "no" to.

We believe that staying within capacity is a radical, life-changing and world-changing move. 

In this fast-paced world, we are conditioned to think of everything in terms of "have to", "must" and "should", adding to the sense of pressure that we may feel.

Here are some thoughts to breathe into as you consider your own capacity before joining this course: 

•  Your pace is your own, and you are welcome to explore at your leisure. Perhaps you could experiment with embracing, allowing and welcoming your own pace? 
• There is no need to "keep up" in this course. You also have 2 opportunites to go through all the materails again with the additional 16 weeks after the course ends. 
• Remember the analogy of the laden fruit tree? The invitation in this course is to take what you want from the course, whatever you have space for, and to leave what is too much for you, trusting that you will get exactly what you need for this season of your life. There is no need to overstuff your bag or weigh yourself down. You can always come back for more if and when you are ready.

At Peace Talks, most of our services and offerings are offered on a Gift Economy basis (see "How Much Does it Cost?")

It is important to us that this course is accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial situation. If you are struggling to cover the deposit, please get in touch so we can find a solution that will work for both of us (such as a payment plan). Contact us

At Peace Talks, we want to take concrete steps towards creating a world where we can truly care for each other, operate from deep connection to community and give and receive from a true generosity of heart.

We want to live the change we want to see in the world (or, as Yoram Mozenson puts it, “live the needs we want to see in the world”) by bringing our values into every aspect of our lives and our work, including the question of how our families meet our basic needs. 

As a concrete step towards living the change we want in the world, we have been using a “Gift Economy” approach through our work at Peace Talks. This is a whole new way of operating in the world, is a little uncertain and maybe even uncomfortable at times, and yet, one that we have found to be rewarding, exciting and hopeful.

Simply put, a gift economy approach is an attempt to recreate a world where we care for each other, where we acknowledge that our well-being is inextricably tied up in each others’, and that we have some agency in creating a world that is focused on need not greed.  

The gift economy is an attempt to reimagine how we might be able to bring about the kind of deeply caring world we long for while also acknowledging the current reality of the economic system we are embedded within.

The gift economy harks back to our traditional, ancient roots when we lived in interconnected communities and each of us cared for all of us. (If you are interested in more background in the gift economy approach, see Charles Esientien, Miki Kashtan, Genevieve Vaughan among others).

This is very different from the world and economic system we currently live in (which rely on widespread ideas and beliefs like “deserving”, punishment and reward, power over or the use of violence in order to function). We therefore choose to live our lives to reflect these values as much as we are able to. Our wish in using this approach is to:

• Create systems where resources can flow to needs. We want our offerings to be accessible to a wide range of people, regardless of their ability to pay. In other words, we want the support, care and guidance that we offer to flow in the most direct way to the people who need that support, care and guidance. We want this course and all of our teachings to be accessible no matter their financial circumstances.

• Integrity and alignment with our values. The values of connection, care and compassion that are at the heart of NVC are the guiding principles of our lives, not “add ons”. The gift economy allows us to offer our services in a way that integrates our values and moves us towards a world where resources flow to people's needs.  The Gift Economy approach offers a way for us to explore a radical economic paradigm of integrating and embodying the connection and needs-based lens that we share in our teaching into every aspect of life (including economic decisions). 

• Modelling a new way of being, based on NVC teaching. We want the people we work with to have a powerful experience of what NVC can look like in the “real world”, not just at the level of inner consciousness or in their relationships with loved ones, but at the level of the systems that govern our lives and how we operate with each other in the world. We are passionate about sharing an alternative vision for the world, and therefore choose to offer many of our services using a gift-based economy.  

Offering a gift economy approach is a concrete step we can take towards these goals.

A gift economy approach transforms the moment of economic exchange into a relational moment - your wellbeing and mine are brought together into shared consideration. We are brought into awareness of our inter-dependence, our shared humanity and our mutual longing for trust and cooperation: “I” and “you” become “we”.

It creates a tiny microcosm of possibility; a world where we care for each other, where the implications of our economic choices are a little more visible to us, and where we are able to use our daily financial decisions as a way to meet needs and support each other.