The Goals of Say It Straight Training (SIS) are:

● Prevention of risky or destructive behaviors, such as alcohol, tobacco, other drug use/abuse, allienation, violence, school drop-out, teen pregnancy, behaviors leading to HIV/AIDS

● Promotion of wellness, personal and social responsibility, self-efficacy, positive self-esteem and positive relationships.

● Improving quality of life in the family, school, friends, community, workplace.

● Rooting diversity in our common humanness.

● Creating opportunities for people to discover their deepest longings to be loved and valued as well as to love and value others.

● Creating opportunities for people to discover the strength in their roots.

● Creating opportunities for people to discover their internal resources (courage, wisdom, trust, etc.), their deepest wishes in difficult interpersonal situations and develop the skills needed to implement them.

● Creating opportunities for people to discover that they can move from relationships of submission-dominance to relationships of equal value, not necessarily equal function.

● Shifting motivation for positive change to the paricipants by letting them co-create their training and exploring situations important in their own lives within which they practice their learnings.

Processes

Objective 1: Move from disempowering communication/behavior, such as people-pleasing, blaming, bullying, being sarcastic or physically aggressive, splitting off from feelings, lecturing or playing smart, being disruptive, irrelevant or spacing-out, to communication/behavior that empowers people to honor their deepest wishes and give them expression in appropriate ways while respecting others.

Activities: Explore communication/behavior using body sculpting and guided visualization. Embed processes into systems such as a group of friends, family, community, work environment.

Objective 2: Move from relationships of submission and dominance to relationships of equal value (not necessarily of equal function), and enhance quality of life.

Activities: Participants create movies portraying difficult interpersonal situations important to them, such as drug abuse, violence, dating behavior, setting limits, cheating, stealing. They rotate through all the parts in these movies using disempowering and empowering behavior to discover how they feel, the consequences of their behavior by getting feedback on the effects they have on others as they behave in different ways.

Objective 3: Understand how to transform disempowering processes into assets by counting oneself, others and life issues. For example, how to transform people-pleasing into the ability to negotiate and to compromise or how transform blaming and aggression into leadership with personal and social responsibility and caring.

Activities: Transforming rules that lead to disempowering processes, such as "I must always please others," or "I must always win," into guidelines such as, "I can please someone when…" or "I can win when…." SIS training is action oriented and uses visual auditory and kinesthetic modalities to involve people with different learning styles. The learning is cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The developmental line for positive change is: experience-practice-learn-assimilate-implement.

Objective 4: Connect to one's internal resources and discover one's deepest longings for wellness and empowering behavior.

Activities: Participants create systems under stress in which everyone behaves in disempowering ways. By connecting to their resources, they discover that their deepest yearning is to let go of disempowering behavior and behave in ways that empower themselves and others. Participants discover the strength in their roots through multi-generational sculptures that shift the focus from blame and shame to appreciation and responsibility (ability to respond in their lives).

Objective 5: Move from seeing only their own point of view to being good listeners, understanding another’s point of view and being able to feel and express empathy. Discover that empowering oneself leads others to empower themselves.

Activities: Exploring sameness and diversity, first in small groups and then using guided visualizations to include all people everywhere. Exploring how feeling good and being cool are different. Exploring their "bill of rights" and their "bill of responsibilities." Developing movies to explore and practice giving positive support in situations in which there is a concern about someone’s behavior (friend, loved one, acquaintance, co-worker). Participants alternate taking both the part of giving and receiving positive support. A process called "temperature reading" is used to give participants the opportunity to practice expressing appreciations, worries, puzzles, suggestions for change, new information, accomplishments, commitments, hopes, wishes and excitements.