The goals of Say It Straight (SIS) training are prevention of risky or destructive behaviors, such as alcohol, tobacco, other drug (ATOD) use, violence, school drop-out, teen pregnancy, behaviors leading to HIV/AIDS; and promotion of wellness, personal and social responsibility, positive self-esteem and positive relationships. Within a framework of communication skills training, SIS creates opportunities for people to discover their internal resources, their deepest wishes in difficult interpersonal situations and develop the skills needed to implement them. The training is co-created by participants by having them choose situations important in their own lives within which they practice their learnings. Thus, SIS is appropriate for any age, gender or cultural/ethnic group.

Objective 2: Understand how to transform disempowering processes into assets. For example, how to transform people-pleasing into the ability to negotiate and to compromise or how transform blaming and aggression into the ability to take leadership with personal and social responsibility, and with caring.

Activities: Rules that lead to disempowering processes, such as "I must always win," or "I must always please others," are transformed into guidelines such as, "I can win when…," or "I can please someone when…" (Englander-Golden, 1983a, 1983b; Englander-Golden & Satir, 1991; Englander-Golden & Golden, 1993a, 1993b; 1997)

Activities: Participants create movies portraying difficult interpersonal situations of interest to them, such as ATOD, violence, dating behavior, setting limits, cheating, stealing, in which they take parts. They communicate using disempowering and empowering communications to discover how they feel, the consequences of their behaviors and get feedback on the effect they have on others as they communicate in different ways. Participants alternate taking on the parts of senders and receivers of all communications (Englander-Golden, 1983c, 1990, 1991, 1992-93; Englander-Golden, Elconin & Satir, 1986a; Englander-Golden & Golden, 1993a, 1993b).

Objective 4: 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.

Activities: Exploring sameness and differentness first in small groups and then generalized by guided visualizations to include all people everywhere.  Exploring how feeling good and being cool are different. 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.

Objective 5: Participants use a “temperature reading” to uncork the energy of the group.