Speaker: Elizabeth Lesser
TEDWomen 2016
Date: October 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Description from TED website:
In a lyrical, unexpectedly funny talk about heavy topics such as frayed relationships and the death of a loved one, Elizabeth Lesser describes the healing process of putting aside pride and defensiveness to make way for soul-baring and truth-telling. “You don’t have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you,” she says. “Be like a new kind of first responder … the one to take the first courageous step toward the other.”
My Review / Notes / Thoughts
This is a rather interesting talk. If you have any conflict with people in your life, it’s a good talk to listen to and perhaps learn how to get past that conflict. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I think it’s probably more important for you to watch the talk for yourself.
What I want to discuss about this talk is how it could possibly be used in the educational sphere. How can we use this talk to engage coworkers and students?
One way might be to use this talk as a primer for a “development day” workshop for employees. (Note: I would highly recommend that HR be present for such a workshop, if not actually being the department that runs it.) The workshop could start off by showing this video, then perhaps someone with the appropriate knowledge could give a brief talk and some instructions for the next phase. I believe a good, next phase would be to have employees break up into groups (a minimum of 3 but no larger than 10). One person would need to be the assigned “mediator” and the other members could talk. It could become a type of group therapy.
As for students, a similar session could be held. Perhaps a counseling department could hold something like this. Or perhaps it could be done as an activity with students inside a classroom. I also think it could be used as a primer for a paper or discussion topic inside a psychology class.
What do you think? How could you see using this talk to engage your coworkers or students?
Until next time … live long, life-learner!