Bored in staff meetings? Feeling stuck in or wanting to improve your relationships? Wish to enhance your teaching? Strive to be a better therapist?
Let interpersonal design enhance the way you relate and interact in any situation or relationship that is relevant for you.
What is it? How can it help me?
Interpersonal design is a construct that can add a new dimension to the way you perceive your world. It is a practically applicable idea that has the potential to enrich your personal and professional relationships, and your home and work environments.
Interpersonal design involves consciously and purposefully “designing” how you interact with and relate to others, and how you create your physical and interpersonal space. Through increasing your awareness of your interpersonal and physical environment you can implement positive change. Interpersonal design is an approach and a way of seeing things that can be useful for parents, marriage partners, employers, employees, health practitioners, counselors, therapists, coaches, teachers, lecturers, and rabbis in a wide range of settings. Through interpersonal design, you are able to be more effective with what you are already doing.
Most of you, most of the time, experience and perceive your immediate surroundings and relate to others as if you are independent, separate, isolated units. This is in contrast to acting as if you are part of a larger whole or system. Interpersonal design entails making a seemingly subtle shift in perspective, similar to replacing your regular glasses or eyes with a different and powerful new pair. These new glasses or eyes, when you choose to wear them, allow you to alter your experience of your world from being ego-centric and me-focused to thinking systems.
“Inter-personal“. “Inter” means between, and “personal” refers to people or persons. Generally speaking, interpersonal refers to the way any two or more persons relate, react, and interact with each other. “Design” has to do with deliberate, purposive, planning and arrangement of elements. It implies being able to alter, change, and choreograph the way you interact, in any number of ways. You can consciously choose to implement and customize specific interpersonal-designs in specific situations [e.g., business meeting, counseling sessions, dealing with customers, time with family, social events, lectures, classes]. It also involves placement of elements within, and selection of interpersonal space.
Interpersonal design is a model that involves conscious and deliberate “designing” of the way you interact [act, react, relate, and respond] with others. Being aware that you are constantly “dancing” with others is, in and of itself, a powerful tool. This then allows you to choose and decide how to design your dances.
In the interpersonal design model you consciously think about a particular situation, preferably before you enter it. You plan the design and structure that you believe is appropriate and that you wish to apply to the circumstances.
Ideally, you prepare ahead, and prevent potential difficulties. You then anticipate, are more ready for what may occur, and can reduce the “unforeseen”. Interpersonal design also provides a framework that allows you to enhance and optimize any particular situation.
How do I find out more? Feel free to contact me [see below] if you have any questions, or if you would like an interpersonal design consultation.
