our first ever SUMMIT FOR SPOUSES/PARTNERS IN BUSINESS

 

a bit about the presenters at our Nov. 20th Spouses in Business Summit:

Peter Zimmer , a family business consultant from Enfield, CT, with extensive employee assistance experience, will help you get clearer on issues such as: How you are “familiar” at work vs. at home?; making better decisions together about your family, especially as it's impacted by your partnership; sharing vs. struggling for power; coming to terms with your differing views on child-rearing, transportation, maintaining a household, and so on.

Deborah Kruger - business owner, working artist, and facilitator of the FBC's 2 women's roundtables- will help you learn, through role-play, how to deal with difficult conversations you may regularly repeat or avoid. Watch- and demonstrate- the before (conflictual) and after (mediated) versions of these typical miscommunications (email Ira with your “faves”)…we will also coach you through them, stopping periodically to point out the stumbling blocks, patterns of thoughts and behaviors, as well as building the skills to make it better. You will learn how to mediate with yourself, and to explore what you really want from your situation/conversation/relationship

Karen Fogliatti a teacher with the Greenfield, Mass. based Conscious Communication Institute, will help improve your ability to communicate consciously, listen actively, identify your needs and feelings, clarify your and their positions, negotiate outcomes satisfactory to all; transform attacks into explorations of differences; self-manage so you can stand the heat; and stand your ground with awareness. If this doesn’t help you work with your spouse, forget it.

Jack Laforte , a Northampton based psychologist, specializing in couples and family businesses, will guide you through an understanding of what happens to you, and all couples in business (as well as all humans in relationships), so you can become more healthfully differentiated, suffer less from emotional cutoff, deal with anxiety with less “projection,” not to mention “triangulation.” If this is Greek to you, don’t worry: you’ll understand it, and yourself, more, when he’s done with you.

ASIDE FROM THIS, there will be a lot of peer learning from a dozen or so couples who, like you, are trying to make it work.

for more information, to ask questions, or to register, contact Ira Bryck at 413 545 1537 or bryck@contined.umass.edu

 

 

 

CONGRATULATIONS to Susan White and Mark O'Connell, spouses in business and owners of Photography by Susan White and Mark O'Connell of Norwell, Mass., who guessed that the audacious letter (below) was penned by "the Queen of the Air" Amelia Earhart, to George Putnam, who proposed to her 6 times before she finally agreed, under the terms of that letter. Susan and Mark therefore attend our November 20th Summit for Spouses in Business for free!!! The rest of you, the price is right!! so send those checks and registrations before the room fills up (this workshop will be for about a dozen couples in business).