Let's Take It To The Mats!

Couples Communication and Collaborative Marriage Skills

Couple Communication is a program that helps you understand and connect with your partner better. You learn 11 skills and processes to communicate effectively about day-to-day events and important issues.

In the program, you gain skills and tools that improve every aspect of your life — with your partner, your family and friends, and with people at work and elsewhere.

How it works

Over 700,000 couples have used these research-based tools to strengthen and grow their relationships. Our instructors will use their experience and expertise to help you put these concepts and skills to work in your everyday life.

Building a Healthy Relationship

Recognize the 7 Ingredients of a Collaborative Marriage

Choosing Communication Styles

Identify ineffective and effective ways of talking and listening

Improve the quality of your communication

Using the awareness wheel

Understand yourself and situations better – a foundation for effective communication

Apply 6 talking skills to connect in a clear and constructive way

Mapping Issues

Combine the talking and listening skills

Make decisions and resolve conflicts collaboratively

Learning Formats and issues

In a Group with an instructor and several other couples – in sessions totaling 8 hours

By yourselves as a couple with an instructor – often six 50-minute sessions

COUPLE COMMUNICATION II Advanced program – extends the use of skills taught in COUPLE COMMUNICATION I into processes for you to continue building a collaborative relationship. It includes managing your own, and responding to your partner’s, anger more effectively.

included in the program

The Skills Zone

Staying skilled – regardless of what the other person does

Applying – a “collaborative operating system” in important conversations.

Managing Anger

Recognizing – 4 unhealthy expressions of anger

Using – a healthy process for putting anger to work constructively.

Responding to my partners anger

Being alert – to your own typical reactions to your partner’s anger

De-escalating – tension and acting in positive ways for your relationship.

Aligning Your Relationship

Exploring – our values and goals

Setting – plans for the future.

Learning Formats and Methods

In a Group with an instructor and several other couples – in sessions totaling 8 hours

By yourselves as a couple with an instructor – often five 50-minute sessions

We will teach couples how to:

Enhance their well-being and nurture their relationship

Spot and change breakdowns in communication

Speak clearly and constructively using six talking skills

Listen to understand using five listening skills.

Deal with ‘what is’ personal and relational.

Transmute conflict into collaboration.

Enjoy a collaborating operating system.

Increase self-awareness instead of focusing on partner awareness.

Expand awareness of non-routine issues.

Understand the mental view that exposes caring and uncaring.

Let’s Take It to The Mat!

When couples come together to learn collaborative listening and talking skills, they engage in conversations while maneuvering on floor mats, enhancing their listening and understanding and self-awareness through various activities and training:

Active Listening Exercises: Each partner practices truly hearing and understanding the other’s perspective, without interruptions or judgments, fostering empathy and trust. Couples receive feedback by reading their partner’s eye contact, tone, and other non-verbal cues. Sometimes words aren’t needed.

Shared Conversations: Through shared experiences, couples engage in exercises that require teamwork and cooperation to enhance empathy and collaboration. By slowing down their conversations, couples gain the ability to hear, see, and feel what is unfamiliar.

Open Dialogue: Curates courage to build trust and express thoughts and feelings, lending honesty and vulnerability, and strengthening the emotional bond. Partners skillfully resolve conflict together to find solutions to challenges, which cultivates a sense of partnership, shared accountability, and responsibility.

Mapping the Issue: By practicing listening and awareness skills on mats, couples build a stronger foundation for their relationship, enhance communication and connection, and deepen their understanding of each other.