The 'No More Harm' Conference is a national conference that focuses on bullying, harassing and discriminating behaviour solutions. I submitted an abstract to it earlier this year and was accepted, so this June I’ll be flying to Queensland to share my views on bullying and universal laws, and what we can do inside the school system to consciously work with those dynamics rather than be at their effect.
Other speakers include
* the Executive Director of Bully Zero Australia Foundation,
* the Children’s eSafety Commissioner,
* various speakers on workplace bullying,
* a lawyer speaking about the Royal Commission on institutional responses to child sexual abuse,
* speakers on gender-based male violence, Aboriginal violence, and bystander behaviour
* a behaviour specialist on changing the blame/victim mentality
* speakers on youth empowerment, leadership and the role of social media.
There will also be workshops and poster presentations.
Dates are 26-27 June at the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Brisbane. The whole program is now published.
Included in your registration is access to presenter podcasts and Book of Proceedings after the conference.
I’d love to see you there!
* the universal dynamic governing bullying
* how bullying serves us
* the opportunities for growth for all concerned
* the fallout in all relationships when we don’t develop better communication skills
* a strategy schools can adopt to support children in mastering communication skills so that we don’t need the extremes of bullying
Here’s to creative solutions to better communication!
Liliane
‘Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love.
'Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, on in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.
‘Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with a sense of serious discomfort, no ‘point’ to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly - and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength, but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasise autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, ‘self-made’; we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realise that life depends - quite literally - on the capacity for love.
‘We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.'
- from The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
A few days ago I interviewed Clare Coffield, a Leadership Specialist and Empowerment Coach who experienced a stroke literally as she was speaking to an audience and writing on the whiteboard. She finished her presentation, sat down, and her body collapsed down one side.
The 'No More Harm' National Conference last Monday and Tuesday was a great success.