Neutrals spend a huge amount of time dealing with emotion. Our parties' conflicts are driven by the energy of high emotions, and those powerful forces are constantly present in the room. There as many ways to manage those emotions as there are practitioners. One thing that can make a real difference to the quality of our practice, though, is increasing our parties' emotional granularity.

This training offers the opportunity to learn why and how emotional granularity can benefit our parties, explain how the underlying biological processes work, expand our emotional vocabulary overall, and ultimately find out how to "tune in" our parties' feelings.

To begin, the research on emotional granularity will be briefly presented. Individuals with more emotional granularity (the ability to clearly and precisely identify their feelings) are much more able to control their reactions to those emotions. In addition, the greater a person's emotional granularity, the less likely they are to suffer from mental illness. These individuals react less aggresively in negative situations, are less likely to allow emotions to cloud moral or rational judgments, and are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.

If we are to help parties identify and name their emotions, they will need words. Words like "Anger" or "Love" are really broad concepts, and it's important to dissect the smaller emotional reactions underneath. Rage is very different than Irritation, after all, and Anger might really be misidentified Fear. The English word Love fills in for seven different Greek words, each providing important nuance. This is an opportunity to share and exchange words and descriptors for specific emotional states.

This training will also dedicate time to constructing new words on the fly, when the appropriate word isn't at hand (or doesn't exist). What do you call the feeling of hesitating to answer a friend's question honestly because you don't want to hurt their feelings? Let's call it Contrittery (a bit contrite, and very jittery). Learning to help our parties create words that sound (and more importantly feel) right for them is the ultimate goal.

The training is two to four hours, and the standard fee is $350 to $700 plus expenses. (An Advanced, seven-hour, interactive version is also available.)