Speaker seeks to take "war out of words"

Sharon Strang Ellison, M.S., the author of "Taking the War Out of Our Words," will be the featured speaker on Tuesday, July 12, for the free quarterly learning session sponsored by Citizens4Community.

As part of the Sisters Country Civility Project, ongoing trainings are offered to the general public at the Sisters fire hall. From 5 to 6 p.m., there will be an introduction to Speak Your Peace and the Civility Project for those who haven't yet heard about the program that began locally last January.

At 6:30 p.m., Ellison will lead a skill-building session on how to give constructive criticism, which is one of the core tenets of the Civility Project. She is a pioneer in the field of eliminating defensiveness and has presented her Powerful Non-Defensive Communication process as a guest speaker, presenter, and keynote speaker to more than a dozen professional fields, in public workshops, and for organizations and associations. Her clients are as varied as Hewlett Packard, Stanford University, Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Center for Dispute Resolution in London, England, and a number of social-change organizations.

Whatever the situation, whether social, family, or business, our communication has been "shaped by our focus on defensive self-protection and power struggle. Because we use our words as weapons instead of constructive tools, we often communicate in a way that increases conflict instead of resolving it," according to Ellison.

Currently a resident of Sunriver, Ellison graduated from Milwaukie High School, where she was elected best debater. While at Willamette University in Salem she won the Dorey Oratory Contest and spent her junior year at the University of Stockholm. She later graduated from the University of Oregon with a masters in juvenile corrections.

Much of her early career was spent as a group worker, and field and intake counselor with juveniles in Marion and Lane counties. In the '70s she was involved with skill-building programs for at-risk teens, their parents, and teachers.

From 1975-1986 she was a counselor in private practice and a consultant to Children's Services Division and for Lane County teachers and administrators, as well as teaching communication classes through Lane Community College. In 1986-87, Ellison was a scholar-in-residence at St. John's University in Minnesota while she worked on her book, which was ultimately published in 1998.

"I started thinking about the ideas for my book when I was a child, and can find the developing theme in my high school and college papers," Ellison said in response to the question of how she developed her process for non-defensive communication.

"The feedback I'm getting from a wide range of people in the field of psychology - as well as other fields - is that the process I've developed is unique in that it works very effectively to prompt people to drop their defenses, often instantly," she said.

For more information visit www.pndc.com.