Grace Chatting

At long last! The Relationship academy will officially launch on 1 June 2012.

http://relationshipacademy.co.uk

The Story So Far

I first got the idea of a Relationship Academy back in the 1990s when I saw quite a number of divorced and separated couples for Family Mediation, as they divided up their property and assets. Often this would be accompanied by a great deal of hostility amongst the parties concerned; but by far the most difficult ones for me were those where it was obvious that they still cared for each other.

I thought it so sad that here was a family which had split up when perhaps with the right intervention they may have been able to restore their relationship or marriage. Many of them had gone to seek couple counselling with various agencies but without success. I wasn’t sure what the answer was myself, because I wasn’t having as much success as I would have wished for with couples whom I saw for counselling.

Breakthrough

Alan and I went off to work at our coaching centre in Spain and during that time I offormed a view that perhaps a coaching approach was what would work best with couples. I began to have 3-4 hour Breakthrough sessions with couples  and almost immediately the outcomes were much better, and couples really enjoyed the process. The whole business was so much more positive for all of us. Increasingly I would hear people say “Why don’t they teach this in schools?”  Yeah… why don’t they? I thought.

Why don’t they teach this at school?

We all know that schools were set up to meet the needs of commerce and industry… not people. I seriously considered where DO people learn about relationships? After all we can learn to drive, ski, cook, speak different languages etc., but where do you go to learn about relationships? The obvious answer is, from their parents, but often this is not a good idea. It’s a bit like installing windows 95 on your computer and wondering why it doesn’t work very well. Likewise, even if our parents had a good relationship, we live in an entirely different world now than they did.

Fractured Families

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons that prompted me to start the Relationship Academy is the fact that many adults today (my children amongst them) have grown up in single parent households and that figure is now more than 60% of children are growing up with no role model or first hand experience of an exclusive committed couple relationship. In my view this puts these children at a disadvantage as far as having a successful relationship is concerned. We know that when people feel competent they feel more confident, and when they they feel more confident they become more competent. Somehow we need to find a way to raise people’s competence in relating skills.

My Vision

I considered how these young people and future generations might be able to learn this stuff and decided that the fairly recent advances in technology is the answer… online.What I want to do is to firstly, stem the flow of family breakdown by targeting youngish parents   and secondly, to provide some psycho-education to young people through a series of short experiential webinars. I think that providing low/no cost webinars to schools to access might be a way of reaching a wider audience.

Feedback

I would very much welcome your feedback. It has been a steep learning curve for me because I had difficulty finding techies who really understood what I wanted to do so I set about learning how to set it all up myself from scratch. It is very tempting to keep re-recording my webinars as I improve how I do them but I would never be finished at that rate… so Relationship Academy will launch on 1 June 2012.

Free Webinar Series

This link will take you through to the Free webinar series;Click Here

Love well,

     Grace

written by Grace \\ tags: Divorce, family breakdown, fractured families, marriage, relationshipacademy, Relationships