Relational Play Podcast from ThinkPlay Partners

When loved ones or friends are feeling distress, it can be very difficult for us to experience. We may feel unable to hang in with our loved ones, especially when we're stretched thin during difficult times. We may try and quickly name and fix others' distress in order to manage our own anxiety at witnessing it. We may simply turn away or shut down. How we can learn to better care for loved ones who are feeling distress?  Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene, authors of The Relational Book for Parenting explore our relational capacities for for supporting our loved ones during crisis. Listen and learn how to hold space for the distress of friends, co-workers and loved ones. It's a powerful capacity that can reduce our own anxiety and create deeper more meaningful connections.
Learn more about the The Relational Book for Parenting at ThinkPlay Partners.

In this episode of the Relational Play Podcast, explore what we call the Conflict Game, a powerful tool for helping even very young children better understand and navigate disagreements.  Our little ones can begin early differentiating between discussions, debates, disagreements, arguments and fights. Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene, authors of The Relational Book for Parenting, explain how the Conflict Game is one way to grow our rich human capacities for connecting across difference. Learning to manage, navigate, and resolve disagreements is key to creating and maintaining successful personal and professional relationships as we move through life. Learn more about this and hundreds of other relational games, stories and capacities in The Relational Book for Parenting by visiting us at ThinkPlay Partners.

What role does language play in defining our emotions for us? What happens when a feeling (a physical response to what is said or seen) is named for us before we have fully had time to sit with it or understand it? If we name a child's feelings as anxiety, when we might instead name them as excitement, what gets created? How we name our own feelings or the feelings of others plays a powerful role in who we are becoming. In this episode, Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene, authors of The Relational Book for Parenting explore the ways in which we can play with our experience of emotions to include a much wider range of possibilities and interpretations. Learn more about the The Relational Book for Parenting at ThinkPlay Partners.

Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene are the authors of The Relational Book for Parenting. Each episode of the Relational Play Podcast will explore a single relational practice, idea, or game designed to grow our capacity to form healthy, authentic personal and professional relationships.  

Episode #1 explores listening with curiosity, which invites us to be surprised; to see new sides of others, children or adults. We look to spot the positive emergent threads in conversations with others. In our curiosity, we can intentionally seek to be surprised, saying, "I won't try and predict how you will respond. Instead, I will look to be pleasantly surprised, to discover something new." In this way, we can become participant observers, asking questions, experiencing the moment, not trying to shift things. The implications for how conversations then play out are empowering for all of us.

Learn more about Mark and Saliha's work at ThinkPlay Partners.