Designing & Leading Life-Changing Workshops: Creating the Conditions for Transformation in Your Groups, Trainings, and Retreats

The authors of this book write from a combination of extensive experience and solid research. This book is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to create or facilitate a workshop. The hard thing is that being a workshop leader requires a lot of inner work of your own! Luckily this book offers tools for that. Even better if you can join the authors for their courses at Kripalu, where you get to experience their teachings and do some of your own inner work in real time. I think they are also offering an online program now too, but I haven't experienced it personally. Great book, great authors, great experience with them at Kripalu.

Say goodbye to the voice of insecurities and fears regarding your leadership, teaching, and intervention skills. Say hello to a complete, digestible structure of mind-set, humanity, and science that will become your new home for your Self in your work (and even life)! Simply to read this spectacular book is to change already your relationship with your inner, genuine Self. You will imagine, with every page, how you will become the workshop/retreat/ training leader that your desires and longings say you can be. You can enjoy your personal calling in all the fullness of experience that you are imagining. This comprehensive book is the be-all, end-all book for “training the trainers.” It is the KEY to unlock so many doors that have been rusted shut from feelings of anxiety and self-doubt, or often, just lack of information!As a psychotherapist of some 40 yrs, I know the power of what is in this revelatory book. I have attended the workshop led by Ken, Lesli, and Jim (authors). They are vastly experienced, articulate, loving, wise, and very human. They embody and model everything they teach. They want you to succeed and know how to help you do just that. And if you ever get the chance to attend this workshop at Kripalu (magical place!), it just may be the most impacting gift you will ever give yourself---in addition to this phenomenal book.I have done a fair amount of training/workshops in my career. All went seemimgly ok, and all involved, for me, more than just performance-anxiety as well as often extreme over-stimulation, making it hard to decompress afterwards and sleep the night before and after. After my workshop experience at Kripalu, and using the workshop manual, I created many 3 hr. workshops (original content by me) that I had been envisioning. My personal experience of doing these workshops was the most calm, assured, anxiety-free enjoyment I have ever had, and it was so long in coming! I also designed and led a 5-day training in the therapy model I use. They were all successful and “masterfully done” was a repeated written review. And anything I can do, you can do better!!! If you consider yourself a change agent in any way in our world, don’t live the rest of your professional and personal life without this book by your side.

This was such a great book! I do a lot of workshops and webinars, and have been at it for 10+ years. Because of the suggestions in the book, I changed the intro and outro for all my workshops and have received an overwhelmingly positive reaction to this. It was easy to read, and a lot of the suggestions are simple and require very little prep, but good reflection. Highly recommend!

I had the great luck to participate in Ken Nelson and Lesli Lang’s course at Kripalu a number of years ago so when I heard about this book I was delighted. I was also deeply curious.Why delighted? Their course was so informative, comprehensive and high quality I wanted people who could not make the trip to the Berkshires to nonetheless have the benefit of their experience. In that regard, this book is a winner.Why deeply curious? I wondered whether they could translate such skill and depth of heart onto the printed page. ‘Modeling’ the best way to lead a workshop, in person during a workshop, is one thing; could they ‘show up’ on the printed page as well? In fact, they did. This book ‘transmits.’ Though not in the same room, you’ll meet these authors as the authentic, honest, wise people they are. Just like those of us in the workshops knew we were in good hands, as you read, you’ll sense that, too.Even better, unlike a weekend workshop, reading this book is like having a private tutorial with people who are the masters of their craft for as long as you care to keep at it and as often as you'd care to come back to is.As one who’s taken their workshop, I’m deeply grateful they chose to write this book. It is far more comprehensive than any weekend could offer. In addition, they’ve improved a set of materials we received at the workshop. Those materials are now far more comprehensive and provide any workshop leader with a running head start on every phase of planning and execution.I’ll never lead a workshop as well as they do. In fact, given the current pandemic state of the world, it will be a long time before I ever lead a workshop again.In the meantime, this book has given me a framework for thinking about how to improve other types of interactions with people in my work. Whether it’s an email, a Zoom meeting or a phone call, these authors have provided me with an approach to leadership that is transferable to those encounters, too. With luck, if I’ve learned their lessons well enough, even a Zoom meeting might well be transformational.