A process-group playground for adults who want a place to relate deeply and grow
Are you looking for the kind of personal growth that would make you a stellar founder, leader, team member, parent, teacher, coach, therapist, worker, family member, person, or romantic partner?
How much better would it make your life if you could fulfill your potential as a relationship genius? What if you were a truly gifted communicator?
What if you weren’t scared to be authentic? If you knew how to say what needed to be said? Could truly hear and understand what needed to be heard? If you truly understood your strengths and your weaknesses?
What if you could supercharge your personal growth while feeling less isolated?
Join a Full Contact Group where you and seven of your peers, facilitated by me, will meet twice a month by video. You will gently and kindly coach each other into relationship genius so you accelerate in your leadership, work, friendships, family and romance.
Already psyched to join in?
“Colin’s work is about increasing fulfillment and happiness by asking us to think about what makes us truly happy and what’s really important in our lives.”
Arianna Huffington
To be good at life, you have to be good at relationships. BUT… they are hard.
How do you keep a worker motivated while correcting their performance? How do you discern your team’s stumbling blocks? How do you truly understand your children, your partner, your friends? How do you help them to understand you?
How do you become free to be yourself? How do you overcome your blocks? How do you become less scared to be who you really are?
To understand another person’s thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for him, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return — this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all too rare.
CARL ROGERS
In the 1970s, a psychologist named Carl Rogers designed a way that groups of people could meet together to learn such things, and more. Not by studying. Not by reading or being taught. Not by following a curriculum or agenda. But by being in vital, spontaneous, vulnerable relationship where members offered each other honest feedback in real time.
Rogers called these groups Encounter Groups. I call them Full Contact Groups because they are about being in Full Contact with yourself and others.
Already wondering how to join?
I’m still feeling the deeper learnings resonating and seeing the changes unfolding, and I believe that comes from being held accountable by a supportively honest group of people over an extended period. Colin’s insight and guidance shaped the journey, and I’m grateful that I was able to be a part of the group.
Deborah Knuckey
Do you wish you got more joy and pleasure from your work relationships, your friendships, your romantic life?
Full Contact Groups are like a playground for grown-ups. The game is communication and you get to play with it in a safe, friendly, no-risk environment. You get to experiment with new ways of being and, if you like them, take them out into the world.
We get so rigid. We often feel as though everything depends on saying or doing the right thing. We find ourselves obeying a lot of unspoken, unconscious rules in our relating. We feel constricted and dry and bored and isolated.
In Full Contact Groups, you get to experiment with and expand into new, spontaneous, playful, authentic ways of being. You also get instantaneous feedback from loving, kind peers. You get real-time feedback on the effects of your expansion. And your expansion–your personal growth–will be demanded.
Meanwhile, you will get the reassuring sense that your challenges are not just yours as you hear others struggling with similar things and you even get to use your experience to help them.
I’m so thirsty for something like this. What’s my next step?
“I and the other members of Colin’s carefully curated small group embarked on a journey of self-discovery that culminated for me in a life-changing way… I am so happy that I have been able to take what I learned from Colin and my group members and build a foundation of confidence and inner peace.”
Jennifer Dill
Do you feel you’ve grown small and stifled and you want to explore and expand? Are you looking for something new in life or career without knowing what?
The theory behind Full Contact Groups is that each of us has inside us all the resources we need to be the be the people we want to be. But over our lives, punishing events and interactions close parts of us down, and we stop being in full contact with ourselves and the world around us. This causes us leave some of our own potential untapped. We get blocked.
The group is intended, through authentic, vulnerable conversation, to help us get back in full contact with ourselves, with others and with life. Being in full contact, we can then bring all our resources to bear on our lives, careers and relationships. We can grow and explore and come to know ourselves well enough to know our next steps.
I’d love to do this. What’s next?
One great reason to join the group is because it is fun and interesting and growth-promoting and makes you feel alive!
Other benefits include:
- Supercharging your growth
- Feeling less isolated
- Learning ways of being in relationship and leadership
- Honest feedback from peers
- Developing self-awareness
- Learning to relate to people unlike you
- Companionship
- Exploring motivations, blocks, blind spots and hidden potentials
- Learning to listen, to be heard, to assert, to take space
- Learning to be effective in a group or team
- Honest feedback from coach and peers about how you relate
This sounds great! How do I apply?
In Full Contact Groups, you don’t learn a list of strategies. You actually change. You might find you become more:
- Hopeful … as you see others grow
- Empathic/Compassionate … as you understand their struggles
- Connected … as you see you are a lot like others
- Altruistic … as you experience how you are helpful to others
- Flexible … as you become aware of old relationship patterns and try out new ones
- Socially skilled … as you get to practice in a new environment
- Conscious … as you learn to participate in a group and observe yourself at the same time
- Whole … as old relationship patterns are replayed and healed
Yes! Tell me how to apply.
About the facilitator, Colin Beavan
Coach, writer, social change activist, and consultant Colin Beavan is the author, most recently, of How to Be Alive: A Guide To The Kind Of Happiness That Helps The World. He attracted international attention for his year-long lifestyle-redesign project and the wildly popular book, No Impact Man, and the Sundance-selected documentary film that it inspired.
He has appeared on Nightline, Good Morning America, The Colbert Report, The Montel Williams Show, and NPR, and his story has been featured in news outlets from Time magazine to the New York Times. A sought-after speaker by wide-ranging audiences, he also coaches individuals looking for better ways to live and consults with businesses that want to improve the lives of their stakeholders.
He has spent many years training in the techniques of humanist counseling and facilitation and as a senior dharma teacher in the Zen tradition. He has coached, mentored and guided hundreds of people.
Full Contact Groups–Details and How To Apply
Why are playgrounds are important for children? It is because it is a place were they can run and climb and–inevitably–fall without hurting themselves. They get to play with their bodies and grow and change and discover their physical potentiality without risking any more than a scraped knee.
Full Contact Groups are exactly the same for grown-ups. They are communication playgrounds where the adults explore things like vulnerability, emotionality, risk-taking, experimentation and authenticity without the risk of damaging a relationship or losing status at work. Like any playground, you will learn not by reading or being lectured at but by “playing.”
Full Contact Groups:
- Meet twice a month for 90 minutes by Zoom
- Have carefully curated memberships
- Include six to eight people
- Are Facilitated by Colin Beavan
- Run perpetually but require a minimum six-month commitment
- Are scheduled by joint calendar availability of the group
- Are not a substitute for therapy or other clinical support
- Cost $375 per month*
*Colin is committed to diversity and inclusion. Discounts are available for anyone under-resourced financially. Please let us know in the application.