Staying Calm When Everyone Else Isn’t: Why Our Brains React and What We Can Do About It
Wed, Sept 2, 6:30pm, Zoom Entry Window: 6:00 PM – 6:25 PM
Seniors West of the Tetons, 60 S Main St, Driggs
Conflict is inevitable. Escalation isn’t. Learn the neuroscience behind difficult conversations and practical techniques to stay calm, reduce defensiveness, and build stronger connections at work, at home, and in everyday life.
Drawing on neuroscience and more than 14,000 mediations, Carol explains why conflict escalates, why people become reactive under stress, and how we can respond in ways that build understanding instead of division. Participants will leave with practical tools they can use immediately in the workplace, at home, and throughout the community.
This presentation is especially valuable for leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, nonprofit organizations, public servants, employers, and anyone who regularly works with people. Free and open to the public, Carol’s 60 minute talk will be followed by a Q&A.
We would love for you to join us in person to see Carol Barkes live! If you can’t make it in person, we still want you to get all the great information. Technology permitting, you can tune in to our listen-only stream on Zoom.
We are all more reactive than we used to be. Work feels heavier, families feel more strained, and small disagreements can turn into something bigger before either person realizes what happened. In this talk, Carol Barkes explains why: what actually happens in the brain the moment we feel threatened, criticized, or dismissed, and why logic and good intentions often cannot reach someone whose brain has already shifted into defense mode. Drawing on more than 14,000 mediated cases, she walks the audience through what is really happening beneath the surface of a heated conversation, whether it is with a coworker, a spouse, a teenager, or a stranger at the grocery store, and gives them specific tools for staying clear headed themselves and helping the people around them do the same. Audiences leave with a new way of understanding conflict and connection, and something they can use in their very next difficult conversation.
Carol Barkes spent the first half of her life running into fires and the second half pulling people out of them. Before becoming one of the nation’s leading voices on the neuroscience of conflict, she served as the first female firefighter for the City of Redwood City, California. The experience taught her calm isn’t a personality trait, it’s a skill. Today, as founder of the Institute of Applied Conflict Resolution and Mediation, Carol has guided more than 14,000 civil and family mediations, with a resolution rate exceeding 95 percent. Right here in Idaho, she redesigned the Fourth District Court’s mediation program using neuroscience-informed principles and watched the resolution rate climb from 58.4 percent to 85.5 percent. She has spoken twice at the United Nations both in New York and in Geneva, delivered two TEDx talks watched by millions worldwide, and was named by Fox News as America’s leading neuroscience based conflict resolution expert. She teaches the neuroscience of conflict management at Boise State University and the College of Southern Idaho, and she translates brain science into tools people can use in their very next conversation, at work, at home, and everywhere in between.
