{The Lutheran Ladies' Lounge} Sarah Goes to School: Understanding Others, Personal Values, Difficult Conversations

Thinking caps on, ladies! Class is in session!

Once again, Sarah’s sharing study notes from her graduate courses at Concordia University Irvine’s Townsend Institute for Counseling and Leadership. In this stimulating episode, she covers:

Macro cultures and their effect on organizations and communities
The value of articulating personal values, mission, and vision statements
A helpful model for engaging in difficult conversations

“What happens when we avoid hard conversations?” Sarah asks. “Things fester, grow, become more of a problem, become more stressful, and become harder to manage, right? So if we have the confidence to deal with something at the start, we can manage things in a better, more productive way. … We want to ultimately build up relationships and become closer to people, and dealing with conflict in a healthy manner can actually do that. Building up a culture of healthy confrontation means people live in truth with each other rather than avoiding the truth.”

Resources referenced in this episode include:

“Having Difficult but Effective Conversations” by Dr. John Townsend
Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein

Click to learn more about CUI’s Townsend Institute for Counseling and Leadership.

Connect with the Lutheran Ladies on social media in The Lutheran Ladies’ Lounge Facebook discussion group (facebook.com/groups/LutheranLadiesLounge) and on Instagram @lutheranladieslounge. Follow Sarah (@hymnnerd), Rachel (@rachbomberger), and Erin (@erinaltered) on Instagram!

The Lutheran Ladies Lounge is the podcast produced by KFUO Radio and hosted by Sarah Gulseth, Erin Alter, and Rachel Bomberger. Created for Lutheran ladies to have a place to escape to with inviting conversations, laughter, and fellowship with Lutheran sisters, we invite all of you Lutheran ladies to join Sarah, Erin, and Rachel on the sofa in the Lutheran Ladies Lounge to sit, rest your feet, and stay a while. If you’re a Lutheran lady, join us in our Facebook group: facebook.com/groups/LutheranLadiesLounge.

Sarah Gulseth

A proud Michigan native and fan of anything with the Mitten State on it, Digital Media Manager Sarah Gulseth is also a lover of historical war movies and anything with the label PBS Masterpiece. An avid bicyclist and women’s biking advocate, she rides her bike to work year-round and has the massive bike clothing and accessory collection to prove it. If it’s the weekend, she and her husband Luther are probably out riding bikes, or finding the next awesome coffee shop to frequent, or rehearsing for the next choir concert. You may also find her down a new rabbit hole on Google, researching the latest random fact she found on social media, while eating an unhealthy amount of apples (Macintosh from Michigan, of course) and raw almond butter.