Being Human
Learn to Live Wisely, Love Well, and Lead Confidently
A Six-Week Live Course with Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD
BEING HUMAN
Learn to Live Wisely, Love Well, and Lead Confidently
A Six-Week Live Course with Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD
How can you remain engaged and hopeful about yourself and your life, no matter what happens?
Most of us believe confidence comes from success, self-improvement, or empowerment. Yet life continually reminds us otherwise. Relationships disappoint us. Colleagues misunderstand us. We make mistakes. We become more vulnerable. We lose what we love.
The secret to remaining engaged and hopeful is not avoiding these realities, but embracing them while strengthening your awareness so that you can discover the wisdom hidden within healthy conflict, challenge, limitation, and loss.
Being Human is a six-week course for seekers, lovers, and leaders. Through the principles and practices of Real Dialogue, you will learn how to remain curious when you disagree, listen without becoming defensive, speak authentically without attacking others, and learn from the very experiences you would rather avoid.
Our Team
SEEKERS:
LIVE WISELY
If you are drawn to understanding yourself more deeply, pursuing a spiritual path, or making sense of adversity and trauma, Real Dialogue will help you cultivate the self-awareness and self-knowledge needed for natural wisdom. You will learn how to use your own defeats, failures, and loss to awaken greater insight and meaning.
LOVERS:
LOVE WELL
Whether you are partnered, married, parenting, caring for family members, or navigating important friendships, Real Dialogue offers practical skills for creating healthier connections, deeper trust, and more authentic relationships. You will learn how to listen more carefully, remain curious longer, and speak with authenticity and humility.
LEADERS:
LEAD CONFIDENTLY
Whether you lead a family, a team, a classroom, a business, or a community, leadership begins with confidence in yourself. Real Dialogue will show you how to navigate difficult conversations without polarization and create relationships grounded in trust rather than control, helping others to do the same.
THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF REAL DIALOGUE
1. Know Thyself
Understand your own emotions, assumptions, biases, and limitations before attempting to change yourself or your relationships.
2. Speak and Listen Responsibly
Speak for yourself. Listen mindfully. Remain curious—especially when you disagree.
3. Resist Dehumanization and Polarization
Stop turning people into enemies, heroes, victims, or objects. Recover your shared humanity with everyone you encounter.
4. Learn from Defeat and Failure
Growth comes less from success than from learning from disappointment, misunderstanding, limitation, and loss.
BEING HUMAN INCLUDES
• Six live one-hour sessions with Polly Young-Eisendrath
• A digital workbook with four foundational chapters
• Weekly Real Dialogue Practice Pods facilitated by experienced faculty
• Digital resources, exercises and practices between sessions
• A supportive community of fellow seekers, lovers, and leaders
6 Week Courses
Week 1: Diving In: Principles and Practice
In the first week, I will introduce you to the overview of Real Dialogue as a perspective on living well with your life, as it is. You will also meet your cohort in the practice pod and receive the first chapter of the workbook, as well as other materials to help you getting oriented.
Week 2: Emotions and Self
In this week, we will look at how human emotions, self-consciousness, and the urge to control others develops for all humans in early family life. We will look at these aspects of being human in terms of the ways they benefit us and make us unique among mammals, as well as how they work against us in our feelings about ourselves, our relationships and our authority. We will begin to get the Big Picture of being human (not animal).
Week 3: Living in a Snow Globe
In week three, we will explore and experience how we each live within our own subjective world and see/hear/feel everything from our own first-person perspective. We will see how this condition can lead to emotional threat, defensiveness, conflict and isolation, on one hand, and mystery and individuation on the other.
Week 4: The Tension of Real Dialogue
In the fourth week, we will talk about and practice the Skill of Real Dialogue, unpacking the experience of Speaking, Listening, and Remaining Curious from a perspective of responsibility and humility.
Week 5: Being Wrong: Defeat and Failure
In this fifth week, we will take on board the facts about how humans are often wrong about what they see/hear/feel and remember. We will talk about how being wrong can become a wondrous playground for being humorous about yourself or a rigid prison of always defending yourself. We will explore Don Hoffman’s theory of “fitness beats truth,” in terms of the ways you defend yourself against what has already happened.
Week 6: Embracing the Gifts of Impermanence
In this final week, we will inquire into loss, impermanence and death as doorways to awakening and love. We will explore awakening, Near-Death-Experience, and a broken heart for what we can learn about wisdom.
You do not need to perfect yourself. You need to befriend yourself and embrace the life you have. Then you will discover your own natural human wisdom.
Being Human: July 21, 2026 1PM ET US