So, hello again. I'd like to take a few minutes now to talk about why you may want to take this course, what you might get out of this course. What we hope you will get out of this course. We've all faced times in our lives, in our work lives, and in our broader lives, when we were faced with values conflicts and maybe we felt we didn't know how to speak. We didn't know what to say. We were afraid that even if we did speak, no one would really pay attention to us. Or we were afraid we might alienate someone who was important to us perhaps a boss, or perhaps a friend, or a colleague. And for all those reasons we just felt ill equipped to act on our values. That's an uncomfortable position to be in and it can be very dispiriting. What this course is about is actually helping us to learn to have the skills, the competence, the confidence, and the comfort to be able to voice and act on our values effectively in those sorts of situations. It's about enabling us to bring our whole selves to our workplace and to our wider lives. We're going to do this in three ways. We're going to share with you some of the research that supports and explains what works and why it works. We're going to share with you some case stories, some case studies of people who have actually already done this successfully as in the story of Susan and the client who fell through the cracks. And we're also going to do it through, and this is very important, through pre-scripting, through practice, and through peer coaching. And you'll learn more about why that's so important later. So what I like to do now is talk a little bit about the fact that this course can be useful to many different sorts of learners. So I don't know who all of you are but I'm imagining that some of you may be managers and you may be wanting to take this course because you want to learn to be able to create a culture in an environment in your workplace that enables your teams and your employees to work effectively. You may be wanting to learn better how to speak up and act effectively to your supervisors and to your bosses in the organization. Or you're maybe people who are trying to design an initiative, or a training program, or some sort of experience for your employees that will enable them to more effectively and more often act ethically in the workplace. And you will be hearing from some managers later in the course, some interviews, where they will share stories of how they have done this using the Giving Voice to Values approach that you're learning about. But some of you who are taking this course may be educators and faculty, and what you are interested in, I hope, is finding ways, a methodology, ways that you might integrate and prepare your students for ethical action within your own course. Whether it's a finance course, or an accounting class, or a marketing class, or a general management class, or anything else, without your having to be a philosopher or to teach philosophy. This will be about teaching people to act using the language, and the skills, and the frameworks of your discipline, but to pursue values driven leadership in their workplace. And then there also maybe some of you in this course who are individual learners, who simply want to learn about this methodology so you can apply it more in your own life, so that you can be feeling more confident and more competent at acting on your own values more of the time. So this course will be designed to address all of those issues. Now, you might ask who is already using Giving Voice to Values. It's a pretty large group. There are nearly a thousand pilots that we know of. There's many more because the materials are available for free online. But but people who've actually contacted us it's nearly a thousand on all seven continents including the Antarctic, believe it or not. The work has been translated, the books have been translated into Chinese, and into Korean, and there's Thai translation coming. Some of the materials have been developed into Russian and there's more, more is still coming. Some of the materials have been translated into Flemish and it's being used with different sorts of audiences although we originally developed this curriculum for use with business schools, business students and business faculty. And it is being used in many, many business schools around the world at the MBA level, at the undergraduate level, at the executive education level. But now it's also being used by companies who want to build this into their leadership development, and their ethics development trainings within their organization. It's been used in the U.S. military. It's been used in the Australian police force. Increasingly people are using it in healthcare education, nursing, and medicine. And there are nonprofit organizations who have used this approach in their own work. So it's grown quite widely beyond its original intent. So the last thing I want to do right now is to ask you before you plunge into this course is to take a moment to set your intentions about what you want to get out of this course. I don't know if you've noticed this but what we know is that if people actually set their intention, if you think consciously about what you want to get out of an experience. And even if you actually express it, say it out loud, write it down, you're more likely to actually reap those benefits. Because you're cued in, you cued yourself mentally to be paying attention to the lessons that are going to be useful to you. So I'm going to ask you to set your intentions right now in two ways. First, I'm going to ask you to take a moment and jot down the answers to two questions. The first question is, why do I think this course will be meaningful to me? In other words, think about why did you pick it out of the course list? Pay attention to the instinct or the appeal, the draw, the need that you were responding to. Take yourself seriously there. So why do I think this course will be meaningful to me? Jot that down. And then answer a second question, what do I hope to accomplish by taking this course? And maybe list out a few things that you hope you will be able to walk away with. So that you will be listening for those things and practicing those things as the course goes on. And then the second thing I'd like you to do is take a look at the required course materials that come along with this course and you're going to see something called the GVV survey, and I'm going to ask you to complete that survey. What that survey is that it's brief and it's just a set of questions that are intended to surface some of your starting assumptions about how you think about values, about how you think about values conflicts, about how you think about your own capacity to act effectively, about what you think is possible. We want you to do that now at the beginning of the course because as the course proceeds and we revisit the topics on that survey you may hear things that either support your coming in assumptions or maybe differ from your coming in assumptions. And this is going to be a way for you to begin to assess and think about, am I changing any of my views here? Am I making it more possible for me to act on my values by thinking about values in a different way? And so, that's a very important first step. So what I'd like to do now, if you will, is just take a moment and complete that survey.
