What is Real Dialogue?
Healthy Conflict & Respect for Differences
Real Dialogue™ is a set of principles, practices and methods for healthy conflict as the means for growth and development in relationships, creativity, and productivity.
Like fire, conflict is used by people for both creative and destructive purposes. Healthy conflict increases problem-solving, wisdom, and love while unhealthy conflict, and avoidance of conflict, result in polarization, dehumanization, and war. Ending war is plausible if we can engage in healthy conflicts and learn from all sides of our disagreements.
Every project we develop, from science and technology to art and culture, to religion and personal relationships, involves searching for truth through opposing viewpoints.
Real Dialogue™ offers evidence-based skills, methods, and knowledge for welcoming differences and regulating our drive to simply defeat others. Our human superpower is self-awareness: our ability to perceive our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. As humans we can train our awareness (mindfulness) and develop self-knowledge and self-acceptance. These experiences permit us to regulate our emotional reactivity to respect diverse viewpoints, ways of being, ethnicities, and cultures.
Our Curriculum includes online and in-person events and courses that teach, explore, inquire into our principles:
// Know Thyself: Discover the meaning of living a human life
// Speak and Listen Responsibly: Use the skill of Real Dialogue
// End Dehumanization and War: Defeat delusions of superiority
// Learn from Failure, Defeat, and Death: They are your teachers
Ultimately Real Dialogue™ is a social movement for guiding the future of human consciousness towards development, not destruction.
BEING HUMAN: A Course
The Operator’s Manual for Living Wisely, Loving Well & Leading Confidently
Six Live Online Sessions with Polly Young-Eisendrath PhD, plus
Practice Pods, Workbook, and Much More
Begins Tuesday, July 21, 2026 • 1:00 PM ET
JOIN BEING HUMAN
How can you remain engaged and hopeful about yourself and your life—no matter what?
Most of us believe confidence comes from success, self-improvement, or empowerment. Yet the experiences that shape us most deeply are loss, conflict, disappointment, failure, or unwelcome change. Through them, we can discover our own natural wisdom: surprising insight, clarity, courage, creativity and compassion that emerge when we “drop the ego” or our belief in control. Befriending our lives, not perfecting them, is the secret to finding the wisdom of the masters through our own experiences.
Being Human is a six-week live journey that combines developmental psychology, Jungian wisdom, mindfulness, and the principles and practice of Real Dialogue to help you embrace and expand your life, as it is.
Is Being Human for You?
SEEKERS — Live Wisely
Discover how adversity, uncertainty, and loss can become sources of natural wisdom.
LOVERS — Love Well
Learn to speak authentically, listen deeply, and remain curious during conflict, and build relationships grounded in trust.
LEADERS — Lead Confidently
Navigate difficult conversations without polarization and lead with confidence and humanity.
During Six Weeks Together You’ll Learn
Remain calm and curious during disagreement.
Listen without becoming defensive.
Speak authentically without making a case for yourself.
Transform conflict into understanding.
Learn from mistakes and failures instead of feeling ashamed.
Build confidence grounded in self-awareness.
What Participants Say
“Real Dialogue is an ongoing mindfulness practice that I will engage in for the rest of my life. From my perspective, it is the most important way of being with another human being.”
“I used to avoid conflict. Today I approach disagreement with greater humility, curiosity, and respect for people who see the world differently.”
“Real Dialogue has become a mindfulness practice of speech and listening. It has given me the freedom to ask better questions—of myself and of others.”
This Course Includes
Six live online sessions (recordings included)
Weekly Real Dialogue Practice Pods
Beautifully designed digital workbook
Guided practices and resources
Supportive community of seekers, lovers, and leaders
Investment: $495
Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD
Founder & Executive Director
Center for Real Dialogue
Machrie Moor Standing Stones: 4,500-year-old ceremonial landscape on Scotland's Isle of Arran oriented to align with the rising sun on the solstice, taken from the Westerly view.
Photo by Jeremy Woodcock
What is the Center
for Real Dialogue?
The Center for Real Dialogue is a non-profit organization that was founded and developed by Polly Young-Eisendrath who is a widely-recognized psychologist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and mindfulness teacher.
The Center provides evidence-based practices, education and training in the skills and methods of Real Dialogue through free podcasts and other public programs, fee-based affordable training for individuals and groups, and continuing education for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy.
Real Dialogue Skill
The three-part skill of Real Dialogue is Speaking for Yourself, Listening Mindfully, and Remaining Curious. Through learning, practicing and teaching this skill, individuals learn how to speak and listen in ways that foster healthy disagreements, learning from conflicts, and remaining curious, even when emotionally activated.
Real Dialogue Method
This facilitation method (for difficult conversations) is rooted in evidence-based and precise techniques from mindfulness, psychodrama and psychoanalysis. People learn how to do both solo and co-facilitation through advanced training processes. Contracting our Real Dialogue Specialists for facilitation of difficult conversations is also a fee-for-service offer that can be arranged with the Center for Real Dialogue for your group or organization.
Dialogue Therapy Training for Professionals
The Center offers comprehensive training for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy — a time-limited, structured therapy that draws on mindfulness, psychoanalysis, and psychodrama to address the complexity of 21st century relationships for couples and other adult pairs.
Our Impact
Reaching out globally and locally, the Center offers free education through two podcasts and local public programs to help people understand and master our natural tendencies to make enemies, blame others, and create stereotypes when we avoid conflict or become polarized.
What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you.
What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.
— James Baldwin, Author
Read, Listen, and Watch
Hear how the skill and method behind Real Dialogue™ can make a difference.
