Developmental Practice Series

a nine-week course in being who we want to be

IS Developmental Practice Series

Skillful relating to inner and outer challenges. Liberation from stuckness and not-okay-ness. Spacious ease and equanimity. These are learnable skills, freely available through interactive, relational, intentional practice in a supportive environment.

The key mechanism of psychological adult development is (roughly) perspective-expansion — our ability to move from "being caught up in it" to "seeing, welcoming, and working with it". Leveraging years of action-research experience from Intentional Society, the Developmental Practice Series assembles a powerful sequence of practices supporting post-conventional personal development.

In plain words, we're building a bridge to "being who we want to be" beyond what society typically offers us. This series is being run as a nine-week course on Thursdays starting July 10th, 2025, 9:00am to 10:30am Pacific (Noon Eastern, 4pm UTC, 6pm CEST).


Schedule and practices

Unit 1 — Awareness
July 10, July 17, July 24, 2025
  • Empathy Circle — receptive listening and reflection
  • Parts Work (IFS) — listening to and being with parts-of-self
  • Interpersonal Gap — perspectival awareness and frame hygiene
Unit 2 — Acceptance
July 31, Aug 7, Aug 14, 2025
  • T-Group — noticing and naming our experiences
  • Circling — welcoming everything in connection
  • Inquiry Spiraling — perspective weaving, collective dreaming
Unit 3 — Integrity
Aug 21, Aug 28, Sept 4, 2025
  • Nine Whys — (re)connecting to desire, motivations, and purpose
  • Pure coaching + Clean language — clean (space-holding, not self-injecting) coaching basics
  • Case Clinic — developmental coaching in action

Optional bonus session Sept 11, 2025 — wrap-up and retrospective.

After signing up, you'll receive a recurring calendar invite for all sessions. The skills do stack together in later practices, so we ask that participants intend to make at least 6 out of the 9 weeks.


Reflections from 2024 participants

THANK YOU SO MUCH multiple breakthrough insights, connection and emotional support, rich learningplease accept my deepest gratitude for your creative, powerful sessions which have benefitted me, and others, over the last months. Your skill and integrity are awe-inspiring. Please keep going!This was an awesome season of learning for me

About the facilitator

James Baker, facilitator

James Baker has facilitated over 200 Intentional Society practice sessions since 2021. He ran the first edition of this Developmental Practice Series in Q1 2024, and has also hosted a corporate-focused version called Relational Agility.

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