Episode 11: Listening Partnerships with Carolina Valencia Coleman

In this episode, I talk to Carolina Valencia Coleman. Carolina is a Colombian Australian, mother to 2 children, aged 11 and 8. She is a certified Aware Parenting Instructor and currently leads a Cultural Responsiveness Training Consultancy that specializes in safeguarding the cultural and racial dignity of children. Carolina is passionate about birth, caring for children and supporting parents through Listening Partnerships. In this episode Carolina shares her journey into Aware Parenting and how it saved her from the weight of exhaustion and worry that she originally experienced as a mother. We talk about the importance of Listening Partnerships – a term borrowed from Hand in Hand parenting – also known in Aware Parenting as Empathy Buddies. We discuss the need for us to be receiving compassion in order to be able to offer it to our children, and how this teaches our children compassion too. She describes how to undo our conditioning so we can listen with empathy and space in our listening partnerships and how to share, and how learning to do this makes it possible to support our children with loving, unconditional listening too. The Facebook group for finding a Listening Partnership that Carolina runs, can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2562318203992646/ The guide for Listening Partnerships can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GIec0EsSciZ0xeMuX8YbzkHnQlHz32lF/view?fbclid=IwAR2uV65FlgKkjCLyUvmbx-V9p83gcmORME-XE9GBMS4ilBiuo8E_eWjTiNE