Senior Living Empower Hour

This month on the Senior Living Empower Hour, Rebecca Adelman, Esq. turns the hour over to Paige to talk about the work she has been building. A medical social worker by training and degree, Paige spent years in acute and post-acute care watching the kind of conflict that quietly dismantles good teams. In 2020 she went looking for a better answer than muddling through, and found it in Nonviolent Communication — completing a certification through the Center for Nonviolent Communication that she describes as equivalent to earning a master’s degree. What she brings back to senior living is not conflict avoidance and not conflict management as usual. It is a practical, teachable model for how to speak and listen without judgment, blame, or defensiveness, so that a team spends less of its finite energy on friction and more of it on the people it came to serve.

Paige will walk us through what that actually looks like on the floor: the pause and what a person is doing internally during it, the difference between a real request and a demand wearing a request’s clothes, and how a few deliberate words can turn a defensive standoff into a conversation with somewhere to go. She’ll share the paradigm shift at the heart of her work — the move from treating conflict as a problem to be endured toward treating it as a signal that something can be brought into better alignment.

And because this is the Convergence Era, Rebecca will draw out the connections that senior living leaders live with every day: how communication skill intersects with staff retention, family trust, survey readiness, and yes, the long quiet road that sometimes runs from an unaddressed conflict to a complaint or a claim. But that is the implication of Paige’s work, not the point of it. The point is that the way we talk to each other in hard moments is learnable, and Paige has built something to teach it.

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this program, participants will be able to:

1. Explain how the four components of the Nonviolent Communication framework — observation, feeling, need, and request — differ from the habitual patterns of evaluation, judgment, blame, and defensiveness that typically escalate a difficult conversation.

2. Describe the paradigm shift from treating workplace conflict as a problem to be avoided toward treating it as an indicator that something in a team or system can be brought into better alignment.

3. Apply pause and self-connection techniques to real-world senior living scenarios — such as a resident declining care or a disagreement between staff members — to interrupt escalation before a reactive response occurs.

4. Evaluate the distinction between a request and a demand in a given interaction, and construct a request that invites collaboration rather than compliance.