What is The Encounter?

The Encounter hosts transformational personal growth experiences that will help you transform the way you think about yourself, your relationships, your past, and your future so you can create the life you want. Using a faith-based, therapeutic, proven framework of experiential exercises, The Encounter will help you understand how your story has shaped you, uncover what is holding you back, and discover the tools and action steps you need to reach your fullest potential.

With two-, three- and four-day intensives, The Encounter is designed to give you accelerated change as you do deep work and get results that take most people a year of traditional therapy to get.

What Makes The Encounter Different

Accelerated Transformation

The Encounter is not just a few days of personal growth where you might leave feeling better but not experiencing real, lasting change. Through an intentionally designed series of experiential exercises, we will take you on a journey that will shift your perspectives, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs so that you leave truly transformed. It’s like getting a year of therapy in a long weekend.

Proven, Therapeutic Framework

The Encounter’s framework is based on principles and methods from therapy, psychology, Christian spirituality, and more. This experiential model has been used in life coaching and therapeutic workshops for over 50 years and is proven to help you change your life quickly.

Individualized Outcomes

Whether you’re trying to overcome a specific problem in your life, get unstuck, or just grow and become a better version of yourself, The Encounter will help you get what you need to move forward into an empowered life.

Empowering Tools

The Encounter isn’t just about having a one-time experience where you might gain some awareness and then quickly fall back into old patterns. It gives you practical tools that you can use to gain perspective and take an empowered approach to everyday relationships and life events. It puts the ownership of your life in your hands, so you can move forward into the life you want.

What Our Experiences Are Made Of

Experiential work is simply the process of learning by doing. Your life experiences up until now have shaped the way you think, feel, and live, and it’s through experience that you transform those areas. 

At Encounter events, we use a combination of teaching, somatic and experiential exercises, interaction, sharing, and sensory experiences like music to create a powerful journey of transformation. These will help you achieve real change in your life (instead of just head knowledge or awareness)! 

Mini-Lectures: The trainer or participants may offer points of view about different subjects. Whether you agree or disagree is your choice. Be willing to discuss and explore your perspective with others in the group. The value will be in getting clear about what you really do believe and testing out how you stand for what you believe. 

Sharing: Sharing is voluntary. Sharing can happen one-on-one, in small groups, or with the whole group. All during the training you will have a chance to know yourself better by sharing, talking about what you are thinking and what you are learning, and hearing about your own and others’ experiences. Just like in life, participation equals value! The more that you participate the more value that you experience and the more you create for others.

Small Group Exercises: You will, at different times, meet with a group of about 4-6 other participants for casual discussions or specific relational exercises.

One-on-One Interaction: In order to make progress, you may be asked to answer a number of questions, tell a story, complete sentences, or take on a particular body position (like standing up). You will have an opportunity to see new solutions for the problems and issues that you struggle with and to support the other participants to do the same. 

Listening: To increase your ability to listen carefully and to discover how well you listen, occasionally the trainer will request that you close your eyes.

Interaction with the Trainer: At times you may be talking directly with the trainer. The trainer will challenge you to look at your life in terms of personal responsibility, to consider what prices you and others pay for your decisions, and to consider where you play the “victim” and where you take responsibility for your choices. You may feel challenged when looking at your life and your choices from other perspectives or working with things that you are not used to addressing, but the results are well worth it!

Music: Music is an important part of the experience. The music is adapted to many preferences and styles and is always thematic. You are encouraged to listen to the words as well as the tune.

Homework: During evening or meal breaks throughout the training, you will be asked to complete written homework. The homework is designed to prepare and support you for the next phase of the training. It will usually take at least 30-45 minutes to complete each time.

Worship: You will discover and explore your own creative and powerful expressions of worship and have the opportunity to be involved in individual and group worship during the training.