Newt Bailey, Lead Trainer
Newt’s passion is to help people communicate with each other more deeply, to experience greater intimacy, and to find the potential for mutually-satisfying change that lies within conflict.
From his first training in 2005 Newt has set out to understand and share with others the essential core of NVC. He believes strongly in teaching the principles of NVC in a way that frees students from specialized language, and allows facility with connected communication to grow in small, quickly assimilated steps. The Communication Dojo has been Newt’s testing ground for his latest ideas and approaches, and he is now bringing it to BayNVC.
Since 2006 Newt has been facilitating NVC groups, and leading intro classes and class program like Foundations 1, Foundations 2, and his own Communication Dojo classes, in public and organizational settings, and with prisoners and parolees. He is also on the teaching team of John Kinyon’s NVC Mediation yearlong programs, most recently co-leading a yearlong program in Poland.
Leeza Pesenson, Assistant Trainer
Leeza is passionate about understanding how our minds work and how we connect with each other. She has a Masters in Cognitive Science and works as a User Experience Researcher by day.
Leeza fell madly in love with NVC after attending Newt’s drop-in classes in 2018 and has been a dedicated practitioner ever since. She has participated in immersion programs in NVC, Mediation, Conflict Coaching, and Inner Compass work with Oren Sofer, Roxy Manning, John Kinyon, and Arnina Kashtan. Since 2020 Leeza has assisted Newt and organized her own NVC practice and empathy groups. She is overjoyed to be sharing NVC on a larger scale as part of the Communication Dojo team.