The Training

This certification licenses you to use the skills, exercises, information and handbooks in your work with families. Mental health counselors, social workers, and educators have incorporated these skills to provide workshops and seminars to families within their communities.

Many have taken the certification to become instructors for the COMMON GROUND course, adding this powerful tool to their parent education businesses. We have also trained many teens to assist adults as co-instructors for the course.

The training is 3½ days and provides opportunities for personal development, role-plays, simulations, and coaching. Participants have a chance to examine their own, often unresolved, adolescent issues, their belief systems about parents and teens, and their communication styles in delivering training information to diverse audiences (i.e., adults and adolescents) to achieve the greatest impact.

How This Certification Training Benefits You

Because we have a commitment to quality service, we offer a unique training format. Part of the training involves spending time on personal development that encourages you to examine your own belief systems and judgments. This experiential framework offers you an invaluable opportunity to move past barriers so that you can be a successful instructor. We have certified over 120 instructors who now offer professional and high-impact courses by bringing creativity, confidence and humor to their educational process. Qualifications to take the certification training include any of the following:

• Experience as a parenting instructor of another quality parenting course
• Experience working with families through teaching, counseling, or social services
• On-the-job training as a parent, grandparent, or foster parent

Building Your Own Business-There's Consistent Demand Out There!

The demand for the COMMON GROUND course is overwhelming! Parents, teachers, counselors, psychologists, social service agencies, churches, private and state organizations are searching for ways to bridge the "gap" that every generation experiences. Many organizations are interested in offering the COMMON GROUND course on-site for parents and their teens. Some of our instructors have been successful in obtaining grants for the purpose of teaching COMMON GROUND (some people have been successful in winning a grant to pay for the COMMON GROUND instructor/co-instructor training course!). Others use the handbooks and the skills they learn in this training to enhance their work with youth and families.

It is easy to enroll families into the COMMON GROUND course. Many instructors recoup their training expenses with the first COMMON GROUND course they teach, which is almost unheard of with a new business. Since very few courses address the parent-teen relationship, this makes the COMMON GROUND course at the forefront for preventing the major issues that tear families apart.

Who Will Certify Me As An Instructor?

Your trainers will be the co-authors of COMMON GROUND. They have combined, extensive experience in parenting, training, family counseling, marketing and public relations. In addition to training you to teach the COMMON GROUND course, they will also instruct you on ways to be effective in marketing and enrolling students for your courses.

Once you have graduated from the COMMON GROUND instructor training, you set the fees and the schedule for your courses. You can adapt the format to meet the needs of the community in which you live. This becomes your business and the only requirement is to purchase your materials through our company-there are no royalties or membership fees, ever!

COMMON GROUND is about magic. Not sleight of hand, pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat kind, but rather the magic that happens when people with different perceptions begin to cherish each other and join together for a unified goal. We invite you to become a COMMON GROUND instructor and to be an active participant in the positive force that can heal our society-help us create a new legacy for our children and our children's children.