What a busy three months we have had! December—which is cold and snowy where I am in Indiana—is a perfect backdrop for cozying up under a blanket with a warm mug of tea in my hands, and reflecting on the past months and the past year. I am buzzing with excitement for the coming year and all the possibilities that come with it. But, for now, I am forcing myself to be patient and let 2026 arrive in January, and not a moment before. The rest of this month is for me, and all of us, to reflect and reset: To reenergize ourselves before going back out into the world and doing the important work we do. At this time, I’d like to share with you what we have been up to in the few months since our last newsletter.

On October 14, 2025, John Burnham and Barbara McKay hosted our second webinar, Creating Magical Moments: Embodying CMM as a Practical Theory and a Theory for Practice. We had around 90 participants who joined the conversation to learn about the therapeutic potential of CMM. Thank you to all who attended and made this such a rich event!

We hosted our third webinar just recently on December 10, 2025, with Ilene Wasserman and Arthur Jensen, titled, What if We Didn’t Have to Agree? Preserving Relationships While Communication Across Differences. This was a timely offering of concrete tools for engaging in difficult conversations with loved ones—something many of us find ourselves doing during the holiday season. With three webinars under our belt for 2025, we are thrilled to look forward to even more online offerings in 2026. Beginning in January, we will be offering a webinar each month. In these 90-minute sessions we will explore the many diverse applications of CMM, hearing from friends of the CMM Institute about their practice and what we can all learn together as we collectively expand our thinking about communication, relationships, and social worlds.

At the moment we are looking forward to our January webinar with CMMi Steward, Beth Fisher-Yoshida, and our February webinar with researcher Theresa Southam. More information to follow soon!

You can follow us on Humanitix here to be notified whenever registration is live for a new event. Additionally, you can subscribe to our Substack here for monthly newsletters and other regular updates, including event announcements and more!

The CMM Institute also participated in the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD14) Conference throughout October. I hosted two live podcasts during RSDX-Online, which can be listened to on the Stories Lived. Stories Told. feed here, featuring guests, Mathilda Tham and Hannah Jones (Ep. 150) and Chris Speed and Claudia Westermann (Ep. 151). On Saturday, October 11, the CMM Institute hosted a “takeover” of the online conference, offering four unique sessions exploring CMM in the context of systems thinking. Recordings of each session can accessed for free here. Filter the results by day (Day 5, Oct. 11) to see all four sessions.

Finally, I was able to attend RSD14 in-person in Toronto, Canada to try something new! Throughout the conference I made myself available for some live podcasting, where I was joined by the conference’s participants to reflect on their experiences of the conference. You can listen to the resulting RSD14 Participant Podcast here. I found this experiment to be incredibly meaningful, and I am so grateful to Cheryl May and Su Lynn Myat for their willingness to take a chance and try something new!

Finally, I attended the RSD14 Retreat hosted by Seanna Davidson of the Systems School, where I captured some additional recordings to create an audio artifact of the day. This recording will be forthcoming.

On November 29, I was a guest on Jonathan Shailor’s radio program Education Matters for WGTD in Wisconsin. We explored our own evolving relationships with CMM and how we hope others can begin to see, do, and be in CMM in our everyday practice of communication. You can listen to the recording here.

Now, we are looking forward to joining our friends at the Taos Institute for their Co-Creating Social Worlds Symposium at the end of February in New York City! You can learn more and register to join us there here. This intimate gathering is a celebration of social construction, reflecting on the social worlds we have co-created together and looking forward to the social worlds we continue to co-create.

In the past few months, we have also revitalized our Associates Program. For $100 a year ($50 for students and unwaged), you can now gain free access to our monthly webinars and growing video library of recorded events, along with the opportunity to promote your CMM-related research and work in our newsletter and social sites. As we hope to keep offering more benefits and ways to engage in the future, Associates benefits will continue to evolve and grow. You can become an Associate here.  Your support enables us to do so much!

As the CMMi Stewards begin to make plans for our hopes, priorities, and visions for the next year of living and teaching CMM in the world, we invite you to share your ideas, too! Email me at abbievanmeter@gmail.com to let us know how you are using CMM in your life and work and if there are any emergent opportunities for us to offer support and collaboration.

What are your updates to share? We always want to hear from you! Great avenues to engage with us are on the CMMi Substack, our LinkedIn page, and our YouTube page.