Penza, 28 May 2015. PenzaNews. Irina Khakamada, famous civil activist, writer and TV show host, held a workshop titled “Master of Communication. Success Without a Cost” in the Penza “Molodezhny” concert hall in the evening of Wednesday, May 27.

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The audience was almost full, mostly by women of various age groups.

The workshop that lasted for nearly 2.5 hours was divided into two sections: a lecture, and a Q&A session. Right from the start, the civil activist urged the audience to actively participate in the dialogue and frequently asked questions to various people.

Irina Khakamada told people an elaborate lecture on psychological types and people’s character traits, ways of leading a discussion, and her own “psychological aikido” techniques that allowed to gain the upper hand even in the most difficult talks.

She also paid particular attention to the development of communication skills.

“The topic of our today’s discussion is one of the most important instruments to gain personal success in our tough times. Too bad there are so few men in the audience, and I would like to praise those who did come, because this is mostly a problem for men in Russia. We do not know how to communicate, how to speak with people whom we do not know, and women do this better than men even if they are not skilled in it,” Irina Khakamada said.

In her opinion, anybody “can create themselves without any costs attached.”

“When you look at me, you see a person who built her own career without investing a single ruble in it. When people told me I made a brand, I’m always on the TV, I’ve got some PR coaches, I’m investing money in it, this is all just a kind of dirty jealousy, because I never invested anything anywhere,” she stressed.

The three generations of the Soviet Union upbringing created a person who is a social shut-in, who is used to “vodka discussions” culture, who always looks tense and tends to be aggressive and oppressive in a discussion.

“Our eyes are always ‘strung up.’ It’s not our fault. By our genes, we live in a country where we always have to defend from something. We can’t relax because we expect a stab in the back at any second. But this does not justify our behavior, because Russia along with the rest of the world is plunging in the age of great chaos, when many events cannot be predicted. This will affect economy, politics, wars, ecology, and it can’t be helped because the civilization has entered a turbulence. A turbulence is when several waves at once go into different directions, and it begins to shake you around like a plane,” the civil activist pointed out.

To survive in the modern world, a person “must learn to fly in these winds,” Irina Khakamada thinks.

After the workshop, she answered the questions from the audience and gave away signatures.