Mastering Difficult Conversations
Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
A Project Manager At A Tech Company
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
A Project Quality Engineer
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
This course is designed to help you develop your skills to confidently handle difficult people and situations. You will learn how to manage stress and build more productive relationships with colleagues, even those with challenging behaviour. With these new strategies, you will have the confidence to constructively manage difficult people and situations in a professional manner.
You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.
The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.
This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.
In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.
We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.
That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.
For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.
This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.
Leading Through Conflict
For over 40 years we have specialised in training managers and professionals to become more confident and competant at dealing with difficult behaviour. We can help you develop the skills and perspectives you need to effectively manage difficult behaviors, communicate with and manage challenging individuals, and lead with confidence and success. Here's how;-
Your training is designed with your particular needs and challenges in mind. This means that rather than a bland or generic syllabus we will address the specific types of difficult behavior that you face and provid practical solutions and strategies for managing those behaviors effectively. You'll be able to immediately apply what you have learned in your day-to-day work.
Your training is led by an experienced trainer who has a deep understanding of this subject. They'll effectively convey knowledge and insights to you and help you develop new skills and perspectives. He'll facilitate interactive and engaging discussions and activities, so that you'll have opportunities to practice what you have learned and receive feedback.
Your training will be structured in a way that makes learning fun and enjoyable. This means using a variety of teaching methods, such as lectures, case studies, role-plays, group discussions and one-to-one coaching. Your trainer is experienced at creating an immersive learning experience. The time will fly by. You will also have ample opportunities to reflect on your experience and apply what they have learned in real-world scenarios, rather than generic templates.
This course is practical-oriented rather than just theoretical. This means your training is focused on giving you practical skills to apply in both your work and home relationships. You'll gain useful tools, strategies, and techniques to help you manage difficult behaviors effectively. Rather than just theoretical knowledge, you'll be able to immediately use the skills you learn in your daily life.
Might your need to be better at dealing with difficult or challenging behaviour be met here?
What this communication skills course in dealing with challenging behaviour can help you to do better
Is this training course on dealing with challenging behaviour relevant for you?
Hundreds of managers and professionals, over several decades, have obtained the understanding, experience and communication skills they need for this important aspect of their working life and career, by attending this management training course. It provides a 3-day course of practical behaviour training in a small group, as well as a substantial number of individual one-to-one coaching sessions spread out over several months. It's called, Skills with People (see participant's testimonials to hear how clients rate and review this training). In particular:
We give participants not only the understanding but also the communication skills they need to be confident they can calm people down when they are hard to deal with and under stress. On the training course, as you practise handling challenging situations, your understanding develops too, as does your confidence. This is hands-on behavioural training with lots of practice, feedback and coaching.
No two participants are the same. Everyone's pace of learning and the situations they find challenging are different. That's why there are no more than 6 participants in the group, and why everyone is offered, as well as the three-day group session, several separate private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions.
One of the things this training course is about is stress management. When people you work with are under stress … whatever the root cause … their stress unavoidably stresses you. You can't manage stress unless you can understand what's stressing them and making them speak and act in a way that you find hard to deal with. For this you need empathy. It's a learnable skill. It's one of the core skills you would develop on this course.
Other people's stress might be to do with habits of response they've needed to develop to cope with past pressures in their life … or it might be to do with the current threats, real or imagined, that they're experiencing in work … or both. It also helps to be aware of and be able to communicate about the stress to your mental health you your self are under in having to deal with all this.
Our approach is simple and practical. We've boiled the skill-set you need down to just two strategies. These two will equip you to handle almost all situations where people's behaviour in the workplace presents a challenge. Once you've mastered this crucial two, you'll have more confidence you can apply the skills and manage situations and people you previously found hard to manage. The reason is that, when you use them together, you're able to create a calm, rational atmosphere of mutual respect, understanding and trust. This is particularly needed in times of stress, uncertainty, change and conflict.
This simple skill-set is the heart of emotional intelligence. Most of us already have this to some extent. It's a natural part of the human race's evolved survival kit. It's based on an inbuilt sensitivity to feelings, and how they can affect our relationships with others. But regrettably, due to pressures and habits of modern life, society and environment, many of us pay little attention to our in-build emotional intelligence and leave it unused and dormant.
This training course is not theoretical but a practical experience. You learn strategies and practise how to listen with empathy to others, that is, what to say to make them feel genuinely respected and understood. You also learn how to talk to them in a professional way that makes them hear what you are saying and take you seriously. The two skills are very effective when used together in the same situation or conversation because, together, they create a respectful and trusting atmosphere. As well as plenty of practice, you receive helpful feedback about your precise effect on others as you practise and develop.
Most of us cling to old mental habits even when we no longer need them. Often, they're so deeply embedded in our mind that we're not even aware of them, but they can get in our way when we're trying to develop a new skill. That's why, as well as helping you learn new skills on this course, we also help you unlearn old mental habits when they seem to be getting in the way.
Here's an example. Many people believe that behind other people's difficult behaviour in the workplace there must be a deliberately negative motive. It's a belief that makes us look for the worst in other people and makes it hard for us to deal with them in a way that gets the best out of them. It may come from our own past experiences, perhaps in early years, of trying to protect ourselves from difficult behaviour. It may be a reason why we find difficult behaviour at work so challenging. The trouble is it makes our strategy for dealing with difficult people at work appear disapproving and leads to even more difficult and challenging behaviour from the people who are already being difficult.
If we assume instead that the difficult and challenging behaviour of people at work may come from a positive, though unrequited workplace need, we will have a more open-minded approach to handling them and are more likely to discover what their need is. This will provide us with a more successful, less disapproving, strategy for managing challenging behaviour. We can then bring out the best in them.