Tools to guide you through communication nightmares

We all face situations that cause anxiety and frustration. No matter how hard we've worked to build our skills, most of us still try to avoid having to take part in these difficult conversations.    This seminar will provide tools and techniques to guide you through these difficult, and often unavoidable, situations.

Using tested principles and practical strategies, you will learn how to:

• Manage strong emotions
• Figure out what unspoken “rules” keep us stuck
• Prepare in advance for the “grenades” lobbed in many difficult conversations
• Attend to the meaning of what is said and not said

Practice using excellent video vignettes will help you get a grip on your communication nightmares.  You will also receive coaching on how to handle difficult conversations in your professional life as well as at home.

Course Objectives:

• Identify elements that make conversations difficult.
• Discuss strategies and principles for managing strong emotions and situations, which make our conversations less effective and more stressful.
• Describe how preparing for the unexpected can improve the effectiveness of our conversations.
• Explore skills for decreasing defensiveness in our conversation partners by "starting from the third story" and adopting a "curiosity" stance.
• Apply and practice the concepts learned in class to real situations.
• Involving real work-life situations as generated by participants.