Conflict and coaching courses in September
Two opportunities for developing your leadership, facilitation and coaching skills in the new academic year.
In a brief interruption to the usual flow of nerding out on how humans work and blacksmithing, I wanted to let you know about two new ways to work with me that are coming up.
Coaching skills programme
The coaching skills course is aimed at anyone who has line management responsibilities or who has been coaching in some way and knows they need to up their skillset.
Most people who end up looking after the development of others don’t have a lot of formal training, and most coaching programmes are both long and prohibitively expensive.
This course is eight-weeks long, combining models and principles with practice and dialogue.
Some of things we cover include:
Contracting - setting good boundaries for others and with yourself.
Conditions - creating the right tone and feeling for every session.
Deep listening - learning how to perceive what is most important to your clients.
Reflective inquiry - responding in ways that direct sessions towards what matters.
Powerful questions - using language to inspire or provoke people to new insight.
Working with needs - getting to the underlying drivers of specific issues.
Conflict navigation - finding opportunities to connect beyond the mess.
Dates and times: the next course runs 1pm-3pm (UK time) on 3rd September, 17th September, 1st October, 15th October.
How to Fight Well
This is my ‘flagship’ conflict navigation course that I’ve been running for nearly ten years that I run infrequently (usually twice a year).
How to Fight Well is a discipline that combines Nonviolent Communication, models from Western psychology and methods for managing our neurophysiological responses.
You will learn that at the heart of every conflict (inner and outer) is an unmet need and that our normal reliance on judgement and blame gets in the way of spotting what that need is. Our default reactions are built on learned patterns of behaviour which are not fixed but plastic and moldable through practice.
We learn how to cut through all the mess, connect to our needs and those of others, see conict for what it is and steady our nervous system so that we can choose how to act, rather than simply react.
Aimed at anyone who wants to become more comfortable in difficult conditions to find ways to have the conversations that matter.
The course covers three core elements:
Understanding judgement and blame
We begin by exploring the true nature of conflict, why it shows up at work and at home. We learn a model that allows us to identify the needs at the heart of every sticky situation and spot the subtle ways that judgement and blame show up, using these as signposts to what you need to unpick.
Escaping the drama of conflict
We learn how people develop the unconscious scripts that play out in conflicts and the default roles we all take up when triggered. Using this awareness we identify ways to see when drama is showing up in relationships, how to zoom out from the situation and see what’s playing out.
Managing your nervous system
We discuss and unpick the role of the nervous system in conflict, including the physical signs that tell you when you’re triggered into unhelpful modes of thinking and feeling. You learn how to take back control of your neurophysiological state so that you can act with discernment from steady ground.
Dates and times: the next course runs 10am-12pm (UK time) on 3rd September, 17th September, 1st October, 15th October.
Next steps
If you’re interested in joining one of these courses, drop me an email via hello@maxstjohn.com and we can arrange a time to talk.