Mastering the Difficult Conversation: The Four Key Skills for Leading Change and Leveraging Possibility in Any Situation

This high impact course presents an effective, science-backed system using mindfulness, systems intervention, and brain-based techniques for building the skills to navigate, lead and transform any difficult conversation.  Whether it’s business / professional interactions or personal relationships, this course teaches the keys leading away from the common derailments and conflict we have all experienced.  Intractable impossibility becomes practical possibility when these skills are practiced and applied leading to pathways of progress and positive outcomes.

Based in Dr. Abblett’s PRIZE System of tools , this course will help you

• untangle “stuck” patterns
• lead complex conversations forward with a set of simple, accessible skill patterns, while simultaneously managing and transforming inner reactivity
• assist individuals, family members, professionals, teams, organizations and group cultures to create more compassionate dialogue and capability for true collaboration
• utilize simple, effective skills to resolve conflict
• convert enemies into allies
• plant seeds of compassion and collaboration, and
• create possibility out of chaos and disorder.

You will learn clear, concise evidence-based strategies and skills to enter, manage, lead and transform the most difficult conversation situations to be faced in personal and work life.  While there is no ability to perfectly control the outcome of a conversation, these skills align with how human beings are neurologically wired and psychologically conditioned to manage experiences of emotional discomfort and meet universal human needs.  Therefore, learning to align with the skill patterns taught in this course will bring you into alignment with universal principles that maximize possibilities when previously only predictable and seemingly negative, dead-end outcomes were the result.

Derived from the latest empirical findings in psychology and neuroscience and honed in Dr. Abblett’s clinical practice and his experience from Harvard therapeutic school program for clients with emotional, behavioural and learning difficulties , you will discover and implement an effective system for skillfully responding in the most difficult “tug-of-war” interactions.

Using compelling examples, video clips and practice of skills, you will be able to begin applying the skills from this seminar immediately.

OBJECTIVES

• Demonstrate skill in managing difficult interactions by conducting in-the-moment assessment using Dr. Abblett’s PRIZE System.
• Develop “scan and response” skills with the top five challenging conversations you face.
• Demonstrate skills for proactive and effective response in these situations.
• Elevate your confidence for communicating with anyone about anything going forward.

PROGRAM OUTLINE

Lesson 1: On Your Mark!  Welcome to the Conversational Race You Did NOT Want to Run!

• The Anatomy of Difficult Conversations (and why that is crucial to understand)
• Assessing ourselves: What makes these conversations such a challenge?  How – exactly – are they getting stuck?
• Understanding why standard point-counterpoint and / or polite-and-dutiful-as-usual conversations fail
• How in this course you can learn the least taught communication skills – the WHEN, WHEN NOT, and HOW to emotionally and behaviourally scan and respond with others who are fixed, “certain” and unskillfully fired up
• Stretching Practice: Consulting Your Inner Compass
• Stretching Practice: Timing and Targeting Results with Intention

Lesson 2: Get Set!  The Habits You’ll Need to Stay the Course of the Conversation

• Learn to use the “Process Grid” tool for in-the-moment scanning of actions and reactions in these conversations
• Understanding the brain and learning basis of unskillful emotional reactivity for people in these hot button conversations and the reward-based learning habit “loops” people form that limit compassion, connection and collaboration
• Sampling the role of mindfulness-based skills for “flipping” these tough situations toward compassionate, creative progress
• Mapping your own reactive, unskillful habit loops which have knocked you flat or sent you running for the hills in these tough conversations
• Stretching Practice: TEAR Habit Loop Mapping
• Stretching Practice: Taking a NAP with Your Map

Lesson 3:   GO!  Learning the PRIZE System of the Difficult, Yet Effective Conversation

• Overview of Dr. Abblett’s PRIZE skills for enhancing the quality, timing and impact of communication responses
• Skill 1: Presence in the body and mind with core mindfulness, cognitive flexibility, focus and panoramic awareness skills in order to sidestep unskillful emotional reactivity, thinking errors / biases, and set yourself up for leading the moment
• Skill 2: Reframing other’s behavior and possible inner experience with skills of compassionate yet direct, authentic perspective-taking
• Skill 3: Inserting “compassionate audacity” from the Zero point in terms of learning to sidestep short-term, egoic agendas and instead do what resonates – what truly fits – with yourself, the other person, situation and needs of the broader context using structuring, guiding and containing interventions.
• Skill 4: Empowering common humanity for making resonant, effective choice to connect, create, respect boundaries or collaborate.  Here, you’re skillfully inviting the other person stand with you on equal footing in the here-and-now truth of what is occurring, absent distortion, bias and value judgment in the situation so that effectiveness and positive outcomes become possible.
• Stretching Practice: SLOWing Before Speaking
• Stretching Practice: Dropping Stinkin’ Thinkin’ Into Conversation Gaps
• Stretching Practice: SNAPPing Unskillful / Reactive Habit Loops
• Stretching Practice: Reframing & Seeing Behind Other’s Behaviour

Lesson 4:  The Race is Done and Yet Only Beginning — Putting PRIZE Conversations into Practice in Daily Life

• In Action: Demonstration and skill by skill modeling of PRIZE methods
• Touching the Unvaccinated Elephant at Home and at Work
• Going from Feedback to “Feel-back” with Others
• Encounters with the Political Polar(ized) Bear
• The “Ask”
• The “End”
• Shades of Racial Grey
• Separation of Church and Hate
• Learning to stay on track and claim the greatest prizes in your conversations with others
• Stretching Practice:  Speaking Equivalence
• Stretching Practice: Truth-Talking Amid Challenge
• Stretching Practice:  The Compassionate Dope-Slap