Handle difficult conversations with greater confidence, clarity and psychological safety
Difficult conversations are part of working life. Whether it is addressing poor performance, challenging behaviour, resolving conflict, setting boundaries, responding to complaints or delivering an unwelcome message, avoiding the conversation rarely makes the problem disappear.
This practical workshop gives participants the skills and confidence to tackle difficult issues earlier, more clearly and more constructively.
Drawing on principles from the Harvard Negotiation Project, workplace psychology and an understanding of human behaviour under pressure, the training goes beyond communication scripts. Participants learn why conversations escalate, how defensiveness develops and how to remain clear and assertive without creating unnecessary threat.
Participants will learn how to:
- prepare for difficult conversations
- communicate clearly and assertively
- separate facts from assumptions and interpretations
- recognise the difference between intention and impact
- reduce blame and defensiveness
- listen without automatically agreeing
- maintain boundaries while preserving dignity
- respond to anger, withdrawal or defensiveness
- manage their own reactions under pressure
- bring conversations back on track when they start to escalate
Psychological safety without losing accountability
Psychological safety does not mean avoiding challenge or making every conversation comfortable.
It means creating an environment where people can raise concerns, disagree, acknowledge mistakes and address problems without unnecessary fear of humiliation or retaliation.
Handled well, difficult conversations help build that environment.
This workshop shows participants how to combine clarity, empathy and accountability so that difficult issues can be addressed without either avoiding the problem or unnecessarily escalating it.
Who is it for?
The training can be adapted for:
- managers and leaders
- corporate and professional organisations
- public sector teams
- healthcare and care services
- charities and community organisations
- organisations developing psychologically safe or trauma-informed practice
Examples and exercises can be tailored to the situations participants are likely to encounter in their own organisation.
Practical, evidence-informed training
The course is delivered by a trainer with first-hand experience of management and running businesses, who has studied Workplace Health and Wellbeing at postgraduate level at the University of Nottingham, is a qualified mediator and has a professional background as an engineer.
This combination of management experience, workplace psychology, mediation and analytical problem-solving brings a practical perspective to difficult conversations: understanding both the people involved and the problem that needs to be resolved.
Cost
Training starts from £2,500 for up to 12 participants.
For third-sector organisations, a tiered pricing structure is available based on the size of the organisation.
Please get in touch to discuss your requirements, delivery options and costs.
Why difficult conversations become difficult
For those interested in the thinking behind the training, difficult conversations are rarely difficult simply because two people disagree.
Each person brings their own interpretation of what happened, assumptions about the other person’s intentions and emotional reactions to what the situation means for them.
When people feel criticised, blamed, embarrassed, rejected or unfairly treated, they may become defensive, argumentative, withdraw or counter-attack.
A useful way of understanding this is:
Trigger → perceived threat → coping behaviour → interpretation → response → outcome
Once we understand that process, we have more choice about how we respond.
The aim is not to excuse inappropriate behaviour or diagnose people. It is to understand enough about what may be happening beneath the behaviour to avoid making a difficult conversation unnecessarily worse.
The conversation beneath the conversation
The workshop explores three important questions:
What happened?
What do we actually know, and what have we assumed or interpreted?
What is being felt?
What emotions are influencing the conversation, whether or not they are being openly expressed?
What does this mean to the people involved?
Does the conversation challenge someone’s sense of competence, fairness, respect or identity?
This shifts the conversation away from certainty, blame and accusation towards curiosity, contribution and problem-solving.
Understanding does not mean agreeing
One of the most useful skills in difficult conversations is being able to understand another person’s perspective without believing that you have to accept it.
You can listen and still disagree.
You can acknowledge distress and still maintain a boundary.
You can challenge behaviour while preserving dignity.
You can be empathetic and still hold someone accountable.
The goal is not to make every conversation comfortable or to ensure that everyone agrees.
It is to make difficult conversations more manageable, more constructive and less likely to escalate, while helping people address problems before they become entrenched.