The School
I teach three things. How to say the true thing to someone who does not want to hear it. How to hold a room when it turns. How to build a rite that does what rites are for.
THREE WAYPOINTS BELOWThe Art of Difficult Conversations.
The emotional architecture of conflict, taught as a craft you can practice badly at first and get good at. Content, context, and concern. Positions against interests. Requests and boundaries that survive being tested. I wrote the book and built the curriculum. Courses, workbooks, workshops, thousands of humans. Then the Fight Lab, the weekly dojo I designed for it: you bring a live conflict and run the move in front of witnesses instead of rehearsing it in the shower. The test I hold it to: does it still work when you are tired, outnumbered and half wrong.
The Facilitation Academy.
Where facilitators learn to hold a room without gripping it. I founded it and wrote its curriculum. Group dynamics, container design, reading the exact moment the room turns, and the unglamorous logistics that make transformation repeatable instead of lucky. It is for the people who run the circles, the retreats, the standing meeting, the ceremony everyone else remembers and nobody understands the mechanics of. You probably already have presence. Presence is not transferable. What you need is the part you can hand to your replacement and watch it still work.
Ritual and experience design.
Ritual is old technology and it still works. I teach the mechanics: the threshold, the ordeal, the witness, the thing they carry out in their hands. A real rite does one of four things. It initiates, it affirms, it grieves, or it dissolves. That is the whole list. Everything else is a tired category dancing the steps with the life gone out of it, an offsite with a talking stick, a wedding that was a photo shoot. What I teach is how to build the one the moment actually calls for. The initiation nobody gave you.
Study with me
Coaching, consulting, and the training itself. Yourself, your team, the facilitators who hold your rooms, or a rite you are trying to build and cannot get right. You get me, direct, with no institution in between. Tell me who is learning and what they need to be able to do the week after we finish.
Write to meTake one for the road
Not a school. A side door. Three field manuals from The Art of Difficult Conversations, free: Foundations of Conflict, Rational Relations, Requests and Boundaries. Ask and I send one. No toll, no drip sequence pretending to be a friendship. Take the one that matches the conversation you are avoiding.
- Foundations of ConflictYour conflict is not the problem. Your posture toward it is.Request it
- Rational RelationsTactical tools for staying connected without disappearing into it.Request it
- Requests & BoundariesSay what you mean. Mean what you need. Hold the line you drew.Request it
The book, the weekly dojo and the Academy run at AuthRev, a company I helped build and still hold a stake in. I wrote a lot of what they teach. I do not teach there anymore. These three doors lead to the material. The one above leads to me.
The Art of Difficult Conversations
The method, written down carefully enough to hand to a stranger.
Open the bookThe Fight Lab
Sparring with rules. You bring the fight you keep having; we run it until it changes shape.
Step into the dojoThe Facilitation Academy
For the people who hold the room. Real frameworks, real feeling, no fluff.
Walk to the Academy