The Course
Eight weeks on the conversation you keep putting off
One cohort of forty. A live room every Tuesday evening for ninety minutes, one real conversation to run in between, and a vocabulary your team will still be using next year.
The shape of it
- Live sessions
- 8 × 90 min
- Tuesdays, 6pm ET
- Cohort size
- 40
- capped, never raised
- Between sessions
- ~1 hr
- one real conversation
- Access after
- Forever
- recordings and workbook
Who is in the room
Forty people who all have somebody they need to talk to.
Cohorts run about half founders and executives, half senior people without positional power — which is the more interesting half, because they cannot fall back on it. No industry requirement. One rule: you bring a real conversation you are actually facing, not a hypothetical.
- You have a conversation you have postponed more than twice.
- You have been told you are “too diplomatic”, or “too blunt”, and neither note helped.
- Your team agrees in meetings and disagrees afterwards.
- You are about to restructure, merge, or let somebody go.
The eight weeks
What happens, week by week.
- Week 01
The cost of the silence
We start with your actual conversation and put a number on not having it. Most people have never done this and it changes the urgency immediately.
- Week 02
Observation and story
The central move. You will rewrite five sentences you have already said and see why they landed the way they did.
- Week 03
Opening lines
The first fifteen seconds decide the next forty minutes. We build and test yours in the room.
- Week 04
When they get defensive
What defensiveness actually is, why arguing with it always loses, and the two responses that reliably work.
- Week 05
Power and asymmetry
Running the method upward, and running it when you are the one with the power. They are different problems.
- Week 06
Feedback that is usable
Turning a vague impression into something specific enough for the other person to act on by Monday.
- Week 07
Closing with a commitment
Owner and date. How to get one without sounding like you are issuing a task.
- Week 08
The debrief
Everybody has now had their conversation. We take apart what happened, including the ones that went badly — especially those.
Enrolment
Say The Difficult Thing
Cohort Ten — eight weeks
- Eight live sessions, ninety minutes each, Tuesday evenings
- Recordings posted within a day, yours to keep
- A workbook of the three moves, printed and posted
- One real conversation to run between each session
- A cohort channel that most groups keep going afterwards
- A year of The Table, the members' room, included
Full refund up to the end of week two, no conversation required. About one person a cohort takes it.
Cohort Ten
Starts Tuesday 2 March, 6pm ET
- 181days
- 20hrs
- 58min
- 28sec
31 of 40 seats taken
9 left
Enrolment closes when the room is full, or two weeks before we start — whichever comes first.
$1,450
or three payments of $495
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What changed
The sentence people repeat back to me.
I had been circling the same conversation with my co-founder for eleven months. We had it on a Thursday. It took forty minutes and it was not even that hard — I had just never separated what I saw from what I had decided it meant.
Cohort SevenAdaeze Nwosu
Co-founder, a Series B fintech
Our leadership team now has a shared phrase for the thing we used to avoid naming. That sounds small. It has changed how long our decisions survive contact with the rest of the company.
Team programmeMarcus Feld
Chief Operating Officer, healthcare
She did the closing session at our offsite and I watched two hundred people stop performing agreement. I have never seen a room turn like that in ninety minutes.
KeynotePriya Raman
VP People, global logistics
The part I did not expect: it made me kinder. Being clear turns out to be the considerate option. Being vague was the thing that was costing people their time.
Advisory, 1:1Tom Beaufort
Managing Partner, design consultancy
Still deciding
Fair questions about a course that costs real money.
You do. In nine cohorts nobody has arrived without one — what happens is that people arrive thinking theirs is too small. Week one usually reveals it is not the conversation they thought, which is the point of week one.
Neither. It is a working method for a specific job: getting a true thing said, heard and acted on inside an organisation. It borrows from negotiation and from clinical supervision, but nobody will ask you how you feel about your father.
No. Practice happens in pairs and threes in breakout rooms. Volunteering to work something in the main room is available every week and roughly a third of people do it at some point. Nobody is called on.
Yes, and there is a one-page justification note you can forward to whoever approves it, which saves most people an awkward email. Purchase orders are fine.
The waiting list is genuine and it moves — there are usually two or three deferrals in the fortnight before we start. People on the list get first refusal on the following cohort before it is announced anywhere else.
Full refund up to the end of week two, no conversation required and no form. About one person a cohort takes it, usually because their job changed. After week two there is no refund, because by then you have the whole method.
Where to start
The conversation you are avoiding is already costing you.
You do not have to book anything to begin. Read one letter, take the fit finder, or write to me and say what is actually going on.
