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Leadership Skills for Healthy Workplaces
What if you could understand disagreement and conflict as a source of learning, creativity, and possibility rather than as something to fear and avoid? What if you could support your team to disagree in ways that build more authentic relationships, lead to better decisions, and even transform systems? This is a generative approach to conflict.
Leaders and organizations that take a generative approach to conflict are more confident and resilient in their ability to respond to challenges and adapt to change. Join Big Waves as we find a path to healthier conflict.
Generative Approach to Conflict

This training will bring together a small cohort of people in leadership positions who want to build their capacity for generative conflict as a tool for transformation.
We will engage in interactive and experiential learning sessions, large and small group discussions, self-reflection, peer support and creative learning.
This training will help you:
- Develop your awareness of your reactions, triggers and patterns, and how you can create more choices for yourself
- Deepen your ability to participate in and support open and respectful dialogue
- Build your toolbox of conflict transformation skills such as curious listening, clear communication, and perspective taking
- Identify some next steps on your personal journey of developing healthier relationships
- Lead your team more effectively in conflict, and create spaces that are safe enough for bravery
- Understand disagreement and diverse perspectives as a source of growth and creativity, rather than as something to fear or avoid
- Identify and be proactive about what goes on under the surface of a conflict
- Build your capacity to identify and intervene in the power struggles that happen in conflict, and be aware of how your leadership power impacts the situation
- Strategize about how to create the conditions for psychological safety and healthy conflict in your workplace.
What is included in the price?


- Eight weeks of 2.5-hour sessions of intimate small group learning, plus one week of group coaching
- One hour of one-on-one coaching to help you apply the learning to your specific context
- Opportunity to participate in one Group Coaching Session with previous course participants
- Connection with other workplace leaders who are committed to creating healthy teams
Special Offer
With registration for Generative Conflict, you will also receive a free subscription to Annie Bray’s somatic library, RESOURCED. It is an easy-to-access, organically expanding library of tools and practices that Annie uses with her somatic coaching clients. It includes audio, video and printable PDF resources.
Annie Bray is a Trauma-Informed Massage Therapist, Somatic Coach and Educator. She supports clinical caregivers and creatives who want to show up for the people and the work they love, without burning out or losing heart. Her approach is informed by 20+ years of hands-on experience and concurrent studies in movement, meditation, the neurobiology of attachment and trauma and other related topics.
The path we will take together


Week 1: Introduction to Generative Conflict and Building a Container that Supports Relationships
Week 2: Conflict Survival Responses and Caring for the Group and Individual Nervous System
Week 3: Befriend and Expand Our Embodied Responses to Conflict
Week 4: Communication Skills for Leading in Conflict
Week 5: Exploring Our Leadership Power in Conflict
Week 6: Understanding and Influencing Workplace Culture
Week 7: Creating Workplace Cultures of Care and Respect
Week 8: Putting it All Together
Fall 2023 Dates
Dates: Eight Tuesdays from October 2 to November 20, 2023
Times: 1:00-3:30pm AT, 12:00-2:30pm ET, 9:00am – 11:30pm PT
Interested for your whole team? Big Waves is proud to offer this course customized for organizations. Contact us here for more information about bringing Generative Conflict to your workplace.
FEEDBACK
From Past Participants
Brook is an expert teacher and facilitator! The way she holds space for process while simultaneously instructing and guiding creates the kind of safe spaces in which true transformation can take place!
I highly recommend enrolling for Brook’s Generative Conflict course. Brook’s approach is practical, intelligent, forward thinking, informative and refreshing. I completed the course feeling well-resourced with tools and new ways to think about conflict from a trauma informed lens. I have new ideas of ways I can lean into conflict as a leader that feel brave and full of possibility. I also loved that there was space to hear from a community of other participants to learn from real life examples and struggles from the field.
This was a fabulous course that has given me new tools, strategies and perspectives for seeing conflict in new light – with curiosity, empathy and patience. Thank you so much!” – Course Participant“I found the material very applicable to all sorts of conflict types of situations. I appreciated all the new skills, tools and ideas to try out. Brook was excellent at leading, coaching and supporting participants during the course. I also appreciated how interactive it was.