Training Programs

My passion is delivering highly interactive, information-rich and practical training programs tailored to your business needs.  

Workshop participants have access to gold-standard, research and methodologies relevant to their needs, with integrated self-assessment tools to evaluate current strengths and challenges and set well-informed, measurable progress goals.  

All programs include valuable follow-up resources to reinforce knowledge and continue skill development in the next 30 days. Programs are available online and in-person. 

“With 1.2 million people through our doors every year our 350 staff must provide excellent customer service and manage real and potential conflicts in often difficult circumstances.”

“Elizabeth gave considerable time and attention to understand the needs of our leaders and our staff teams to ensure we delivered a succinct message, shared language, valuable skills and a practical model that we could that we could implement throughout the organisation.”
Adam Luscombe – General Manager, YMCA Victoria & SAALC

Conflict

Confidence

A Simple 6 Step Model to Manage Conflict with Confidence!

The Conflict Confidence Method will help your organisation systematically predict, assess and navigate workplace conflicts.

Your leaders, teams and individual staff will be equipped with the skills they need to understand the drivers of conflict and the attitudes and behaviours that predictably increase disagreements and entrench divisions. They will learn what really works to reduce tensions, resolve conflicts, build high levels of trust, effective communication and foster resilient, dynamic workplaces.

Based on the world renowned relationship skills research and and the best evidence-based practices in conflict resolution and organisational behaviours the Conflict Confidence Method is a simple 6-step strategy that will help your executive, leaders and staff teams find positive outcomes to the inevitable, and unexpected, workplace conflicts.

“Fantastic – really think it will help me to reflect on how my own behaviour influences conflict.”

“Eye opening content – a checklist with a high value method: reduce the emotional intensity, recognise problem, slow down, do less.”

Felurieu Leaders Program participants

The Conflict Confidence Method will help your organisation systematically predict, assess and navigate workplace conflicts.

Without skilled training people will reliably and repeatedly act in ways that do not work to reduce workplace tensions. With a shared framework to understand and respond to emerging conflict, your business will have the practical skills to defuse difficult situations and better manage conflicts, workplace incivility and difficult customers and clients. 

Your leadership and staff teams will learn how to:

Reduce Conflicts

  • Confidently engage and set boundaries for difficult relationships and in challenging situations
  • Reduce workplace incivility and reinforce personal accountability for respectful relationships
  • Use communication strategies that reduce defensiveness, tension and hostility
  • Know what really works to reduce misunderstanding, assumptions and blame

Regain Control

  • Understand and manage stress and emotional reactivity
  • Learn a strategic framework for recognising and understanding difficult personalities
  • Successfully manage unreasonable behaviours and escalating emotions
  • Proactively manage difficult conversations through a focused communication process

Remain Resilient

  • Respond effectively to unreasonable behaviours, including personal attacks, hostile emails and social media
  • Use proven, practical approaches to remain calm and solution-focused in confrontational situations
  • Mindfulness and self-care strategies that really work
  • Improve your employee’s skills to be proactive conflict resolvers and reduce HR and leadership workloads

“This workshop has brought tangible changes to our leadership of conflict management.”

“At our senior meetings, our leadership team continue to discuss and share how they are using these conflict skills in practice, both at work and at home.”

“Our staff have really started to put the skills into action, which is so great to see.”

Kristy Tepiaho – HR Manager, SAALC

Leading Highly Valued Relationships

Successful relationships are the heart of a great business and the bedrock of good mental and physical health for employees.

This researched-informed program focuses on the attributes needed to initiate and maintain high-trust relationships with clients and stakeholders. Preliminary reading materials prepare flexible thinking, an intentional mindset and a science-based approach to relationship management skills.

Participants will use their own business case studies to explore, evaluate and set progress goals, including:

  • The 7 elements to mapping and measuring relationship quality, strengths and challenges
  • The art and science of trust-building and relationship repair when things go astray.
  • Emotions, decision-making and motivation drivers for different personality styles
  • Increase influence in difficult conversations and negotiations
  • Set clear boundaries for role, relationships and responsibilities
  • Learn critical relationship principles and skills in communication, emotional intelligence, influence and negotiation as well as conflict managment

“I think the proactive approach is really positive and it’s great space that opens people up to be vulnerable and builds a deeper level of engagement.” 

“This program can have a huge impact. Great tools to reflect on and enhance emotional intelligence, whether this is already a skill, and easy to embrace for those who need to work more on their understanding, to reflect and learn.”

Dairy Australia participants

Dealing with Difficult and Demanding People

Research by the High Conflict Institute indicates that the number of conflict-driven people in our society is increasing and currently represents about 10% of the population.

The Conflict Confidence Method provides a comprehensive approach to effectively deal with people who consistently use blame, excessive emotion or unreasonable behaviours in conflicts.

The usual ‘common sense’ strategies won’t work to resolve conflict with difficult and demanding people. These are the people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, underperform or create a sense of chaos. They disrupt team functions, confuse issues and entrench escalating conflicts that seem to defy resolution, making it hard to know how to interact and manage them.

Too often these are the people who are moved around from team to team as situations deteriorate.

Dealing with Difficult and Demanding People training provides strategies informed by research and expert advice to:

  • Lead better outcomes and address responsibility and consequences for behaviours
  • Respond effectively to unreasonable and extreme behaviours, including personal attacks, hostile emails and social media
  • Effectively and proactively plan to minimise avoidance and blame games
  • Increase accountability, reduce avoidance and procrastination
  • Minimise the pressure of poor communication and unnecessary disputes
  • Regain a productive, rewarding and cooperative environment

“Very happy I brought my staff along today. Very valuable, learning to manage yourself in both professional and personal relationships in a more empowering way”

“I did not expect it to be so interactive, which helped enormously to show the examples and behaviours in action”

“Enjoyable to think about different aspects of our jobs, in a more empowering way”

“Very important. The skills and knowledge are relevant to all industries.”

Lawyers and solicitors, workshop facilitated by Cardone and Associates

Step Up, Speak Up: Assertiveness for Women

This unique program focuses on helping women increase their influence, assertiveness and negotiation skills. Learn how to maintain your cool and your power in challenging situations and communicate effectively and purposefully.

Packed with interactive activities and thought-provoking information, Step Up Speak Up is all about what’s really important to you in your professional and personal life.

This practical and fun program is for you if you have ever:

  • Stopped yourself from saying what you really want
  • Been silent when you needed to speak up
  • Settled for less than what you was reasonable
  • Felt consumed by people’s endless dramas and needs
  • Been the last person on your ‘to-do list’ because you’re too busy looking after everyone else
  • Wanted to increase your presence, influence and impact
  • Wanted to better manage difficult people, conversations or situations without unreasonable compromise.

“Your conflict resolution workshop you held on campus was so popular Elizabeth, the session fully booked within two hours of the email sent to staff. Your genuine approach and years of expertise made the session very useful and applicable! Thank you!

Women’s Professional Development Network, University of Adelaide

“You demonstrated the skills needed to step up with confidence.”

These were immediately applicable, I found myself using these valuable insights in the next few days.”

Katrina Webb-Denis OAM
AIMM Director, Silver 2 Gold and Newday

Resilience Re-Imagined 

Welcome to a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary and imaginative exploration of resilience, aimed to inspire and uplift you. You are invited into a whole new conversation about what we really experience when we are resilient.  You will discover new insights about your own personal strengths. .

Elizabeth Williamson has lived with quadriplegia for over a decade and has an ongoing personal conflict with gravity. With extensive hard work she has relearnt to walk – twice – and collected just as many titanium inserts due to accidental falls.

She interweaves personal discoveries with the science and the stories that debunk myths and help audiences understand that resilience has very little to do with ‘bouncing back’. Rather than being an internal, individual trait of grit and determination, resilience has a lot more to do with our relationships – with ourselves and with others. 

This program will help you rethink assumptions and encourage participants to honour and find meaning in the hard times, transitions, change management, misfortune, and different points in life, when we all experience vulnerability. 

An informative, engaging, and multi-layered understanding of the skills and knowledge needed to foster robust relationships, enhance psychological safety, and boost productivity in our workplaces.  Business leaders and teams can contribute to building resilient environments that create trust, advance cooperation, and honor both success and the inevitable disappointments and failures we encounter.

  • Keep top-performing employees and key leaders, and avoid burnout risks.
  • Ensure employees feel highly valued and committed to the business.
  • Achieve high staff satisfaction, confirmed by trust in leadership.
  • Cultivate customer loyalty and dedication to your brand.

“I love her energy, her humour, she is a very entertaining speaker. I love that she pulls her story into the presentation and connects really from the heart with people.”

“Love my problems a bit more, this idea that the problem I’ve got is a gift and I need to look at it from a different perspective. That lateral approach to problem solving and the nature of the challenges we face, is a point of difference that Elizabeth brings on the discussion of resilience.”

“The little card that Elizabeth gave out during the talk, I’m going to put it up on my computer and look at it every day as a way of thinking about things differently.”

Resilience Re-Imagined @Raising the Bar 

Conflict and relationship skills programs designed for your needs. 

A variety of formats are available:

“Bite Size” 1 hour sessions on relevant topics.

Half day – 4 hour sessions

Full Day – 7 hour sessions

Immersive 2-day programs