Master the Art of Forging Lasting Connections
Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
A Project Manager At A Tech Company
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
A Project Quality Engineer
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
This course is designed to help you develop your relationship building skills, and increase your abilities to connect with others in both a professional and personal setting. You'll receive a generous amount of one-to-one coaching sessions, as well as group learning to help you improve your communication, interpersonal, collaboration and conflict resolution skills that will help you build and maintain strong working relationships.
You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.
The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.
This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.
In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.
We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.
That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.
For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.
This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.
Build Stronger Relationships
For more than 40 years this training course on how to build successful relationships has proven to be one of the most highly acclaimed. Over the years we've had thousands of managers and professionals through our hands. Many have said it's one of the best relationship building workshops they ever attended. We have helped our clients develop their skills so they can communicate more effectively, and succeed in both their personal and professional lives.
On this training course we'll provide you with powerful emotional intelligence tools that help you become better at building relationships with others. Building relationships is a crucial aspect of life and work, as it allows us to create meaningful connections. All too often connections with other people can become frayed by miscommunications, misunderstandings, or competing priorities. It can be challenging for some people to overcome these difficulties that get in the way of a good connection. We can provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to effectively communicate, empathise, and build trust with others. We not only provide you with the theory, but also the opportunity to rehearse until you're confident you know how to apply the skills every day.
Topic |
Benefit of this Relationship Building Course |
Communication Skills |
You'll develop your verbal and nonverbal communication skills, including listening actively, speaking assertively, and understanding other people's body language. You'll build trust and understanding and feel confident about building stronger relationships. You'll also learn what effect you have on other people when they listen to you. |
Empathy |
You'll learn to master this skill that allows for deeper connections with others. Other people won't be able to help themselves but warm to you when you show them empathy and compassion. You'll be hard to resist. They'll melt like warm butter in front of you because finally ... after all this time ... someone gets them. |
Honest, Trust, Authenticity, and Sincerity |
Learn another fundamental aspect of the relationship building skills taught on the course, how to inspire others with your honest, authentic, sincere, reliable, consistent feedback. Learn how to do it without having to worry about triggering a bad reaction. |
Transferable Skills |
The principles and philosophy learned on these relationship building workshops can be applied in other areas of life, including conflict resolution, managing teams as well as personal relationships outside of work. |
Why not get in touch to have a free sample of our training? We hope you'll find it a valuable tool if you're looking to improve your relationship building skills. Just fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page.
Proven training for managers, leaders and professionals who want to build rapport, improve relationships and have honest meeting of minds
How to develop your relationship building skills - a London UK management training course & leadership development programme called "Skills with People"?
How emotional intelligence can help you build successful relationships
There's an ancient wisdom known around the world as the Golden Rule. It's about how to get on with others. It says, very simply; treat them as you like to be treated. We'll give you the crucial skills that'll help you build successful and harmonious relationships by treating others as you like to be treated.
At the heart of relationship building are two crucial skills, how to listen with empathy, and then encourage other people to listen to you when you speak assertively. They're the two main emotional intelligence main we'll help you master. These two skills will greatly enhance your ability to build relationships and connect well with others. Empathy is the art of giving your attention, respect and understanding to others. Assertiveness is the art of winning theirs.
Here is an example of someone who came on the course to improve their relationship building skills. He was putting people's backs up. This manager had a reputation for being a hard man. This had its upside, because he also had a reputation for being able to achieve results in a tough industry. The trouble was that his aggressive approach didn't go down well with colleagues in the management team, and when an opportunity for promotion came up the job was given to someone more diplomatic. He took this to heart and tried to be less aggressive. The trouble then was that he felt inhibited about expressing himself and so he began to feel disheartened.
He was a courageous man who set a high value on telling the truth without compromise. He had plenty of good ideas and most of what he said made good sense. But when disagreeing with someone he would say, for example, “You're wrong,” “What you should do is . . . .” And he rarely showed any interest in other people's ideas. The result was that he was putting his colleagues' backs up and they found it easy to dismiss what he said on the grounds that, “he was just being argumentative”. It was easy for them not to take him seriously. What he needed was to replace the habit of expressing opinions in a divisive and argumentative manner with a different approach, one which created an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect in which it would be much easier for him to achieve a meeting of minds with his colleagues.
He first needed to be helped to see for himself the weakness of the aggressive approach – in other words, that by putting people's backs up his was making it easy for them to dismiss his ideas. This was done by showing him a video recording of one of his typical conversations. He quickly took the point.
Then he needed to be shown and helped to practise two skills that would enable him to be even more forceful than before but without putting his colleagues on the defensive. The first was to be assertive instead of aggressive. Instead of using an aggressive way of speaking, for example, “your suggestion is rubbish”, he needed to learn a no less forceful but much less argumentative way of speaking, for example, “what alarms me about your suggestion is . . . .” This would make it harder for people to dismiss what he had to say because it wouldn't seem like an attack.
The second skill was equally crucial, namely, the skill of listening with empathy to his colleagues' concerns. As well as saying, for example, “what alarms me about your suggestion is …,” he needed to show he was trying to understanding and empathise with his colleagues, by saying, for example, “I imagine the reason you made that suggestion is that you are worried about . . . .”
You might also find our pages on communication skills and dealing with difficult people relevant and helpful to relationship building.