Emotional Strength Training
How to Have Difficult Conversations in Healthcare
Healthcare professionals, educators, and leaders are facing a seemingly impossible challenge in day-to-day interactions at work.
How can we support our patients’ health and well-being while fielding emotional distress and managing volatile conversations?
We’re exhausted, and burnout is looming.
If you can relate, keep reading.
This workshop is designed specifically for healthcare professionals like you.
While most people who work in healthcare are drawn to service, few have have been trained in evidence-based communication models for how to interact with patients, residents, clients, and coworkers.
We recognize that trusting relationships are essential for optimal care.
The problem is that most of us have been taught to compete, judge, demand, and diagnose – to both think and communicate in terms of what is “right” and “wrong.”
Even when well-intended, these habits are corrosive to our personal and professional relationships.

I have a deep commitment to the well-being of humanity and have dedicated my life’s work to helping people live and work together peacefully and effectively.
I’d love to help you cultivate more joy and purpose in your work.
Navigate conversations with confidence, clarity, and ease – even in the face of intense disagreement and charged emotions.

I’ve designed this workshop to give healthcare professionals in all settings and disciplines the skills to have those tough conversations – with patients, residents, families, colleagues, and anyone else you may encounter at work.
Along with understanding what compels human behavior under stress, you’ll get a variety of tools to help everyone reach their highest potential instead of unintentionally activating fear, blame, and defensiveness.
This trauma-aware and developmentally-informed workshop content will significantly up-level your emotional intelligence and interpersonal capacity to stay grounded under pressure.
You’ll get connection-based principles to guide your responses and insight into the profound power of empathic language.
By harnessing this power of human connection, you’ll be empowered to find the most effective words to use in tough situations so that you can move forward together with others instead of staying stuck in exhausting power struggles.

Sign up for this workshop if you’d like to…
- Learn new moves, skills, and scripts to de-escalate conflicts and bridge connections
- Engage effectively in critically important conversations – especially when people are upset
- Maintain healthy boundaries in a system with never-ending demands
- Reduce your experience of compassion fatigue
- Handle emotionally-charged situations with more ease, clarity, and confidence
- Enjoy respectful, hopeful and empowering connections between care providers, residents, and families
- Get specific things to say (and not say) when people are upset, including powerful questions you can ask to redirect conversations.
- Explore practical exercises, case examples, and demos to help you see how to start, sustain, and end emotionally-charged conversations.
- Apply these strategies to all kinds of hot-button issues (vaccines, treatment decisions, staffing, raising a teenager, finances) – at work and at home.
“Incredible teaching and content. Great examples – including scripts and conversation starters.
Dr. Erasmus is engaging, dynamic, and skilled.
I came away with fresh concepts and how-to’s that helped me increase my self-empathy, empathy for others, and strategies for defusing conflicts.”
–Paige Hector, LMSW National Speaker and Clinical Educator
What we’ll cover:
- The primary paradigm shift you can make to transform all your interactions
- Preparing for a successful conversation
- Emotional readiness and self-trust
- The 5 barriers to “getting through” to each other, combined with practical interventions and new moves to overcome each of them
- Locating the conversation – what are we “really” talking about?
- The magic question that redirects every disagreement
- Practical, Compassionate and Nonviolent Communication tools
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.
Numerous studies of disaster response around the world show that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma.
The critical issue is reciprocity: the experience of being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”
–Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

In case we’ve never met…
I’m a psychologist, teacher, and consultant who specializes in the transformation of domination systems, human healing and growth, and helping people embrace differences while staying grounded in their fundamental unity. My approach synthesizes mind-body medicine, somatic experiencing, diversity and inclusiveness, nonviolent communication, and integral-relational-cultural psychology, bringing what has been divided and fragmented into wholeness and harmony.
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Gold member rate: $79 – learn more.
Group discounts available for teams; please inquire.
Contact us if you have questions.
We’d love to help.