There is one conversation you keep not having. This is a free live workshop where you finally say it out loud.
Not to the person yet. To a room that is safe. You bring the exact talk that is stealing your sleep, and you rehearse it once, as yourself, and you feel the dread start to move.
You know the one.
The feedback you have been meaning to give for three weeks. The underperformer you keep quietly covering for. The former teammate who still talks to you like you were never promoted. It sits in your chest all day, and at 2am it is the thing you are staring at the ceiling about.
Here is what I want you to know before you read another line. You are not here because you do not know what to say. You know exactly what to say. You have known for weeks.
So this workshop is not another set of words. It is a couple of hours, live and free, where you get to do the one thing every book and script has never let you do. You say the hard conversation out loud, as yourself, in a room where nothing bad happens, and you find out that the dread is not as permanent as it has felt.
Come and try it. There is nothing to lose but one evening, and possibly the thing that has been owning your sleep.
Let me describe your week, and you tell me if I have any of it wrong.
If this reads like someone has been watching, that is only because I have sat exactly where you are sitting. This is the pattern, not a personal failing.
There is a conversation on your calendar that you scheduled yourself, and part of you is quietly hoping it gets cancelled.
In the twenty minutes before it, you make a cup of tea you do not really want. You answer an email that could have waited a month. You straighten a desk that was already straight. Your body knows what is coming before your diary does.
There is a message you have typed, and deleted, and typed again, and it is still sitting there unsent, because sending it might cost you something you cannot quite name.
There is the meeting comment you let slide. The deadline you absorbed instead of raising. The person you covered for again, because saying the true thing felt like more than you had in you that day.
And here is the part almost nobody says out loud. At 2am you are not searching for the words. You know the words. You are lying there mourning the version of you who could have said them without being afraid that saying them would make people stop liking you.
I want to be plain with you, because you have been sold enough gentle nonsense. You are not too soft for this job. You are not the one manager who cannot get there. You have simply been trying to fix the wrong thing, in the wrong room, for a very long time, and nobody ever told you that.
The problem was never your words. That is the whole reason better words never fixed it.
The conversation is not decided by what you say once you are inside the room. It is decided at the doorway, by who you are being when you walk in.
Think about the last hard talk that went sideways on you. I would guess you had good words ready. Maybe brilliant ones. And somewhere in the first thirty seconds, the real you quietly left the room and a borrowed, careful, slightly stiff version of you took over.
I call that borrowed version the Counterfeit Boss. It is the manager you perform because some part of you has privately decided you do not quite deserve the role yet. It is not a fraud you chose. It is a costume you were handed, by every promotion that came without a map.
And it does not matter how good your script is, because the person on the other side is not really listening to your words. They are reading who is in front of them. That is the Doorway Decision, and it is why the fear keeps coming back no matter how many frameworks you memorise.
You cannot read your way out of that. You cannot ChatGPT your way out of it either. The only thing that retires the Counterfeit Boss is rehearsing the real conversation, out loud, as yourself, until walking in as you is the easy option.
That is exactly what we are going to do together, once, live, on the night.
What The First Rehearsal Live actually is, in plain terms.
One live session. No slides that put you to sleep. You will not watch me talk about conversations. You will practise one of yours.
Here is how the evening runs, so there are no surprises.
First, I will name the room you have been living in, so precisely that you will feel a little seen, and you will relax, because it turns out this was never just you.
Then I will show you the thing the whole industry has been getting backwards. Why the problem was never your words, and why the conversation is won or lost at the doorway before you say anything at all.
And then we do the actual work. You bring the one conversation that is stealing your sleep, the real one, the underperformer or the former peer or the feedback you keep softening into mush. And you rehearse it, out loud, as yourself, not from a script. I will be right there with you while you do it.
You will say the words once, in a room where nothing is at stake, and you will feel that low hum of dread you carry around all day start to move. Not vanish. Move. That is the whole point of a rehearsal. You practise it badly, in safety, so that when it counts, it is no longer the first time.
That is it. Simple, human, and nothing like the training that has failed you before.
What you will walk out with, even if we never speak again.
This is a couple of hours. It is free. And it is built to actually give you something, not to leave you wanting a sales pitch.
By the end of the workshop, three things will be true that were not true when you arrived.
You will have said your hardest conversation out loud, once, as yourself. That sounds small. It is not. For most people it is the first time the words have ever left the inside of their head, and it changes the way the real one feels.
You will understand why it kept freezing you, in a way no book has explained, because you will have felt the difference between performing a borrowed self and speaking as you.
You will have a way of preparing for the next hard talk that does not involve memorising a single line. You keep that. It is yours, whatever you decide to do afterwards.
I run it this way on purpose. I would rather you leave genuinely helped and think well of me, than leave feeling worked on. That is not a marketing tactic. It is just how I like to do things.
Who I built this evening for, and who should probably give it a miss.
This is not for everyone, and saying so is the most honest thing I can do.
This is for you if you are a newer manager, somewhere in your first couple of years, running a small team, and there is a specific conversation you keep not having. It is especially for you if you are the warm one, the person everyone calls so nice, and you have started to suspect that being nice is quietly costing you the respect you need.
It is for you if you have already tried the famous books, drafted the script, maybe even rehearsed it in your head at 2am, and still froze when it counted.
It is not for you if you are looking for a set of clever lines to win an argument, or a way to become the hard, cold, no-nonsense boss. I do not teach that, and honestly, I think it is bad advice. You will never hear me ask you to amputate the warm half of yourself. That warmth is not your weakness. It is the raw material.
If that sounds like your kind of room, come in.
A quick word on why a former vet is the one running this.
I did not come to this from a business school. I came to it the long way around, and that is exactly why I understand the feeling of thinking you have failed before you have properly begun.
I trained for years to be an animal doctor, and when I finally qualified I discovered I had almost no natural talent for it. I thought I had failed at my career before it started. Then, in the unlikeliest workplace imaginable, I discovered the thing I was actually good at. People. I found them far more interesting than anything I had been credentialed for.
I have spent the twenty years since as an executive coach and leadership trainer, quietly helping managers handle the conversations they dread. I am not going to list letters after my name at you. I would rather just show you, on the night, that this works.
So let me show you.
Come and have your first rehearsal. It is free, it is live, and there is a seat with your name on it.
Bring the one conversation that is stealing your sleep. Bring nothing else. You will leave having finally said it out loud.
Here are the details.
- WhatThe First Rehearsal Live, a free live workshop where you rehearse your hardest conversation once, as yourself.
- WhenSaturday, 1 August 2026 (placeholder date). Start time TBD, and I will send it to you the moment you register.
- WhereLive and online. You will get the link by email as soon as you reserve your spot.
- CostFree. Genuinely free. There is nothing to buy on the night.
- BringThe one conversation you keep not having. That is all.
To hold your seat, just pop your email in below and I will send you everything you need. When you register, add my email to your contacts so the joining link does not get lost, and I will see you in the room.
I would love you to be there.
P.S. If the evening does for you what I hope it does, you will probably want to know what comes next. There is a small group programme called The Rehearsal Room where we do this properly, with your real conversations, over a few weeks, until the dread is gone for good. I will mention it once, warmly, at the end of the workshop, and only if you want to hear about it. For now, there is nothing to decide and nothing to buy. Just come and have your first rehearsal, and let us see how it feels.