Description: The customers and suppliers you need to work with effectively may be outside your company or in the next office. And you may not always see eye to eye. Even if you have strong interpersonal skills and common goals, conflict can happen. Make sure you know how find common ground, calm emotions and forge a productive path forward.

Handling Difficulty People and Situations starts by helping you assess your current skills and style and then offers techniques to successfully manage difficulties. You’ll learn how to:

•  Identify the difficult people in your life and understand their motivation

•  See how differing beliefs and values can be the source of conflict

•  Learn how people are different and how each should be addressed

•  Follow a proven process model to achieve success

Contents: Part 1: The Difficult People in Your Life • The Difficult Person in Your Life • Personality Profiles of Difficult People • Part 2: How You See and Hear Difficult People • How I Contribute to the Problem • Beliefs • Values • Preferences/World View • Part 3: The Power of a Difficult Person • Degrees of Difficulty • Favorite Difficult Person • First Response • Getting Past the First Response • Go, No Go • Part 4: Making a Plan and Finding the Words • Planning to Deal with Difficult People • Strategies for Dealing with Different Types • Leading a Difficult Customer to a Better Outcome • The LEAD Model • Listen • Explore • Attend • Deliver a Solution • Being the Difficult Person • Appreciative Inquiry

About the Authors: Rick Conlow - A quick glance at his professional resume leaves you with the strong impression that effort and optimism are a winning combination. Case in point: With Rick by their side, clients have achieved double- and triple-digit improvement in their sales performance, quality, customer loyalty, and service results over the past 20-plus years and earned more than 30 quality and service awards.

In an age where optimism and going the extra mile can sound trite, Rick has made them a differentiator. His clients include organizations that lead their industries, as well as others that are less recognizable. Regardless, their goals are his goals.

Rick’s life view and extensive background in sales and leadership—as a general manager, vice president, training director, program director, national sales trainer, and consultant—are the foundation of his coaching, training, and consulting services. Participants in Rick’s experiential, "live action" programs walk away with ah-has, inspiration, and skills they can immediately put to use.

These programs include:

Ø   BEST Selling!

Ø   Moments of Magic!

Ø   Excellence in Management!

Ø   SuperSTAR Service and Selling!

Ø   The Greatest Secrets of all Time!

Ø   Good Boss/Bad Boss—Which One Are You?

Rick has also authored Excellence in Management, Excellence in Supervision, Returning to Learning, and Moments of Magic.

When he’s not engaging an audience or engrossed in a coaching discussion, this proud husband and father is most likely astride a weight bench or on a motorcycle taking on the back roads and highways of Minnesota.

Doug Watsabaugh - Doug values being a "regular person," with his feet on the ground and head in the realities of the daily challenges his clients face. It’s his heart for and experience in helping clients deal with difficult situations that distinguish him from other sales performance and leadership development consultants.

His knowledge of experiential learning and his skill at designing change processes and learning events have enabled him to measurably improve the lives of thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations in a wide variety of industries— financial services, manufacturing, medical devices, consumer goods, and technology, to name a few.

Before starting his own business, Doug served as the director of operations for a national training institute, manager of organization development for a major chemical company, and was responsible for worldwide training and organization development for the world’s third largest toy company.

He was also a partner in Performance & Human Development LLC, a California company that published high-involvement experiential activities, surveys and instruments, interactive training modules, papers, and multimedia presentations.

Doug has co-authored two books with John E. Jones, Ph.D., and William L. Bearley, Ed. D.: The New Fieldbook for Trainers published by HRD Press and Lakewood Publishing, and The OUS Quality Item Pool, about organizational survey items that measure Baldrige criteria.

He is a member of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the Minnesota Quality Council and The National Organization Development Network.

Doug’s father taught him the value of hard work, and it paid dividends: He funded his college education playing guitar and singing with a rock ‘n’ roll band, experiencing a close call with fame when he played bass in concert with Chuck Berry. Not bad for a guy who admits to being "a bit shy."

While Doug’s guitar remains a source of enjoyment, it pales in comparison to his "number one joy and priority"—his family.