Fight Wise is an online course about developing courage in your relationships — and this special Holiday Edition is adapted for the unique challenge of going home to family. It’s designed to help you stay grounded and kind when tensions rise, reframe difficult relationships, and practise confrontation so you can show up as the wisest, firmest, most compassionate version of yourself.

This is not about dominating grandma or cowing Uncle Gary into submission. We won’t train you to win points for either MSNBC or Fox News. What you will gain is the backbone to hold your own in a direct confrontation, the grace to pivot away from unnecessary dust-ups, and the resilience to get through the holidays with your integrity intact.

Unlike the regular Fight Wise assertiveness course, this Holiday Edition is less about “winning” interpersonal fights and more about avoiding unnecessary conflict, resolving what can’t be avoided, and finding the most peaceful, joyful path possible in family gatherings. We’ll also spend one session directly addressing attachment and relationship wounds that often resurface around the holidays, so you can meet your family as your best self.

Fight Wise: Family Holiday Edition is designed for habitual people-pleasers who dread those moments of confrontation that seem to come up when the family gets together. Through guided sessions, you’ll practise recognising your nervous system’s cues, reframing beliefs about conflict, and building skills to approach those conversations with clarity and confidence.

Session 1: Learn to gauge your nervous system’s activation on a 10-point scale and identify your unique “somatic signature”: how your body signals that your threat detection system is activated.
Session 2: Explore how deep relationship wounds and attachment patterns shape your holiday experience, and practise meeting those triggers with more self-awareness and care.
Session 3: Master a communication framework to clarify your needs, preferences, and boundaries. Analyse past conflicts to identify what went wrong and what to do differently next time.
Session 4: Prepare for a real-life confrontation by focusing on a relationship where you need to show up with more courage. Plan and practice for a difficult but empowering conversation.

This course equips you to face family conflict with greater self-awareness, assertiveness, and ease, so you can make it through the holidays with more peace, more joy, and less regret.

How it works

The course is practice-driven rather than theoretical. You’ll spend most of the time roleplaying, working through various interpersonal scenarios together with other participants.

You will be able to choose your own level of intensity: the roleplay scenarios should be “real enough” to get you out of your comfort zone, without being overwhelmingly intense. This is what we call the “stretch zone”: it’s safe, but not entirely comfortable, so you’ll have numerous opportunities to observe yourself under stress, and practise different ways of showing up.

Through personal and collective reflection, you’ll increase your self-awareness, gain a better understanding of your automatic responses, and learn how to be more skillful in relationships. With feedback from peers & coaches, you’ll build a model of what it means to be appropriately assertive, on your own terms.

Join us if you want to

Practise your nervous system regulation, and notice how a dysregulated nervous system gets in the way of healthy relationships.
Increase the space between stimulus and response, so you can choose a more skillful option when you get triggered.
Practise working through difficult interpersonal situations by roleplaying real life scenarios with peers & coaches.
Learn about the internalised limiting beliefs that keep you from being effective and standing up for yourself.
Reflect and build your own principles of skilful disagreeability.
Design your own homework to learn at the rate that’s right for you.

Testimonials

Here’s what past participants have said about the course:

“One of the highest return-on-investment personal development activities I’ve done.” - Richard

“Fight Wise was invaluable in helping me to get in touch with my anger and step into my confidence and power.” - Alexandra

“The course fully exceeded my expectations - especially in terms of how real, effective and cathartic the dojo practice was.” - Michael

“I don't remember the last time I've been to something that delivered so much real life impact so fast and in such a profound way as this online course.” - Ondrej

“Fight Wise was an excellent course for me to hone in on my ability to skillfully handle conflicts. Roleplaying the different confrontations gave me a space to really think about how and why I feel and act certain ways during a fight.” - Claire

“The exercises were varying in difficulty: approachable to start, but others I found difficult and emotionally activating. Rich and Gabe created a safe space where even these more challenging activities felt safe and beneficial, helping me to grow. The focus on actually practicing conflict makes Fight Wise an engaging, useful course that actually has an impact.” - Tasshin

Dates, Times & Tickets

We meet on Zoom for 4x two-hour workshops, spread over two weeks: October 28, October 30, November 4, November 6. The meetings always start at 9am Pacific Time.

Tickets are US$450.

If these dates don’t work for you, subscribe to the waitlist so we can notify you next time we run this course.

About your coaches

Gabe Broussard aka @VividVoid_

Gabe has spent a lifetime honing his conflict skills, as a Marine, a startup founder, and a martial artist for 16 years. He has since become a peaceful warrior, studying Zen, working as a counselor and poasting about spirituality on Twitter.

Richard D. Bartlett aka @RichDecibels

Rich gained his PhD in Disagreeability after being excommunicated from the fundamentalist Christian community of his birth. These days he works with collaborative leaders to build non-hierarchical organisations based on relationships of partnership rather than domination.