Conflict Coaching

What Is Conflict Coaching? | Goals & Benefits | Your Coaching Session | Testimonials | Logistics & Costs | Questions?


What Is Conflict Coaching?

Community Boards’ Conflict Coaching Program provides confidential one-on-one sessions that assist individuals in addressing and problem solving a specific issue. Conflict coaching is a proactive way for you to gain new insights and conflict resolution tools for resolving a particular personal or professional conflict.

Community Boards’ conflict coaches are highly trained conflict resolution experts with an array of effective active listening, reframing, and communication techniques.

In your session, your coach will help you understand your current situation more clearly and from different perspectives. With this understanding, your coach will explore those techniques best suited for your conflict. You will then learn and practice them while receiving immediate feedback.

If you have any questions along the way, please feel free to ask your conflict coach. Again, your conflict coach is not there to solve the issue for you, but help you come up with ways of dealing with it more productively on your own.

You will leave your session with a workable action plan along with the relevant conflict resolution skills and understanding to implement it.

Goals & Benefits of Your Conflict Coaching Session

Your conflict coaching session will help you:

  • Feel heard and validated
  • Expand your perspectives about the conflict
  • Identify your own needs and interests
  • Identify the perceived needs and interests of the other side
  • Brainstorm possible solutions to meet your needs and interests
  • Select the best tools to address, manage and resolve your conflict
  • Develop your own action plan and recommendations for its implementation

Your Coaching Session: How Our Process Works

When you meet with your conflict coach, here’s how your conflict coaching session will proceed:

  1. Introductions and Overview: Meeting your conflict coach and understanding the process.
  2. Defining the Problem: Telling the conflict story from your perspective and clarifying your needs and interests.
  3. Broadening Perspectives: Telling the conflict story from the other side’s point of view and understanding their possible needs and interests.
  4. Visioning: What would it look like if this conflict were resolved tomorrow?
  5. Brainstorming: Finding ways to deal with the conflict and achieve your vision.
  6. Creating Your Action Plan: Selecting the best actions to take, which conflict resolution tools to use, and possible next steps
  7. Follow-up: Staff will contact you afterwards about the status of your situation. You can always call our office if needed. Just ask for the staff person assigned to you.

Testimonials from Other Conflict Coaching Clients

  • “Thank you so much for my meeting with a conflict coach!  It really feels as if there is hope in the stalemate I’ve had with my building manager now.”
  • “My conflict coach’s professionalism and honest demeanor allowed me to feel at ease as I shared with him the ongoing noise conflict with my neighbor.  He helped me assess a plan to communicate with my neighbor. Since the meeting, the noise issues have ceased. Because of Aaron, my conflict coach, I again have a peaceful home and have established a new friendship with my neighbor.”
  • “My coaching session was a gentle, practical, conversational exploration of what was important on all sides of my issue. Tony was able to get me to envision a different scenario that would not trigger me.”
  • “I felt comfortable with my coach and she really distilled my issue into one I could better understand. My session was a nice balance of care and curiosity combined with a focus on the practical.”
  • “Awesome session. Sheryl made me think of things that hadn’t occurred to me. She helped me come up with actions I could take that were well within my comfort zone.”

Logistics & Costs

  1. To start, speak with the Community Boards staff to discuss the benefits of Conflict Coaching, whether as a standalone service or in connection with a mediation.
  2. Sessions are 1.5 hours and can be held in person or by telephone.
  3. If you open a mediation case, the case opening fee includes one conflict coaching session at no additional cost.
  4. If you choose Conflict Coaching as a standalone service, the standard case opening fee of $45-$100 applies.
  5. If you want additional sessions, the cost is $45 per session. You can schedule a new date with your coach at the time, or contact CB staff at a later time.
  6. Sessions are scheduled at your convenience: Monday through Friday, 9am – 6pm, Saturday and Sunday, 9am to 2pm.
  7. Click here to open a case and request your conflict coaching session.

Request a conflict coaching session here


Primary Contact: Sarah Moss, Mediation and Training Coordinator, smoss@communityboards.org
General Inquiries: Jim Garrison, jgarrison@communityboards.org