The tools to create a culture of conscious communication.

We’ve identified 12 BULLS that block openness, honesty and straight talk at work and 12 ways to SHIFT them. We’ve learned that teaching these shifts through humour makes it easier and more enjoyable for people to look at themselves and consider changing behaviours.

We can customise our keynotes, workshops and programs to incorporate your specific challenges and opportunities. And we support our live delivery and facilitation with a library of online resources. Is your workplace ready to shift the bull?

Why humour works

Humour is one of the most effective ways to teach conscious communication skills.

Laughter produces happy chemicals
Scientists have proven that laughing together sends good chemicals around your body and builds a greater sense of belonging and connection between people.
Laughing means you’re listening
The more we laugh, the more actively we engage in the content - which is particularly valuable when the content is challenging your ego and encouraging change.
Laughing increases retention
We're more likely to remember the learning and put it to use if it was enjoyable at the time - and to relive it with others who were there, keeping the messages alive.

What is conscious communication?

Conscious communication involves bringing mindfulness, self-awareness and emotional intelligence to your everyday communication – like feedback, meetings, team work, emails and conflict resolution. Bullshift teaches specific, practical, powerful self-management and interpersonal skills, in a humorous and entertaining way.

How is Bullshift different?

It’s not training, it’s Bullshift.

Noticing the "Bulls"

When we are driven by unconscious reactions, the bulls can charge without our awareness.

Our first reactions are often ego-driven. It takes self-observation to notice a reaction before choosing whether or not to act on it. This self-awareness enables us to shift the bulls.

Making the "Shifts"

When we cultivate a practice of observing the bulls, we are more able to shift them.

Understanding our internal reactions and learning ways to shift them means we are empowered to face more challenges and consciously choose our responses.

What would you like to shift?

Explore some common challenges in the modern workplace

Organisations need teams and departments in order to function, and those teams are now more remote than ever. What we don’t need is for people to over-identify with their team and then compete internally. This “silo” behaviour occurs across all fields and industries and causes great waste, stress, conflict and confusion. In Bullshift, we help people (through a lot of humour) to understand how destructive this way of operating can be, why it happens, and how we might shift it together.
We work with toxic cultures trying to get well, healthy cultures trying to get fit, and super-fit cultures investing in their people to stay at the top. Through all of this work, we’ve learned a few things about what makes (and breaks) organisational culture, and helped people to shift from excuses to reasons, sarcasm to straight talk, muttering to speaking up and gossip to respectful communication - shifting the culture by changing our habits.
Conflict is inevitable when passionate people come together, and healthy when it’s used to drive conversations to a higher place. Our observation is that conflict becomes destructive when it’s competitive. Shifting from binary “either/or” thinking to “both/and” thinking opens up the conversation and enables people to work together on a wider range of options and approaches. Bullshift encourages us to seek feedback, park automatic opinions, challenge our assumptions and detach from emotional investments so we can still have conflict but ensure it's purposeful and productive.
Leadership comes with influence, some luxuries and higher pay, but it also demands that we understand complexity, clarify ambiguity, have difficult conversations and exemplify the ideals of the organisation. Many leaders and managers are promoted into roles without sufficient training or support to handle the daily pains and problems. Bullshift helps by teaching pragmatic principles and powerful skills for communicating more effectively at every level, in every field. Leaders learn to make the vague clear, open the closed, straighten the wonky, and shift from competitive to collaborative thinking.
Bullshift helps people to reduce the pretending and be more authentic. We use the well-proven personality profiling system PRINT - created by The Paul Hertz Group - to enable individuals to go deeper into self-awareness, understanding what their Anticipated Best Self, Potential Shadow and Triggers can look like in action every day. Combined with the Bullshift Principles, PRINT can be a positive, practical tool for bringing more of your best self to work every day.
“Collaboration” has become a buzzword in recent years - often requested, rarely understood. We reckon more organisations could increase collaboration if they’d start by appreciating just how hard it is to do so. We use humour, exercises and processes to draw out the personal and organisational barriers in your workplace and collaborate on shifting them. Then we work on real problems with a more collaborative mindset and newly developed communication skills. In essence, we collaborate around why collaboration is difficult - and then collaborate on improving at collaboration!

I looked around the room and saw every single person leaning forward, smiling, engaged and wanting more. “Don’t be defensive, be curious” hit hard with everyone in the room but the delivery was light-hearted and funny. This has been a talking point since we attended the workshop and we will definitely be embedding the principles into our workplace. One of the best learning exercises I have seen. Delivery was spot on.

Leadership and Management Team Coles Distribution Centre

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