The tools to create a culture of conscious communication.

Working with thousands of people in hundreds of organisations over 30years, we’ve identified 12 Principles and 15 Habits to help people get more openness, honesty and straight talk at work. Learning and teaching through humour makes it easier for people to explore and work on these things together.

We customise our keynotes, workshops and programs to address your specific issues and opportunities.  And we support the live delivery with Episodes of Bullshift TV (BTV) – our high quality, engaging online learning resources.

Would you like to improve communication in your workplace?

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 giving and receiving feedback, facilitating meetings, sending clear emails, making effective requests and resolving conflicts before they escalate. Bullshift teaches practical, powerful tools with a bit of light-hearted, relaxed style - keeping some lightness helps us to deal with heavy things.

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 are licensed practitioners/coaches in The Why of you Powered by PRINT®, a breakthrough model of human motivation and behaviour that was developed by The Paul Hertz Group. The approach is used to enhance understanding of the way people react and how they relate by explaining the “why” behind their behaviour. There are 72 PRINTS®, each with their own core motivations and behaviours. No PRINT® is better than any other and each possesses its own natural gifts and contributions (Best Self) and its own potential barriers and obstacles (Shadow).Combined with the Bullshift Principles and Habits, 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!

"Andrew, thank you for delivering a great day. I’m sure everyone, like me, is full of lots of ideas that they want to practice. To your team, zoom or remote learning has become the new norm, but I know how much work goes on in the background to make it seem easy. Thanks for all the setting up and managing all the questions, and support on the technical issues. There is so much thought in how to keep people engaged, and variety in style of learning, I really enjoyed it. For the participants to have energy and enthusiasm to try new things, at the end of 2 days of online learning, is really lovely to see."

Project Officer SA Health, Nursing and Midwifery Office

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