About Winning Conflict
Overview
Winning Conflict is part of a social change project with some big overall goals:
1. Grow Awareness
Nonviolent Communication and Relationship Coaching are very effective, and not well known.
2. Make It Easy
Make NVC mediation easy to follow and accessible, without requiring years of training.
3. Grow Community
Grow the communities of people practicing and supporting each other in using these techniques.
4. Increase Support
Make professional help for conflict resolution more accessible when needed.
5. Create Careers
Increase the number of people who are choosing NVC and Relationship Coaching as careers.
6. Increase Sustainability
Make it effortless for those who want those careers, to do so, sustainably.
Hi, I'm John Reel.
I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) about 35 years ago, and was instantly hooked because I saw how powerful it was for talking about and healing from conflict. I tried to live my life by it, with varying degrees of success at different times, and when I did not live up to my hopes, and my relationships suffered from conflict, I used it later, to heal and deepen many of those connections.
I considered dedicating my life to sharing NVC at that time. However, I went in a different direction, and spent the next 25 years building and growing web-based software companies, which gave me the skills for what I am building now.
In my late 40s, I returned to NVC and trained full-time to become an NVC-mediator and Certified Relationship Coach. I was fortunate to receive years of advanced training with some of the most influential trainers from around the world including three years with John Kinyon, one of the top NVC mediator trainers, and a year and a half with David Steele, who invented Relationship Coaching.
During that time, I noticed some trends that worried me:
Financial Instability:
I learned that very few people were successfully making a living sharing these gifts of NVC, NVC mediation, and many were also struggling as relationship coaches.Hard to Put Into Practice:
I kept seeing people, myself included, seemingly forget their NVC training when conflict came up and when their skills were most needed, including those who had dedicated decades of their life to NVC. Sometimes, instead of responding with empathy, we react with judgment, blame, and stating interpretations as fact, all things we avoid in NVC, because they escalate conflict and reduce connection. Intellectually, we know what to do, and we can apply it when we are grounded. But in other moments, we can go into reaction and revert to old and unhelpful habits.Partial Effectiveness:
I kept seeing how the empathy-based mediation process would feel amazing and be very effective, even when other modalities did not get the desired results. It often led clients to reconnect and solve their problems, in just a handful of sessions. However, when the next conflict happened, old habits would reemerge, and people often felt worse than when they started.
These realizations led to a real crisis of faith for me. I kept asking myself, if those of us with that much training cannot reliably live by our NVC values during conflict, how can this method truly benefit people who have not dedicated years to practice?
When I began this new chapter of my life, I had this terrific plan to retire from tech, stop leading big projects, and live a nice, simple, and relaxing life, working with just a handful of clients a week.
But, now I had these new problems to solve. I spent over a year pondering and planning...
How can these skills be easier to learn and easier to use when needed most?
How can the community grow massively, so more people live by the connecting values of NVC?
How can those in the community, who long to share their skills, financially thrive while doing it?
Introducing: Winning Conflict
When we have no structure to follow, it seems to me that we are much more likely to fall into our habits. Conversely, when we follow a step-by-step structure, it appears to be much easier to slow down and have connecting conversations that lead to understanding, healing, and solutions that get everyone's needs met.
In fact, in my practice, I have seen that, with structure, nearly anyone can connect with the principles of NVC and resolve conflicts, even without any previous training, whatsoever. And, when we combine NVC mediation (to facilitate connection, healing, and solutions), with relationship coaching (to facilitate developing our vision and action plans to achieve the relationships and life we want), we can relatively quickly fix and heal from conflict, and create relationships that are very fulfilling and sustainable.
Working on systemizing that structure resulted in the Winning Conflict book, card deck, and logbooks, to provide that structure, plus the Wheel Of Life app to speed up our progress. I am soon going to make these available to the NVC and coaching community and will start piloting workshops and a group coaching program with those who join. This will be followed by an advertising campaign to start building awareness outside of these communities.
Moonshots
A moonshot is an ambitious goal, that if successful, will have a massive impact on society. Winning Conflict is a series of moonshots.
Moonshot 1) Sustainable Growth:
The first goal is to share this book and system in a way that sustains ongoing growth. If successful, this will result in a continually increasing number of people, working together in community and supporting each other, as we navigate the conflicts in our lives, become conflict-resistant, and create the relationships and futures we desire.
As it grows, we'll offer frequent workshops, where NVC trainers and trainer candidates, along with other experts, can get exposure to large numbers of new faces interested in these topics. This will give NVC trainer candidates opportunities to practice teaching with beginners, and give certified NVC trainers and other authors and teachers, opportunities to grow their audience.
Moonshot 2) Helper Network:
Once that community is growing, it will create a need for support. The next goal is to grow a network of helpers, certified to support people in winning conflict, when they have issues that are too urgent or activating to work through on their own. This will include professional empathy support, conversation prep, mediation, and relationship coaching.
My hope is that this network of helpers will grow quickly as it offers a new and sustainable path to financial stability, while contributing to social change, to the tens of thousands of people around the world who practice Nonviolent Communication and relationship coaching.
The certification programs will be run through a not-for-profit organization, Harmonic Mediation Society (HMS). They will open to anyone, without prerequisites, with fast-track programs for people with previous training in NVC, NVC-based mediation, or Relationship Coaching. If you are inspired to have a new career, or are already practicing these methodologies and want more work and community, please join us.
The vision is that HMS will take care of all of your marketing (through a partnership with Winning Conflict, other partnerships, and other initiatives), as well as all the tech, billing, and other overhead that can be barriers to financially thriving. If all goes according to plan, those certified by HMS will be able to work with as many clients as they can handle, use their skills to contribute to social change, and just focus on what they love, helping people connect to each other and live their best lives.
Moonshot 3) Empathy and Conflict Hotline
Once we have enough people involved with HMS, the next goal is to start offering a conflict support hotline, where people are quickly connected to someone who can help, right when it is needed. The ultimate vision of the hotline, as it grows over decades, is to offer around the clock coverage, around the world, in multiple languages.
If successful, this will further accelerate social change, as we help people change course away from escalation and toward connection, earlier and more frequently.
Moonshot 4) Advocacy and Generational Change
The end goal is for enough people to have their lives transformed by Winning Conflict and Harmonic Mediation, that we reach a tipping point where we can successfully advocate to make conflict resolution skills and support accessible to many more people. There are two goals:
First, get NVC empathy, NVC mediation, and relationship coaching to be recognized as legitimate healing practices that reduce stress, harm, and medical support costs, reduces divorce conflict, workplace conflict, stress leave, family breakdown, HR/legal costs, etc., and to be covered by insurance policies, so they can be much more accessible.
Second, to have this framework taught in schools with the same importance as reading and writing, so we can raise a generation of children with excellent conflict habits as their default way of communicating and thinking, unlike us, who have all our unhelpful habits to overcome. This may change how our society deals with conflict as a whole.
In theory, this can be start to happen when about 5% of the population are ready to sign, email, show up, donate, share, ask schools, ask insurers, and ask institutions to start initiating this. In Canada, where I live, that is about two million people. Clearly this is a long-term goal, but I think it is achievable. Interpersonal conflict is the source of a great deal of pain for most people, and we are providing a solid path out.
However far along we get, this is a future I am happy to be investing in.
Today's Status
The book and card deck are finished and I have a printer ready to print and ship 1,000 decks as a first run. I am currently testing the nearly completed Wheel Of Life app, which I absolutely love. I finally can organize all my thoughts!
I am currently waiting to be approved for Amazon fulfillment and for the Apple developer ecosystem. These are blockers to shipping the decks and finishing and publishing the app. Once that gets sorted out, I will start sending the books and decks to select people for review and send them out to anyone who orders an advance (and discounted) copy.
Once I have some feedback, I will schedule and announce an online launch party. This will be the beginning of us going on a journey together to improve all of our lives, while also providing feedback on how effective this method is as we start putting it into practice together.
Requests
If any of this sounds beneficial or exciting, which I hope it does, I have a few requests:
Attend the launch party:
Sign up to participate and get all the bonuses.Share WinningConflict.com:
Invite your peers, friends, and family, so they can also get all the benefits of the launch party group, and so we can grow this together, faster.Get involved.
There's a lot to do. If you've got skills you would like to contribute, let's chat!Invest:
I created Winning Conflict as a for-profit company, separate from the not-for-profit, HMS, so that I and others could invest and see a return on that investment. Investment will accelerate growth. If you want to help this vision through investment, let's talk.
Long-term Vision
I am very thankful for all the people who helped me get to this stage, and excited about what I am about to offer to the world. But this is not about me. I'm building everything with the vision for it to outlast my time here on this earth, hopefully helping people for generations to come. I see it as continually growing and improving over time, with large numbers of people trained to do these workshops, mediate conflict, and bring more peace and understanding into the world.
Please join us for the launch party, and help us build it. :-)
With heartfelt thanks for your time,
John Reel
Last updated August 5, 2026
Sign up for the online launch event:
Attend to get the app, e-book, audio book, and more... for free
This is a one-time event and offer. Date and time to be determined.
Join us and you will get:
Free digital book, audio book, and app:
Life-time access to the Wheel Of Life app, including the digital book, audio book, and digital log-books. This will include a free trial of all the AI features in the app, which are incredibly helpful. (I don't yet know how much that will cost me to offer, so I don't know how long I can offer that feature for free... Yet.)Free coaching group:
Together, we'll be testing and refining the format of the paid coaching group. Everyone who attends can join for free for six months. There will be multiple calls a week where we will identify all the conflicts we need to work on and follow the framework to address them at our own pace, work on our vision and action steps to make our lives and relationships as fulfilling as possible, and support each other as a community, as we work on our conversation prep, triggers, habitual responses, and other targeted life-improvement skills.
Discount on physical book and card deck:
As this initial group will only be spread by word-of-mouth, with no advertising costs, I can offer the physical products for much less.
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