Conflict Decoded Podcast
On Conflict Decoded, we explore why it’s so common for those of us dedicated to social change to get mired in conflict within our teams and organizations and how to break free. Join host Katherine Golub (callingsandcourage.com) and guests as we explore the hidden, painful dynamics that undermine our good work and discover proven practices that can help you show up more effectively and experience more ease and joy in your work. Let’s move beyond frustration and disappointment and get on with our important work!
Episodes
July 8, 2025 • 39 mins
Heather Plett—facilitator, trainer, and author known globally for her work in holding space—and Katherine explore how activists often get sucked into the victim - rescuer - perpetrator vortex and how to break free.
This model supported Katherine, Heather, and many others to shift from white saviorism to a posture of more true solidarity.
Bio:
Heather Plett, is the author of the award-winning book The Art of Holding Space: A Practic...
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June 25, 2025 • 42 mins
Shiree Teng—community organizer, storyteller, and healer who believes that love and courage will lead the way towards our collective liberation—speaks with Katherine about how to center radical love in our work for change.
With a mixture of grace and conviction, Shiree offers guidance for how to align your life with your truth and a fierce love for yourself and others.
Without cultivating love for ourselves and each other, we ris...
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June 10, 2025 • 63 mins
If we are to survive the current and looming environmental and economic emergencies and grow communities in which we thrive, we need to be able to relate and work together across difference.
In this episode, Carmen Spagnola teaches the building blocks for cultivating secure attachment—the ability to help ourselves and others feel safe, seen, secure, and soothed—even with people we’re most challenged by.
About Carmen Spagnola:
Carm...
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May 26, 2025 • 38 mins
Show Notes
We have good reason to feel scared about what’s happening nationally and globally. And yet, as Sulma Arias, Executive Director of Peoples’ Action, reminds us in this week’s podcast, there are so many incredible opportunities for change in our own local communities.
Whether it’s removing lead from the school playground or installing a stop sign where the kids are playing, we often have the most power to create change at h...
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April 9, 2025 • 47 mins
In part two of our conversation with Francesca Mason-Boring, we explore how to help well and shore ourselves up for the work of social justice. We discuss how to release demonizing and patronizing ways of seeing each other and approach our work from a strong, clear place, disentangled from the traumas of the past.
This podcast is part two to a two-part episode. In Part One, Francesca introduced family systems constellations and it...
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April 9, 2025 • 47 mins
Francesca Mason-Boring, one of Katherine’s most beloved and influential teachers, introduces listeners to family systems constellations, a profound healing modality for transforming intergenerational trauma.
This podcast is part one to a two-part episode. In Part One, Francesca shares about the indigenous roots of this methodology, how it can support the healing of collective traumas that can make our work so challenging, and how ...
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March 12, 2025 • 60 mins
How do we make decisions that honor everyone’s needs, even in high stakes situations? Katherine explores this question with Miki Kashtan, founder of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community and the creator of Convergent Facilitation.
In these times, we need new, revolutionary processes to help us get underneath the surface of our conflicts and listen for what is truly needed. Convergent Facilitation can help us widen the apertur...
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February 18, 2025 • 78 mins
Have you not known whether to speak up when hearing someone make a harmful comment?
Wondered how to center the impacted person without causing further harm?
Or what to say when you do speak up?
If so, I hope you’ll tune in to the latest episode of Conflict Decoded—How to Address Harmful Impact with Nonviolent Communication—with clinical psychologist and Nonviolent Communication trainer @RoxanneManning.
Nonviolent Communication (...
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February 4, 2025 • 54 mins
Podcast Intro:
Earlier this year, I experienced a conflict in my role as a city councilor that was very hard for me to understand.
It was one of those moments that felt very confusing, like what was going on had way more to do with dynamics below the surface, in the group’s unconscious, than it had to do with the actual content we were discussing.
In an effort to make sense of things, I discovered the field of systems psychodyna...
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January 21, 2025 • 59 mins
Episode Intro
Somatics practitioner and anti-racist trainer, Dara Silverman, reminds us this week that to build strong movements, those of us who are committed to bringing forth a world in which all peoples’ needs are met, will need to offer ourselves and each other softness in these times.
When we write people off, point fingers in blame, and narrow our tent, our movements grow smaller and lose.
To build movements with the capa...
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January 7, 2025 • 54 mins
Does someone in your workplace, community, or another realm of your life frustrate or disappoint you?
Do you want to know how to give them some feedback without damaging the relationship?
I recently found myself in a situation like this, and my podcast guest this week, Heather Younger, organizational culture strategist and leading expert on active listening at work, reminded me of exactly what I needed to hear—
When we invest at...
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December 17, 2024 • 52 mins
In this episode of Conflict Decoded, I sit down with Denise Padín Collazo, a veteran leader in grassroots organizing and author of Thriving in the Fight: A Survival Manual for Latinas on the Front Lines of Change. Together, we dive into the heart of what it takes to build a better world without tearing each other down. Denise shares her insights on recognizing habitual responses to stress, setting boundaries, and the transformative...
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December 3, 2024 • 58 mins
SHOW NOTES
Our teams arguably offer our biggest lever for social change.
And yet, teams are vastly ignored.
In our conversation this week, Bennett Bratt, a team coach with over thirty years experience supporting teams, shares his personal mission—reversing the benign neglect of teams.
If you find yourself struggling with frustration in your teams or a nagging sense that your team could be better—especially if you lead a team in...
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November 12, 2024 • 70 mins
In this episode, I’m joined by Jill Poklemba in an honest conversation inspired by Dr. Yanique Redwood’s White Women Cry & Call Me Angry. We get into the messy and uncomfortable realities of whiteness in social justice spaces—how it shows up in ways white people don’t always notice, and how terms like “progressive” can sometimes do more to mask internalized racism than reveal it.
Jill and I explore the ways white women unintention...
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October 29, 2024 • 55 mins
One of the hardest things about being a leader is needing to make choices that will make someone you care about mad, no matter what you do. My guest for this week’s episode of Conflict Decoded, former Amherst, MA, town councilor and mindfulness teacher Dr. Shalini Bahl, knows this dynamic well.
As Shalini shares in our conversation, to make wise decisions and move through challenging dynamics in our workplaces and communities, we ...
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October 20, 2024 • 57 mins
With so many interlocking, overwhelming crises in the world today, it can be so hard to find our role. But when we try to do everything all at once or avoid what needs our attention, we can show up in ways that we later regret and burn ourselves out.
As long-time activist and Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at Building Movement Project, Deepa Iyer, discovered through decades of organizing in the South Asian, Muslim, Arab,...
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October 14, 2024 • 63 mins
Conflict avoidance isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a survival strategy in the face of manufactured scarcity.
Of course, there is abundant potential for leadership, wisdom, and trust.
And yet, living in hierarchies, we perceive a scarcity of leadership. With expert-driven learning, we perceive a scarcity of wisdom. With separation culture, we perceive a scarcity of trustworthiness.
When we don’t trust that we'll be cared for, of c...
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October 7, 2024 • 58 mins
When we get into a disagreement, we often see the other person as the problem. But so often, our conflicts are rooted in systemic factors in our organizations and society, like pay structures and decision-making processes.
To create equitable workplaces and communities where peoples’ needs are met, we must stop butting heads against each other and zoom out to see the changes needed in our larger organization and communities.
With...
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September 30, 2024 • 63 mins
Sarah Peyton is a neuroscience educator, Nonviolent Communication trainer, and, as a good friend of mine calls her, “brain whisperer.”
Her live events, online courses, and bestselling books have transformed my coaching work and have helped my clients and me unstuck from many limiting personal and interpersonal patterns.
We talk about the neuroscience of blame, guilt, shame, rage, and demonization, the difference between left-hemi...
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September 30, 2024 • 8 mins
Hello and welcome to Conflict Decoded, where we explore the hidden dynamics that keep us stuck in conflict in our workplaces and communities and share practical guidance to help us break free.
My name is Katherine Golub. I’m a coach, mediator, city councilor, activist, mother, and the founder of the Center for Callings & Courage. I live on the ancestral lands of the Pocumtuck people, recently known as Greenfield, Massachusetts.
I...
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