» Personal effectiveness

Training programme

We facilitate people’s personal effectiveness in a variety of ways: primarily coaching and mentoring, but also teaching and training. This page describes a set of courses whose intention is to enable people to perform more effectively at work. If a business is to be more successful, the people in the business will need to be able to work with each other better, work with their clients and suppliers better and work with everyone else better. That starts with being able to perform more effectively oneself.

Objectives

The programme has two underlying objectives:

1 To give participants insight into the subjects. If they know what is going on for them, and understand why, they are empowered to change, to do something better.
2 To provide participants with approaches, techniques and tools which they can use to enhance their personal effectiveness.

Content

This programme is made up of a number of individual modules.

I: Handling stress
II: Handling change
III: Wellbeing for businesspeople

Each module is 1 day (7 hours).

Personal effectiveness I: Handling stress

Module description

This course looks at why we become stressed, how to deal with stressful situations and how not to be stressed in the first place.

Syllabus/content

Stressful situations and stressors
We examine the variety of situations that cause stress and why they do.

What is stress and its effects
Defining stress clearly. Stress versus anxiety. Chronic stress versus acute stress.

Physiological model / dynamic model
The comfort zone. We differentiate stress versus stretch, and look at the value of being stretched. The bell curve model which relates the emotional state to the amount of work undertaken. Stress versus pressure.

Satir types of response to stress
Virginia Satir described five distinct approaches to stressful situations. We examine these and see the benefits in each.

Attitude
Often we developed a stressed response to a situation because of our underlying beliefs and feelings about the situation. These have often arisen over the long term. We look at two main areas and cover how to transcend them:

independence: by this we don’t mean autonomy or self-reliance. We will cover an attitude of needing to be in control, refusing to trust others, wanting to be right
sacrifice: this is doing things with a (usually unconscious) demand for reward. We address the consequences of being in sacrifice—exhaustion, burnout and feeling a victim—and propose that a better place to be and how to get and stay there.

Behavioural techniques

reactive—in specific stressful situation
reactive—after specific stressful situation
proactive—to reduce stress in the future.

Emotionally intelligent techniques

reactive—in and after specific stressful situation
proactive—to reduce stress in the future.

Learning outcomes

to understand, and be able to communicate well, techniques and principles of handling stress
to handle stress—and to help others handle stress—at work (or possibly at home).

Personal effectiveness II: Handling change

Module description

Dislike of change and reluctance to change are natural human instincts. Yet, in business, change is not only inevitable, but often essential. This course is for people on the receiving end of change; often not consulted by management on the change but required to deal with its consequences.

Syllabus/content

What are your issues with change?
Resistance to change is understandable, but people’s reasons for resisting change are many and various. Why wouldn’t you embrace change? We address some of those reasons which include fear of the unknown or of taking the next step, fear of loss and beliefs that the change will not meet the stated need for it.

Types of change
This section analyses the differences experienced when changes are perceived as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What is different about changes which we initiate?

Change models
We present a number of models which analyse the stages people go through n the process of change: when presented with the need for change , as the change is proceeding, and afterwards.

Attitude
Successfully dealing with change requires an appropriate attitude. What is needed for such an attitude? We present the well-known model of the comfort zone, but suggest a novel approach to being outside one’s comfort zone.

Remedies for handling change
What are the best ways of dealing with change? In line with our approach generally, we present approaches rooted in behaviours, in beliefs and in feelings.

Create personal strategy for handling change
It’s important to take control of one’s change process. So what are helpful strategies? What, if anything, is holding you back? What additional resources, if any, do you need? How do you know when the change is completed?

Learning outcomes

to understand, and be able to communicate well, techniques and principles of handling change
to handle change—and to help others handle change—at work (or possibly at home).

Personal effectiveness III: Wellbeing for businesspeople

Module description

Much writing on wellbeing is simply about the avoidance of stress. We start from the premise that, for someone to work in business optimally, they need to be functioning physically, rationally, emotionally, and spiritually at their peak. This module teaches people how to be positively well in the rational and emotional domains. The module also discusses how wellbeing fits into the business context and discusses methods available to people to enhance their wellbeing.

Syllabus/content

What is wellbeing?
This part considers various definitions before proposing our own. We emphasise that wellbeing is a positive state, not merely the absence of stress. We cover the states of mind which facilitate wellbeing.

A brief history of wellbeing
There is much writing on the subject. Here we present an overview, picking out the good bits that are useful for businesspeople in the present day.

A bit of theory
This section goes into some more recent contributions which can be harnessed for our purposes. Knowing what we want: well formed outcomes, Graves’s values system, Maslow, etc.

What is ‘unwellbeing’?—know the enemy
We often lose our potential to stay in wellbeing by being undermined by various factors and drives. This part covers some of these factors—stress, insecurity, fears and anxieties—giving avoiding tactics and recovery techniques. We also cover the ways we make ourselves unwell: negative thoughts and beliefs, inappropriate scripts, and so on.

Love thine enemy, or Yin and yang
We can only experience wellbeing when we have knowledge of its opposite. This part shows how to handle and contain the ‘unwellbeing’ and see its potential to provide learning and growth.

Getting the right attitude
How does a business person who has a lot of wellbeing behave/think/feel compared to one who does not have a lot of wellbeing?

Practical techniques
We cover some of the key techniques not only to stave off negative states, but also to enhance positive ones: anchoring resourceful states, relaxation techniques, etc.

Learning outcomes

to develop a meaningful and useful definition of wellbeing and understand it
to increase the level of wellbeing by practising at least three of the techniques that promote wellbeing.

Related material:
> Interpersonal effectiveness [training programme]
> Praise for emotional intelligence at work training