The Daily Pursuit of Better

Discover the transformative power of adopting a mastery mindset towards professional and personal development. Through engaging storytelling and actionable insights, explore how each day offers opportunities for significant growth. From childhood aspirations to adult realities, learn to derive value from every endeavor, embracing setbacks as stepping stones on the journey toward success. By prioritizing progress in the present moment, we pave the way for tangible advancements towards overarching goals.

The audience will:
• Explore the things that make them uncomfortable enough to change course or abandon a goal
• Identify the value in past challenges they’ve experienced
• Establish short-term goals that focus on improvement in the present

New Problems and Old Eyes

Explore the paradox of success and its potential pitfalls in problem-solving. This session underscores the importance of fostering innovation and collaboration to maintain a fresh perspective, steering clear of relying on outdated approaches to tackle new challenges.

Ever encountered the question: “What’s worse than a person with no good ideas?” Answer: a person with one good idea. This intriguing inquiry prompts reflection on the dangers of clinging to singular successes. Success breeds confidence, yet it can also breed complacency. The comfort of familiar processes often lures individuals into a system of replication rather than innovation. In this session, participants are challenged to transcend the allure of familiarity and embrace a mindset of continuous innovation and creative problem solving.

The audience will:
• Understand why we’re drawn to comfortable and familiar processes despite their effect on achievement
• Identify key traits that lead to a replicator’s mindset
• Identify allies who can help push us out of the comfort zone and encourage fresh perspective

The WE Proposition

Human beings are wired for connection with others. But when we face adversity at work and at home our default behaviors disconnect us from others. Navigating team dynamics is essential for professional success and overall wellbeing. This session delves into the intricacies of being a valuable team member and creating connection to elevate collective performance.

While the allure of high-functioning teams is undeniable, striking a balance between individual success and team cohesion can be challenging. Amidst messages advocating self-preservation, exceptional teams thrive by embracing diversity and leveraging individual strengths to achieve remarkable outcomes. Central to this ethos is “The We Proposition.”

Rooted in emotional intelligence, The We Proposition emphasizes nurturing individual well-being while fostering a collaborative and connecting team environment. By cultivating self-awareness and promoting empathy, teams can harness the power of social awareness and relationship management, fostering deep connections and collective growth.

The audience will:
• Assess their comfort level with teamwork dynamics, identifying both strengths and apprehensions
• Examine traits and fears inhibiting strong teamwork and their underlying origins
• Utilize emotional intelligence to enhance work relationships, focusing on social awareness and relationship management  

Above the Line: Effective Thinking for Today's Workplace Challenges

Our thinking and our stories either spark empowered emotions, productive behaviors and desirable outcomes - or they keep us stuck. In today’s uncertain, complex, and demanding workplace, mindset and skillful storytelling matter more than ever.

The audience will:
• Summarize two forms of thinking that lead to divergent sets of feelings, actions, stories and results
• Describe two simple but powerful concepts to generate effective thinking in any situation
• Assess a workplace challenge through the lens of mindset and apply effective thinking tools and the power of storytelling to create a more ideal outcome

Call to Connection: Cultivating Quality Relationships with Diverse Personalities

Our relationships with colleagues in the workplace offer some of life’s greatest opportunities – and challenges. Particularly when we are navigating a variety of personalities, it’s important to know how to work through differences and cultivate connection, which is the key to team success.

The audience will:
• Define the most significant roadblocks to cultivating productive, quality relationships
• Learn about a “cycle of collusion”, which is a common pattern of unresolved tension that often leads to unnecessary conflict and drama
• Develop inclusive leadership skills
• Identify at least three practical strategies for strengthening our professional relationships

Coaching for Leaders

Coaching is an essential tool in a leader’s toolbox and an important component of sustainable leadership. But the skillsets of coaching are not widely known or practiced. Further, many leaders have been taught to be the “expert”, a mindset which can often impede the learning and growth of their team members. To be most effective in leading people and teams, leaders must know when and how to act as coach rather than expert.

The audience will:
• Identify how the coaching mindset is different than the expert mindset
• Explore how to shift from the aim of “getting people to do things” to the aim of “creating the conditions” where growth, learning, and self-efficacy flourish
• Explore the basics of coaching as a leader: listening, asking powerful questions, eliciting best thinking and helping others reduce drama and ego
• Apply the basics of coaching for leaders to specific scenarios relevant to their workplace settings

Courageous Communication: Clear is Kind

When we are confronted with a difficult conversation, we often find ourselves avoiding, sugar-coating, clumsily landing the message, or reacting defensively. This session helps participants identify and overcome these challenges so they can become more confident and comfortable giving and receiving feedback with candor, kindness, and conviction. We’ll use behavioral science to support communication tactics that increase engagement, motivation and learning.

The audience will:
• Define empathy and apply it to an actual workplace conversation
• Define radical candor and apply it to an actual conversation
• List at least three ways to reduce defensiveness during difficult conversations
• Describe what it means to listen with intention

Courageous Communication: The Inner Game

Traditional efforts to improve communication skills focus on models or strategies that, while valuable, overlook one key factor: the internal work that is often necessary to improve the way we communicate with others. Developing an impactful communication style requires that we attend to important elements of our “inner operating system” such as thoughts, feelings, values, and decision-making models.

The audience will:
• Describe at least five communication traps they fall into that undermine communication
• Identify their most pressing personal challenge when it comes to communication
• Understand how their inner narrative and stories will influence communication style
• Apply two simple but powerful tools for generating the right mindset to support better communication and the power of storytelling

Creating a Culture of Accountability

Lack of accountability is one of the most frequent frustration triggers for employees and one of the biggest culprits of underperformance and friction on teams. While most people want to be a part of teams where accountability and teamwork is the norm, many oversimplify the idea or are unsure of how to enact it.

The audience will:
• Describe the accountability continuum
• Define the 4Cs of accountability
• Identify their strengths and gaps in each of the 4Cs
• Develop a plan of action

Mastering Mental Focus: Training for Today's Attention Economy

Smart phones, stressors, to-do lists, interruptions, and distractions deplete our mental and emotional energy, leaving us feeling overwhelmed and “crazy busy”. If we’re not proactive there can be a negative impact on mental health, engagement and productivity. Today’s world requires skillsets and practices around mental attention that help us sift through the stimuli, create clarity, and stay present.

The audience will:
• Identify how their personal relationships and professional contributions would improve through the development of stronger mental focus
• List the two most powerful disruptors of mental focus
• Identify at least two internal practices and external strategies that will reclaim mental energy
• Commit to a realistic action plan for improving mental focus and clarity

Optimize Performance Through Energy Management

The research is clear that wellbeing, work performance, and organizational outcomes suffer in the long term unless leaders develop the ability to balance the demands of the modern work world through better management of their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy. This rich, interactive, and inspiring training helps leaders understand that health and wellness at work is not a luxury, but rather an absolute necessity for showing up as the best versions of themselves at work and at home.

The audience will:
• Connect daily decision making regarding energy and wellbeing to a greater purpose and powerful motivator for change
• Learn science-based behavioral strategies in each energy dimension (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) to support managing and expanding energy as well as increase engagement, motivation and learning
• Practice a resiliency strategy that will help to identify their own stress as a performance enhancer
• Define the barriers to managing energy and understand why energy (instead of time) has more value

The Comeback

Setbacks and crises are inevitable. Recovering from difficult times requires resilience and can even be an opportunity to set out on a new path that’s better than before.

The audience will:
• Establish clarity on purpose and values as guiding forces for returning from adversity
• Learn tangible practices for facing and recovering from adversity with resilience
• Discuss practical and powerful ways to create the conditions for their teams to navigate difficulties well and come back stronger

This is ideal for audiences who have recently experienced adversity at work or at home. Examples includes layoffs, mergers, pandemics, company restructuring or other setbacks.

Trust: The Secret Ingredient

As Steven Covey says, “Trust is the glue that holds all relationships.” Research supports the importance of trust in creating and maintaining connected, collaborative relationships and high performing teams.

The audience will:
• Learn a simple but powerful framework for understanding the elements of trust including: care, sincerity, reliability, and competence
• Identify specific examples in their own working experience of each of these elements of trust (and mistrust)
• Apply the trust framework to a working relationship to identify specific issues and develop the best approach for rebuilding trust with that person

This session is appropriate for individuals and teams who would like to build or repair trust with another person and/or with their team.

Your Emotional Impact

The importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace has become a significant topic for forward thinking organizations. If a person doesn’t have a high level of emotional intelligence, their IQ or work ethic will only take them so far.

The audience will:
• Define emotional intelligence
• Learn at least three new practices for managing their own emotional energy for the benefit of themselves and others around them
• Learn at least three new practices for better understanding the emotional states of other people
• Learn about the connection of emotional intelligence to mental health