Resilience Series

The Resilience Series Wellbeing sessions teach skills to...

...build mental, emotional, and physical energy reserves.
...roll with change and difficulties.
...create coherence between the heart and the brain.

...build mental, emotional, and physical energy reserves. ...roll with change and difficulties. ...create coherence between the heart and the brain.

Becoming Your Future Self

A Session in Change Management, Motivation & Resilience

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18

Becoming Your Future Self

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Embodiment Coaching Session to design the Future Self

The many changes brought on by the pandemic and subsequent hybrid arrangements have uprooted people’s routines and sense of self. Many employees struggle with their personal and work identities, feeling lost, aimless and even depressed. While most people understand they cannot return to how things used to be, few consciously consider who they want to become in this new future. 

Employees report feeling pushed by change, their fears and the past rather than being motivated and pulled forward by their desired future.

“Who is your Future Self?”. This question helps navigate today’s motivation, habits and behaviours. Employees’ view of their Future Self is the compass that will draw them forward and create purpose, meaning and wellbeing in the present.

Our Future Self is not someone we discover but decide to be. Our Future Self is built today, at this very moment. The Becoming Your Future Self session focuses on the how.

  • The foundation of the Future Self practice and its contribution to present wellbeing and mental health

  • How we sabotage change and our Future Self: mindset, the past, other people, thinking urgent and small, lack of courage

  • Understanding your Future Self: goal-driven behaviours, making consistent investments, details and measurements, being true = success

  • Seven practical steps to design your Future Self and be your Future Self NOW

  • Clarify their purpose in their work and private lives

  • Eliminate behaviours that are not aligned with their Future Selves and drain their energy

  • Practice the art of asking for what they want

  • Set up barriers and filters to protect their time and attention

  • Schedule time around their Future Self

  • Complete what matters to them rather than procrastinate

  • Feel more invested in today and the future

Becoming Your Future Self

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Building Personal Resilience

The Four Domains

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

Angela Duckworth

Building Personal Resilience

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions, 1-day sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment, Micro Centring Workshop

Today, more than ever, employees’ ability to renew their energies and build sustainable energy reserves is compromised. When they do not have the right amount and quality of energy, their ability to think clearly, decide wisely, and communicate kindly and with impact diminishes. This, in turn, steers them away from performing efficiently, sustainably and in a way that feels good.

Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress and adversity. When employees become resilient, they can not only bounce back and recoup faster after a challenge but also neutralise or even prevent some of the ongoing wear and tear.

Thankfully, resilience is not a fixed personality characteristic but a trait one can cultivate through life-affirming habits and practices.

The Building Personal Resilience session focuses on teaching participants efficient tools to increase their mental, emotional, physical and social resilience.

  • What is resilience, and what it is not

  • The importance of energy balance

  • The stress, resilience and performance curve

  • Four mental resilience tools, including the Name the Story technique

  • Three emotional resilience tools, including the Urge Surfing technique

  • Four physical resilience tools, including the Four Breathing technique

  • Three social resilience tools, including the Conscious Play technique

  • The three Bs of self-care: balance, boundaries and breaks

  • Use the inner battery metaphor to gauge their daily energy levels

  • Recognise energy-renewing and energy-depleting situations from their lives

  • Identify those negative coping strategies they regularly use to recharge their energy

  • Get “unstuck” from their negative thoughts and calm their racing mind

  • Mindfully deal with their difficult emotions without pushing them away or overindulging in them

  • Practice simple tools to better rest, move, eat and breathe

  • Re-connect to others in a more conscious and rewarding way

  • Better take care of themselves by balancing their energy and boundaries, and appreciating their surroundings

Building Personal Resilience

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Centring

Body-Mind Techniques for Resilience Building & Stress Reduction

We are the first system we must learn to manage.

Stuart Heller

Centring

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-low

Centring is a collection of body-mind techniques used for self-management that brings us back into holistic balance. 

At its core, being stressed is a bodily response. Therefore, we need bodily tools to work with it. We cannot simply talk or think ourselves out of tense muscles, increased heart rate, fatigue, headaches, a racing and anxious mind or sleeping difficulties. We must “state shift” the body for our stress to decrease and resilience to increase. 

During centring practices, we deliberately place our bodies in a state of openness, balance, and expansiveness. When the body is in an open, balanced and expansive state – rather than in a closed, imbalanced and contracted one – every single activity, whether mental, physical or emotional, will be carried out with greater clarity, ease and efficiency

The Centring session focuses on teaching employees short and easy body-based self—management techniques that they can use anywhere and anytime to recharge their energy, gain clarity, calm down after a stressful situation, or prepare for difficulties.

  • The science of embodiment and the pivotal role of the body in stress management

  • Centring, congruence and the key to peace

  • Common stress responses

  • Our childhood conditioning and current stress levels

  • Operating from our personality vs centre 

  • Techniques for calming the body and mind and building resilience: ABC Centring technique, Support from Below & Above technique, 1% technique, Wake Up Centring, Head Heart Gut Alignment technique, the Shining Star technique

  • Understand that their bodies are intelligent systems they can tap into for stress management and resilience building

  • Grasp how their mental activity affects their bodies and how their bodies affect their mind and thinking 

  • Recognise their typical daily stress reactions

  • Shift out of difficult emotions  

  • Come back to their physical and metaphorical centres 

  • Use their bodies more consciously to impact their colleagues, friends, and family positively 

  • Use five simple techniques to relax/reinvigorate their minds on demand and build daily resilience  

The session includes simple, non-athletic movement practices. I deliver this session as a Certified Embodied Facilitator.

Centring

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Change Resilience

Becoming Future-Proof

The future is uncertain…but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.

Ilya Prigogine

Change Resilience

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

3 x 1-hour, 3 x 1,5-hour, 1-day, 2-day sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

On a global level, we have experienced more change in the past 50 years than ever before. The strong, inbuilt societal structures that kept us safe and showed the way for hundreds of years are rapidly changing. In 2023, boundaries are also more fluid in identity, health, gender, love and work. Change is accelerating, yet we are less and less able to look at the past and use it as a roadmap for our future.

On a business level, employees are asked to not only keep up with changing circumstances but to excel and add value beyond what can be done by automated systems and intelligent machines (McKinsey Global Institute, 2021). Adaptability and flexibility, grit and persistence, an entrepreneurial mindset, the ability to break orthodoxies, self-motivation, passion, optimism, empathy and self-leadership are today’s buzzwords and are much-coveted skills in the future-proof citizen’s toolkit.

On a personal level, transformation occurs every seven to 10 years, either through personal choice or external events. Whilst change may feel exhilarating for some, it is a source of anxiety and confusion for many. Employees are expected to roll with change, but how if they were never taught how to?!

By becoming aware of the psychological, biological and spiritual dynamics of change and equipping themselves with well-researched tools, employees may find themselves growing smarter, wiser, kinder, and more resilient through change rather than just surviving it.

1

Change & Self-Awareness

We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.

Sheryl Sandberg

  • Developing global awareness: the four change dynamics of the current era: fluidity, possibilities, individuality and sophisticated skills
  • Developing process awareness: what is change, the types of change, the change transition cycle

  • Developing self-awareness: tools and micro-resilience techniques focusing on future awareness, resistance recognition, belief system audit, and action initiation

  • Recognise some of the global change themes in their private and professional lives and how these impact them cognitively and emotionally

  • Differentiate between the three types of change they could be experiencing  

  • Practice the three types of adaptation required for a successful change process 

  • Pinpoint sources of uncertainty and anxiety in their lives

  • Understand their journey through the six stages of change 

  • Picture who they want to be at the end of the change process, determine their change resistance patterns, unearth their self-defeating beliefs, and stop procrastinating when it comes to taking action

2

Self-Regulation & Hope

Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in so that it can touch you.

Jim Rohn

  • Creating our “change reality”: the three streams of information: senses, thoughts, and emotions; the master reality maker: the reticular activating system 

  • Understanding emotions: the Emotional Landscape, emotional junkies, the 90-second rule

  • Altering emotions: moving in the Emotional Landscape, upgrading the nervous system, feeling better  

  • Hope and motivation: nurturing and restoring hope, increasing intrinsic motivation

  • Grasp the power of their thoughts, emotions and daily focus in determining how successfully or unsuccessfully they navigate change   

  • Build resilience by recognising which emotions deplete or sustain them on a daily basis and how these emotions impact their mind and body

  • Turn depleting emotions into renewing emotions that facilitate the change process

  • Regulate their difficult emotions within 90 seconds by using different micro-resilience techniques 

  • Feel hopeful about change and the future by practicing a 5-step model

3

Community & Connection

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

Henry Ford

  • Co-regulation: why others are necessary for our wellbeing

  • Fear and conflict: how the brain shuts down during conflict and change, the five change fear factors and how to overcome them, the four prototypical conflict behaviours within teams

  • Relational dynamics: the four relational toxins to avoid at all costs, the four relational remedies to build into daily team practices to boost psychological safety

  • Understand why the quality of presence they give and receive matters during change 

  • Avoid generating fear, anxiety, and potential hostility within their teams, and empower each other instead  

  • Recognise and quickly diffuse the most common conflict behaviours that might be present in team dynamics  

  • Identify and transform their own and others’ toxic social behaviours   

  • Practice social behaviours that elevate team cohesion and camaraderie, and build psychological safety

Change Resilience

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Emotional Flexibility

Adapting to Uncertainty & Enhancing Confidence

Flexibility is the new workplace currency.

Dr. Naira Velumyan

Emotional Flexibility

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers, HR Specialists, Wellbeing Champions, Employees

Available formats:

2 x 1,5-hour, 1-day sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Emotional flexibility is a scientifically established concept from cognitive psychology. 

When employees are emotionally flexible, they are more comfortable with complex emotions, better adapt to crises, make value-based choices, and significantly increase their tolerance for internal and external stressors. Emotional flexibility also allows them to shift their perspective and actions when confronted with change and novelty.

According to McKinsey (2021), understanding our own emotions and triggers is one of the 56 foundational skills that will help employees thrive in the future of work.

This two-part webinar series on Emotional Flexibility consists of six interactive elements that support employees in building and maintaining their emotional wellbeing. When they integrate each element into their daily mindset and routines – each element features several practical tools – they will increase their bounce-back power to deal with stress and complex emotions.

1

Finding Anchor in Values, Presence
and the Unknown

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack on meaning and purpose.

Viktor Frankl

  1. Values and Purpose: Your North Star

The foundation of emotional wellbeing lies in understanding our purpose and why we show up to what we do in everyday life. Reflecting on purpose and values is vital since it forms employees’ inner compass, especially when they feel the most challenged.

  • Becoming self-authoring
  • Outlining an inner compass 
  • Defining strengths: what gives you energy?
  • Best-self aspiration: the pull of your future self 
  1. Mindfulness: The Power of Your Focus 

The next element is mindfulness, and it is about building a mental muscle so that employees can create a single-minded focus in their critical activities during the day. This element is at the core of all other elements of the framework.

  • Noticing and using the pause button at work
  • Oxygenising and nourishing your cells
  • Mindfulness throughout the workday – when & how
  1. Acceptance: Looking Fear in the Eye

When scared, we try to avoid complex challenges at work; we are afraid to fail or make mistakes. While this is entirely understandable, becoming flexible involves consciously going out of our comfort zones and learning from the experience. Employees will learn to look fear in the eye with presence and without judgement, reducing its negative impact by half.

  • Growth versus fixed mindsets
  • The “Saying yes to challenges” challenge 
  • The practice of self-compassion  
  • Reframing anxiety
  • Reflect on how their thoughts about their past, present and future inform their perceptions, actions, emotions and behaviours in the present

  • Identify their core personal values and align them with organisational values and goals 

  • Assess their strengths and areas where they excel 

  • Identify activities and situations that energise them 

  • Better manage stress and increase focus through practical mindfulness exercises

  • Schedule various types of intentional breaks during their workday 

  • Apply simple growth mindset principles

  • Identify opportunities for personal and professional growth by accepting challenges

  • Treat themselves more warmly, gently, and fairly

2

Springing Into Smart Action

Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear.

Norman Vincent Peale

  1. Defusion: Keeping Worries in a Healthy Distance 

At the beginning of the second webinar, we continue with the fourth element – defusion – and look for triggers for worries, anxiety and what-ifs in employees’ minds. With defusion, employees distance the real or imagined “danger” from their system. They do not ignore its presence but change their relationship with it. They leave it outside their nervous system to focus on their tasks and stay calm.

  • Naming the inner critic 
  • Creating space and staying focused – the bubble technique 
  • Practising psychological Halloweenism 
  1. Self-in-Context: Taking the Helicopter View 

The fifth element highlights our ability to look at challenges from a distance. Often, employees are so busy that they do not have an overview of everything that is happening. Here, they will learn to focus on taking the helicopter view and putting things into perspective.

  • Learning to zoom in and zoom out
  • The art of taking a flexible perspective
  1. Committed Action: 5-4-3-2-1 Go!

The last element is about leaving procrastination behind, creating a clear plan supported by micro-level actions, and curating a support network that employees integrate into their lives to achieve their goals.

  • Why are you not taking action? 
  • Overcoming self-sabotage and quitting brain tricks
  • Mitigating excuses for success
  • Setting up your personal board of advisors
  • Identify and name their inner critic’s negative self-talk patterns

  • Manage and reframe their inner critic’s commentary for improved self-confidence and decision-making

  • Make physical and mental space for what matters to them 

  • Use the attention bubble techniques and break down their current, anxiety-inducing tasks and find  “small missions” they can complete in six minutes

  • Use techniques to step back from immediate issues and see the bigger picture

  • Identify their reasons for procrastination and inaction

  • Use the NASA technique to overcome procrastination and inaction

  • Recognise their self-sabotaging behaviours and have action plans to counter them 

Emotional Flexibility

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Resilience From the Heart

Creating Heart-Brain Coherence for Increased Wellbeing

Much like electricity changed the outer world, learning to harness the power and intelligence of the heart will change our inner world.

Howard Martin

Resilience From the Heart

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers, Employees

Available formats:

2 x 1-hour, 2 x 1,5-hour, 1-day sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment, Micro Centring Workshop

For more than 25 years, the HeartMath Institute has been researching how the physical heart influences our health, perceptions, emotions, and overall resilience. Many believe the brain to be the master organ of the body, but now we know the heart sends more information to the brain (and the rest of the body) than the other way around. Hence, the quality of the information the heart sends is critical. 

When stress and negative emotions are present in employees’ lives, their hearts send erratic and disordered information to the brain, limiting their ability to feel good, think clearly, remember, learn, reason, make effective decisions, and connect authentically to customers and team members. Thankfully, this erratic information can be changed on demand.

With the help of basic scientific understanding and simple stress-management and resilience-building techniques, employees can make their hearts more physically and emotionally adaptive. They can learn to shift into a specific, optimal state of functioning called coherence. In this state, the heart sends harmonious and orderly information, and employees feel satisfied, energised and perform at their peak.

The Resilience From the Heart series introduces cutting-edge science and teaches stress-management and resilience-building techniques to generate coherence whenever and wherever it is required. These sessions are especially appropriate during times of change when it is vital to maintain emotional balance and mental clarity.

This two-part series is based on the “Building Personal Resilience” program developed by the HeartMath Institute. The content is grounded in more than 30 years of research, resulting in over 300 independent peer-reviewed published studies. I am delivering these sessions as a HeartMath™ Certified Coach & Corporate Trainer.

1

Managing Energy Reserves

True creativity quite simply starts with balancing your emotions and activating the power of the heart.

Doc Childre

  • Resilience and its four domains

  • The importance of energy balance and intelligent energy management 

  • The astonishing science of the heart

  • Heart rate variability: the window into health, longevity, and performance

  • Techniques to increase heart rate variability, the resilience and adaptability of the physical heart  

  • The Heart-Focused Breathing™ technique 

  • The Quick Coherence™ technique

  • Gauge the state of their current energy balance

  • Appreciate how their brain and heart communicate and why this communication is fundamental to building resilience, and a happy, healthy life  

  • Understand what heart rate variability is and how they can influence it 

  • Shift into an optimal state of functioning

  • Practice intelligent physical, mental and emotional energy regulation techniques

2

Changing Emotions on Demand

Emotions that people associate with the heart, such as care, compassion and gratitude, do affect the heart’s rhythm, and the quality of the neural signals being sent to the brain.

Rollin McCraty

  • Defining coherence and how it creates optimal functioning

  • Understanding why and how daily situations and employees’ corresponding emotional reactions can undermine resilience and energy levels

  • The Inner Weather Report: working with renewing and depleting emotions 

  • The Attitude Breathing™ technique

  • The Inner-Ease™ technique

  • The Heart Lock-In™ technique

  • Three strategies for building and sustaining resilience: prep, shift & reset, sustain

  • Identify their prototypical renewing and depleting emotions at home and at work, and understand how these emotions impact their overall wellbeing   

  • Know what situations generate strong emotions in their life that undermine resilience     

  • Move from experiencing depleting emotions (e.g. anger, guilt, frustration) to renewing emotions (e.g. excitement, care, fulfilment)

  • Settle into the moment and take the intensity out of negative situations 

  • Connect to others more genuinely and experience their heart at a deeper level

Resilience from the Heart

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Resilient Coping

Understanding Thoughts & Emotions

Where we have strong emotions, we are liable to fool ourselves.

Carl Sagan

Resilient Coping

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-low

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment, Micro Centring Workshop

According to research by Queen’s University (2020), the average person has around 6200 thoughts in a single day. Of those, 80% are negative, and 95% are repetitive thoughts. While the challenging, often incessant flow of thoughts can be unpleasant, they are in and of themselves relatively harmless. Complications ensue when employees’ thoughts turn into chemistry in their bodies, and this chemistry produces emotions that they have trouble coping with at the workplace or home.  When complex feelings overtake them, the pre-frontal cortex of their brains shuts down, and their most needed and valued abilities diminish: decision-making, planning, focus, critical thinking, empathy, perspective-taking, the ability to express appreciation and care etc.

Depending on what kind of challenging emotions employees feel, there are usually two primary outcomes: they can end up with an overpowered nervous system where they find it difficult to calm down and think straight. Or they can end up with an underpowered nervous system where they feel drowsy, unmotivated, and passionless and find it difficult to act. Both states of the nervous system lead to different kinds of stress, suboptimal behavioural and performance outcomes and communication and relationship dynamics.

The Resilient Coping session focuses on facilitating employees’ understanding of how their thoughts and emotions influence their work, health, and relationships and how they can change these thoughts and feelings.

  • Unknown facts about thoughts and emotions 

  • How the prefrontal cortex and the limbic brain influence behaviour 

  • The 90-second window 

  • Molecules of emotion: the emotions we nurture in our bodies

  • Emotional Landscape™: identifying our trademark emotions 

  • Depletion to Renewal Grid™: moving from depleting to renewing emotions 

  • The energy-draining situation exercise 

  • Three coping techniques to transform negative thoughts and emotions

  • Grasp how their thoughts turn into emotions and how these emotions affect their performance 

  • Better understand their habitual emotional patterns and map their emotional landscape

  • Practice scientifically validated coping techniques

  • Diffuse difficult emotions

  • Arrive at neutral feeling states 

  • Create positive emotions on demand

  • Manage their stress in the moment and improve their mental health and resilience 

  • Change their reactions to daily energy-draining situations

Resilient Coping

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The Resilient Introvert

Utilising Quiet Power

Solitude matters, and for some people, it is the air they breathe.

Susan Cain

The Resilient Introvert

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Employees

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions

Place of delivery:

online

Interaction level: 

medium-low

We live in a world where extroverted characteristics such as high energy, talkativeness, risk-taking, sociability and action orientation are much-coveted employee characteristics. While extroverted employees and managers bask in the limelight and get promoted quicker and more often, introverted employees often combat labels such as passive and anti-social, sensitive, hesitant or even slow.

While introverts may have difficulty excelling in self-promotion, navigating office politics or engaging in conflict, they are the ones who digest information more thoroughly, give up less easily, stay on complex tasks longer and work more accurately.

Introverts are secret powerhouses and can succeed at any workplace as long as they understand themselves, intelligently uphold their boundaries and adequately manage their daily energy levels.

The Resilient Introvert session focuses on helping introverted employees build resilience and eliminate typical energy drains.

  • The four types of introverts at the workplace  

  • Building on the positive aspects of introversion

  • Sources of stress and pressure for introverts 

  • Eliminating stress stemming from the problematic aspects of introversion

  • Resilience and recovery skills for introverts

  • Teamwork: mixing and matching for ultimate team cohesion

  • Realise how their particular style of introversion impacts their wellbeing at work 

  • Better appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of their introverted brain

  • Name their introverted superpowers and use these to create personal and professional wellbeing 

  • Recognise where they come into conflict or lose energy 

  • Identify their needs, communicate their boundaries and make requests

  • Practice pre-charging and re-charging micro-techniques 

  • Pick work tasks that better suit their introverted strength while also venturing out of their comfort zone and learning from their extroverted colleagues

Recommended follow-up session: Working with Our Differences – Resolving the Introvert-Extrovert Divide

The Resilient Introvert

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