Oh yeah, I am like that! How self-awareness accelerates professional development.

Businesses thrive when their employees are self-aware, both of their strengths and the ways in which they can continue to learn and develop. Self-awareness, a characteristic of personal maturity can be challenging, but it is a foundation of many professional competencies. For example, being able to identify and manage the gap between how we understand ourselves and the way that our clients, colleagues and stakeholders really see us, can provide inroads to avoiding or rectifying misunderstandings, conflicts, and ineffective relationships. It also helps us to forge stronger connections, use feedback constructively, find common ground, and work with different perspectives constructively. 

By attending this workshop, you will develop a greater awareness of: 

• Your strengths and areas for improvements 
• What it is that you need from those around your (support and complementary strengths) 
• What’s important to you 
• What you want to achieve in the year ahead 

Being here now. How to apply mindfulness productively at work 

Sometimes businesses run on perpetual adrenaline, fighting to survive. The problem with this is that people need breaks to be able to perform at their best and some situations simply benefit from a more centred or calm mind-set. Excessive stress, anxiety and burnout are common in the workplace and impulsive or angry responses when events don’t go as planned, undermine performance. Mindfulness is a skill that can be developed and applied for business benefit because it aids emotional regulation and supports valuable cognitive skills. For example, the ability to be present with another person or remain rational in a difficult situation can make all the difference. Mindfulness can help us to bring our best game, by being focused, calm, concentrated, objective, and realistic. Mindfulness builds resilience and strengthens human connection and it can help us accept what we must and focus our efforts addressing challenges rationally and realistically. 

By attending this workshop you’ll understand how mindfulness can be applied to improve: 

• Your ability to be present for other people (a quality of gravitas) 
• Calmness (particularly in stressful situations) 
• Self-control (ability to make considered choices) 
• Focus & concentration 
• Your wellbeing at work 

Don’t just do something! How reflection creates the space for new possibilities. 

Reflection enables us to moderate how we feel about ourselves, our colleagues and world of work. By aligning our emotions and our associated attitudes and expectations with the way things actually are, we can identify where we are out of kilter, and work on improving our realism and focus. Reflection enables us to identify and rectify our unproductive thinking habits, limiting beliefs, judgements and biases. Being reflective also supports our ability to assess situations, make decisions, and explain our reasoning to others. Reflection enables us to discover new perspectives and ways to approach challenges and opportunities. 

 By attending this workshop, you will learn how to develop your: 

• Intellectual and emotional intelligence – realism and clear thinking 
• Problem solving ability 
• Workload management 
• Clear planning and goal setting 

How to be a great colleague – we are not just an island, we are an archipelago 

Teams work well when employees support each other to succeed. the success of the group requires both individual and team performance. Great team work is built on communication and active listening, which builds mutual understand and rapport. We communicate directly and indirectly by saying what we think we mean, but we also imply what we’re not fully aware of. By checking that we and our colleagues understand in each other’ communications, we can identify and iron out misunderstanding. By deepening our ability to listen to each other, we develop rapport with colleagues. By being emotionally supportive and showing our appreciation of our colleagues’ potential, we win respect and build trust. Mutual support, respect and trust promotes loyalty, engagement and collective commitment to achieve shared organisational outcomes. When individual needs are met, employees can focus on the needs of the organisation. 

By attending this workshop, you will learn how to develop: 

• The relational capital of your professional relationships 
• Productive engagement with colleagues and stakeholders (through common values and mutual support) 
• Trust and rapport with colleagues, partners and customers 

I’m going this way – but is my team still behind me? 

To lead is to be visible, our strengths and our weaknesses are on show. How we acknowledge and work with our own individual mix of strength and weaknesses signals how we will treat other people’s potential and imperfection. Trust is won by giving it away, by trusting in our colleagues’ ability to do their jobs. Leaders can foster maturity by role-modelling it themselves, for example asking for feedback and adapting their practice accordingly. To pull together, teams need their leaders to clarify what they are working towards and why it matters. Leaders don’t have to perfect. If fact it is their limitations that enable colleagues to step up and contribute meaningfully to a highly performing team. Leaders must be comfortable with who they are, play to their strengths and support the development of their teams talents. 

  By attending this workshop you will learn how the Cognomie Mental Fitness Foundations can bolster your leadership skills 

Things will get better! The art of the possible 

To overcome the uncertainty and inevitable setbacks of a rapidly changing environment, organisations need employees who are resilient, solution-focused and optimistic. To develop optimism in a challenging and risky environment, employees need to understand the pitfalls of burn-out, negativity, and stress. They can benefit from understanding these pitfalls, so as to push off of them, to learn with a growth mindset. Morale is often developed by overcoming shared difficulties, through new positive perspectives, innovations, and creative solutions. In todays’ workplace uncertainty requires above all, an energetic, healthy and productive response, even in the face of business detriment such as, out of date infrastructure and lost sales opportunities. It’s how organisations respond to adversity that counts. There is a positive response to even the harshest of market conditions, if the appropriate perspective can be established. Businesses are helped to develop positivity in response to challenging environments, when their employees are helped to develop positivity in response to what they find personally difficult. 

By attending this workshop, you will learn how to develop resilience to better: 

• Navigate the challenges of the uncertain and rapidly changing environment we are now working in 
• Mitigate the risk of environmental changes 
• Sustain core business quality and impact 
• Safeguard the wellbeing and performance of its staff 
• Strengthen its people capital, employee skills 
• Reconnect with your shared values and purpose 

Float like a butterfly… Agility is a now a must 

The modern workplace is in a perpetual state of change. Being prepared to work with such radical uncertainty is a business benefit, and increasingly a business necessity. Change is risky, it can easily illicit anxiety and defensiveness. However, an employee mind-set that is open to change and able to engage constructively with uncertainty, gives employers an advantage. Agility prevents us from resting on our laurels, getting stuck in our habits, and it undermines our belief that yesterday’s understanding is still relevant today. Agility is the capacity to manage the inevitable challenges of a rapidly changing environment optimistically by being primed to make pro-active contributions to organisational change, innovation and business development. 

By attending this workshop, you will learn how to develop agility to better: 

• Reduce resistance to change 
• Identify what does work, and change it quickly and effectively 
• Develop new approaches 
• Identify and pursue new opportunities 
• Identify and develop new skills requirements 

What are we here to do? Why it matters is why we will succeed 

Knowing why we go to work, and what it is that we want to achieve and why is a foundation for working hard. In order to juggle multiple tasks and exploit multiple opportunities, we need to prioritise what matters to us and our employer. We seek personal benefit through our commitment to the success of the organisation to which we belong. We are naturally optimistic when this overlap is clear. To be more proactive, it also helps to understand the ways in which we struggle to be pro-active, for example why we procrastinate. This understanding enables us to make a choice: we can either extend our proactivity into these low-energy zones, or we can focus on those areas of work we are naturally more passionate about. Proactivity means making the most of the time we have in our working day. 

In this workshop, you will learn how to develop optimism to better: 

• Tackle challenges openly to evaluate effectiveness 
• Approach tasks collaboratively with a goal-orientated / solution-focused attitude 
• Engage more of its employees in pro-active problem solving 
• Strengthen culture of continuous improvement 
• Identify, explore and exploit new opportunities 

Stepping into the unknown – enjoying problem solving 

Certain solutions are discovered with a creative approach. Creativity requires the space to play, so we can engage our imagination and intuition. Creativity can be fostered by staying in a ‘problem space’ longer than we would like to and by bringing our own assumptions and expectations into the picture. Creative ways forward can be discovered through an iterative process that draws on different perspectives within a team. Creative solutions don’t have to be right first time around, they simply need to bring something new to the table. An open-minded and uncritical ambience supports the creative capacity to experiment, even if this means failing in the short-term. Employees and teams who know how to get into a creative flow state cab listen and contribute, stimulate and be stimulated, and they are able to get their fear of failure in check. Organisations are stronger when their employees can remain flexible and creative in the face of potential failure. It’s how as yet unrealised creative solution arise. New ideas will develop and grow in the right climate, a supportive and creative climate. 

In this workshop, you will learn how to develop creativity to better: 

• Explore what is and isn’t understood well enough about your team dynamics and how you engage with your external environments 
• Develop new approaches to current challenges 
• Engage more staff in innovative work-streams, at all levels of the organisation