Fabulous! …..Attending this workshop has equipped me with powerful tools and techniques around resilience….Superb facilitation….Very worthwhile, practical, thought-provoking and inspirational

These are some of the comments made by participants about:

‘Coaching for resilience’, our one-day practical workshop for those who are coaching clients with resilience issues and who want to add to their toolkit.

The assumption that those who have talent are innately resilient is often not borne out in reality.  Organisations need resilience as much as do individuals, so increasing individual resources supports the organisation to retain, and make the most of,  its resources, when they are under stress.

Workshop content
Understanding resilience: What is resilience and how does the lack of it show up at work?
How is coaching enriched by the research on resilience?
Rebuilding resilience: Key frameworks for working with clients; Cognitive reframing;
Acceptance; Stress management

Who is this workshop for?
- Coaches
- Managers who find themselves in coaching conversations
- HR professionals

What participants gain:
- More knowledge about resilience
- The ability to support the building of resilience
- Practical methods to apply with people they coach

Workshop leaders: a collaboration between Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd and Coaching to Solutions
Carole Pemberton, Career coach and Executive coach
Author of a number of career and coaching books including Coaching to Solutions. Works across the public and private sectors including NHS, Government Departments, the banking and pharmaceutical sectors. Areas where change, cutbacks, restructuring and mergers are impacting on individual resilience. See Carole’s article in the Health Service Journal

Lindsay Wittenberg, Career coach and Executive coach
Originator of the Wittenberg career coaching model, Lindsay works with senior people on re-focusing and re-energising careers, finding meaning at work and managing career transition points. Her clients are in the private sector (including technology, banking and the professions), the public sector (particularly the NHS), and charities.

For more details and to book a workshop for your organisation:

Contact us at:

t +44/0 20 7112 7001
e info@lindsaywittenberg.co.uk

2 November is National Stress Awareness Day.

The joint Absence Management survey, undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and corporate healthcare provider Simply Health, has found that stress is the most common cause of long-term sickness leave for both manual and non-manual employees – the first time this has been the case in the 12 years the report has been published (CIPD Survey October 2011).

Stress is an emotional response to a situation and to the thoughts that it elicits for an individual.  It reinforces cognitive, behavioural and emotional tension: it inhibits clear, accurate and flexible thinking and often has physical manifestations which reduce the body’s physical resources for coping too.  By changing the way you think you can manage your emotions and increase the flexibility and clarity of your thinking and your responses to stressful situations.

Mindfulness – that state of calm alertness which allows us to observe our own behaviour, thoughts and physical sensations – can help reduce stress.  By focusing on the present moment we separate ourselves from regrets and resentments about the past and anxieties about the future.  A state of mindfulness takes your mind away from current stressors and re-sets your perspective onto ‘what is’.   Your thinking becomes calmer, more creative and more focused, you experience fewer of the physical manifestations of stress and you gain a sense of control over a situation which had seemed bigger than you had the resources to cope with.

Experiment with a minute of mindfulness when you’re in a state of stress: sit comfortably and upright in your chair with both feet on the floor.  Focus on your breathing, and notice it – the movements in your chest, the feeling of the breath entering and leaving your body, the feeling in your nostrils.  Notice thoughts that creep in, escort them away and come back to your breathing.  At the end of your minute (or two, or three) simply notice your mood.  Even better, make a habit of this – your only objective is to focus and notice.  And observe what happens to your levels of stress and your approach to it.

What do you understand by incentivisation? Remuneration? Childcare? Gift vouchers? In a climate in which employees aren’t getting the career progression they’d expected because of budget cuts, retrenchment or reorganisation, what will retain them – and especially your talent?  Lindsay Wittenberg and employment law solicitors Sheridans present a collaborative workshop that brings together traditional approaches to incentivisation together with fresh perspectives on how to motivate and engage your people.  Participants have a chance to share their own challenges in a confidential environment and to learn practical approaches for dealing with them

If you’d like us to bring this complimentary workshop to your organisation please contact us

What do you think resilience is? Over the years various researchers have produced a variety of definitions.  The definition that Carole Pemberton (of Coaching to Solutions) and I favour (based on research carried out by Penn University and others) relates to flexibility and the ability to manage the way you think, no matter how tough the circumstances.  When difficulty strikes, it isn’t the situation itself that causes you to flourish or drown, but rather the thinking you choose that influences your reaction.  And key to that thinking are the beliefs you choose to hold about yourself and the world around you.  Beliefs are funny things: sometimes they’ve been in your head for so long that the reason they’re there has ceased to exist, while the beliefs get stuck there even though they might not be valid any longer. Consider, for example, those messages from way back (maybe given originally by parents or teachers or other figures of influence) like ‘I can’t sing’, ‘No-one will listen to me’, ‘I can’t cope when things go wrong….’.  The list is endless.

In my experience as a coach, once people surface and look objectively at the beliefs that stop them thriving, their resilience and the capacity to be self-reliant are boosted, and the difficulty that’s holding them back takes on a new, more manageable perspective, the unpredictable feels less threatening, and their sense of control and autonomy grow.  They’re able to separate themselves from the difficulty and move on with a greater sense of capability.

Carole and I offer you two 5-minute YouTube clips: Carole’s to build understanding of what resilience is, and mine to tell you more about coaching for career resilience and the role that beliefs play in building resilience.  See also Carole’s blogs at http://www.carolepemberton.com/career-coaching-for-resilience/and http://www.carolepemberton.com/resilience-%E2%80%93-what-is-it/.  If you’d like more information on the support we offer around resilience, do get in touch.

When there’s change at an organisational level it demands change at an individual level. People are expected to:

• Adjust to the loss of what was valued
• Accept ambiguity about career outcomes
• Be open to seeing new possibilities
• Cope with extra demands when they’re feeling anxious and stressed

Career resilience coaching works with these issues so that those we coach can:

• Face reality rather than hope it won’t happen or seek to blame
• Develop thinking patterns that will increase their flexibility in thought, emotion and action
• Learn new ways of managing themselves when they feel under stress

In collaboration with Coaching to Solutions we’re offering two career resilience skills programmes in 2011:

• 11th – 12th May in Brighton
• 12th – 13th October in London

Led by Lindsay Wittenberg, originator of the Wittenberg career coaching model, and Carole Pemberton, author of ‘Strike a New Career Deal’, the programme offers the option of gaining an Institute of Leadership and Management Award in Career Resilience Coaching.

The programme is for:

• Organisational coaches who want to expand their skills in career coaching
• Independent coaches who want to extend their coaching range
• HR professionals who want to broaden their repertoire

Places are limited to 12.

Fees for the May Programme
Early bird booking by 1st March (25% discount): £447.50 plus VAT
Book by 31st March (18% discount): £493 plus VAT
Book after 31st March: £600 plus VAT

ILM Career Coaching for Resilience Award option: Additional fee: £100 plus VAT

Register for the programme
To reserve your place on the programme e-mail carole.pemberton@coachingtosolutions.com

In collaboration with Coaching to Solutions, LWL now offers two new programmes, endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management. These support line managers, HR professionals and internal coaches to hold coaching conversations with reports and colleagues who are concerned about the impact on their careers of the challenging economic climate and who need to build their resilience. Find out more here under ‘Coaching skills for career conversations’.

Lindsay Wittenberg has reviewed ‘Managing Conflict at Work: Understanding and Resolving Conflict for Productive Working Relationships’ by Clive Johnson and Jackie Keddy.  This new work, providing practical, accessible tools and techniques for conflict management in the workplace, represents a valuable contribution to the field.
See the review at http://www.thehrdirector.com/book-reviews/managing-conflict-at-work and information on the book at http://www.thehrdirector.com/book-reviews

If we only pause to be aware, there’s plenty to learn from a baby about curiosity, learning itself and focus.  See Lindsay’s article on how one particular baby has enriched her coaching process at http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2010/06/28/perspectives-out-of-the-mouths-of-babes/

The rumbling scandal over MPs’ expenses has thrown into sharp relief the difference between playing by the rules and operating from integrity.  The public is outraged by MPs apparently believing that playing by the rules is enough.  It is clear that something more authentic than this is needed from our leaders – and that ’something’ is integrity – the discipline and the courage to do what you claim is the right thing even when no-one’s looking.  Research has shown that integrity is one of the attributes that followers value most in leaders.  We’re reminded too of the dictum by Martin Luther King Jr: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”  Strong, compelling and resilient leadership involves taking personal responsibility for making moral and ethical judgments that might not offer the easiest way forward and might not bring the kind of material rewards that oil the wheels of everyday living.  In the aftermath of the exposure of MPs’ behaviour, one can’t help wondering about the role models of leadership they represent….

We’re living through times when institutions, companies and individuals whose stability and integrity we’ve always taken for granted are demonstrating in dramatic ways that they haven’t warranted that trust. We’re seeing that corporations’ key strategic decisions have, after all,  been made on the shakiest of foundations.  We’re witnessing the exposure of Directors’ self-interest that has taken precedence over delivering on the promise to the customer.  We’re experiencing the fallout from banks – the backbone of economies – that have turned out to be fragile and to have energetically promoted business to people who were the poorest of investment risks.

In LWL’s work with clients, and in the wider world, the effect is showing as a growing reluctance to do business with strangers – with unknown providers whose standards, quality and substance can’t be taken for granted.  On the contrary, what we’re seeing – and we believe this will consolidate and grow exponentially – is that trust is the key differentiator in all manner of purchasing decisions.  No longer will it be enough for a professional provider – whether executive coach or lawyer, accountant or architect – to count on securing new business with a glossy brochure and an impressive client list.  What we’ll be looking for as purchasers is to be able to really trust these professionals to deliver what they’re promising, to work to ethical and professional standards, and to still be there when the tide goes out.

A key source of that trust will be where that provider appeared from: do we know them already and trust them because they’ve provided a good service to us in the past, or were they recommended by someone we already know (and trust)?  The importance of relationships has never been stronger – and we suggest that it will continue to grow even stronger yet.  We’re all going to need to nurture the relationships that are important to us, and that may in turn lead to further relationships that will sustain and stimulate our development as businesses and individuals, both at work and beyond.