Being the Best You Can Be
Being the Best You Can Be provides deep self-knowledge and strategies for living one’s life well. Given we cannot significantly change our personality, our job is to be the very best rendition of ourselves that we can be. The workshop examines why personality is important and provides an understanding of each participant’s profile in terms of the Big 5 personality framework. This enables us to a) select and curate environments (relationships, friends, work roles, habitats) that are compatible with our personality, and b) ‘wire in patches’ and adapt as best we can where we are not in optimal environments for our personality. Finally, the workshop provides guidelines for dealing with more extreme personality dimensions in self and others.
Interview with Sharon Bent
Understanding Personality and Knowing Thyself
Module 1, Understanding Personality and Knowing Thyself, begins with the heritable nature of personality and then demonstrates why understanding it is so important for our happiness and wellbeing. Participants then self-assess on the Big 5 personality traits and share their profiles, discussing implications, including preferences, strengths and weaknesses.
Choosing Environments
Module 2, Choosing Environments, shows how we use self-awareness and our reflexive intelligence to better manage self. The primary task is to select one’s environment (job, physical context, social context) to suit one’s preferences and predispositions – the most important element of ‘environment’ is other people. Participants apply this understanding to specific environmental situations including friendships, conflicts, romance, work, assertiveness, creativity, change and goal attainment.
Being the Best You Can Be
Module 3, Being the Best You Can Be, focuses on how we should ‘curate or change our environment (where possible) to be more compatible with our preferences; especially in relation to work, family and friends, physical environments and outside-work activities. It also provides strategies in how to wire in ‘patches’ in ourselves as inevitably we cannot curate a ‘perfect’ environment for us. Using self-awareness, we can manage our personality, adjusting our responses and practising in more useful adaptations. The module also looks at patches for more extreme personality dimensions in self and others.
Helping with Mental Health
Helping with Mental Health provides knowledge, skills and confidence in promoting good mental health in ourselves and others. The workshop helps participants understand when and how they should intervene to help. It provides hands-on practice in conducting a ‘helping conversation’, including referral options, confidentiality issues and self-care. The workshop is relevant in one’s personal life as well as at work. It provides an understanding of the psychosocial factors that impact mental health and gives guidelines and activities in improving those factors. It also provides practical strategies for managing people with mental health issues at work.
Interview with Sharon Bent
Helping With Mental Health
Module 1, Understanding Mental Health, begins with participants’ general experiences of mental health issues leading to an understanding of mental health as a continuum – from very poor to thriving. The module then gives a brief overview of the prevalence of mental health disorders globally. The main causes are discussed briefly as well as typical legislative responses to mental ill health as it plays out in the workplace.
Helping With Mental Health
Module 2, Helping Self & Others, begins with typical indicators of a person whose mental health has declined. We then outline a structured and practical process to conduct a ‘helping conversation’ well, giving participants plenty of opportunity to practice and develop this valuable skill. Included are guidelines for referral, confidentiality and self-care. Finally, the module deals with the all-important issue of how to help if someone may be suicidal.
Module 3, Addressing Mental Health: Resilience
Module 3, Addressing Mental Health: Resilience, focuses on two ways to address mental health: 1) helping self and others to develop higher resilience and 2) make positive changes to the psychosocial factors that impact on mental health. Particular attention is paid to work practices built around sustained high stress and practical suggestions in modulating stress are suggested. Finally, participants consider ways to address the most relevant psychosocial factors that impact negatively on mental health in their workplace.
Being Well, Performing Well
This workshop is about the robust relationship between wellbeing and high performance. It is about the optimal balance of stress and how that converts to resilience in the pursuit of high value goals. It presents the four pillars of resilience: Social Resilience, Physical Resilience, Psychological Resilience and Practical Resilience.
Interview with Sharon Bent
Wellbeing & Flow, Social and Physical Resilience
Module 1, Wellbeing & Flow, Social and Physical Resilience, begins with an understanding of wellbeing as a continuum and then uncovers the relationship between stress balance and the experience of ‘Flow’. It then explores the powerful relationships between social connection, oxytocin, social support and resilience. Finally, the module provides science-based guidelines for Physical, Dietary and Sleep-based resilience with practical tips for each.
Psychological Resilience
Module 2, Psychological Resilience, provides a model (Reality + Mindset = Experience) of human functioning that provides for (relative) human freedom: our ability to change mindsets and thereby our experience. This is applied practically to Realistic Optimism, Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence.
Practical Resilience
Module 3, Practical Resilience, focuses on the importance of non-distracted absorption in work of purpose and value to us (Deep work). It provides practical guidelines for the reduction of alleged multitasking, the establishment of routines and rituals, the fundamentals of prioritising, the art of saying ‘No’ and how to develop an ‘internal locus of control’. The module ends with practical action-planning.