Workshops

Self-care for Conservationists

Too often, conservationists sacrifice their own wellbeing as they strive to overcome today’s environmental and conservation challenges. Let me help you prioritize your health as we assess your current self-care practices (or lack thereof) and guide you to:

• Examine what self-care and wellbeing are and are not
• Identify personal beliefs around self-care and wellbeing
• Determine barriers to successful self-care plans
• Develop a process for committing to and implementing self-care

Boundary Setting for Work-Life Balance

Our “always on” culture blurs the line between personal and professional time, but clear boundaries and expectations can improve relationships, reduce stress, increase morale, and provide a powerful framework to get work done efficiently and effectively. In this workshop, we will:

• Identify barriers to setting our boundaries
• Understand our personal values as the key to creating boundaries
• Explore ways to develop team operating values and behaviors
• Commit to setting at least one new boundary and create a plan to communicate it

Mindfulness and Compassion in Conservation

This workshop is grounded in the belief that conservation efforts benefit from a more compassionate approach to the large-scale and quickly changing resource issues of today. In this foundational session, we will:

• Explore the practice of mindfulness
• Engage a process for developing self-compassion
• Examine an urban deer management case study to discuss compassion at work
• Brainstorm ways to incorporate mindfulness and compassion on teams
• Consider the balance between planning and presence

Self-Care and Compassion during Epic Adaptive Challenges

Note: This workshop was created when COVID hit and differs from the one described earlier.

When our brains and bodies endure extreme stressors, we have an increased need for healthy self-care to process our concerns. This session explores the range of emotions affecting us and our teams through a compassionate lens to help us move to action.

Expect this space to be safe to share your experiences and acknowledge fears in dealing with COVID19. You will walk away with tools to use for yourself and your team in navigating the near future with everyone’s health and wellbeing in mind.

Making the Most of Your Internal Dialogue

Increase your emotional intelligence and improve the quality of your conversations by capturing and applying your internal dialogue! Through challenging statements and personal experiences, in this workshop we will:

• Practice iterative listening
• Capture primal thoughts and feelings
• Investigate feelings of inferiority common to all humans
• Turn personal triggers into useful responses

Transforming Stressful Situations

Stress is unavoidable but it doesn’t have to be debilitating. Use this workshop to:

• Define forms of personal and professional stress
• Identify both conscious and unconscious stress to clarify action
• Learn the four greatest personal fears and how they affect stress
• Practice uncovering deep personal judgments that often cause undue stress

Personal Goal Setting for a Balanced Life

Learn the five Life Tasks and assess your current life balance and personal wellness. Together, we will develop a plan to maintain what is working and strengthen areas of concern. We will discuss how to expand our lives and give life to others. You will walk away with a strategy and system you can use to track your personal wellbeing.

Introduction to the Enneagram

Discover the Enneagram and its use for personal growth! This introductory workshop will cover the nine Enneagram types, their focus of attention, as well as strengths and challenges. You will understand how the Enneagram can benefit you and your relationships at home and work by uncovering traps that inhibit us from being our true selves and sharing our gifts with the world.

Living in Purpose

We will explore beliefs about purpose and use a series of questions to discover areas of purpose. We will claim existing strengths and energies toward purpose. We will conduct a “possibility conversation” to help you dream big. Finally, we will examine what courage will be required to succeed in purpose. Additional reflection questions will be provided after the session to keep refining any purpose statements.

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Team Wellness during Times of Uncertainty

Are you encouraging your team through these uncertain times or are you leading them to burnout? Managers must take the right actions to address wellbeing for themselves and their teams as we adapt to the future of the workplace. I help leaders become aware of factors contributing to overwhelm and burnout, then learn and encourage new ways of working together for the good of the organization. The learning objectives for this workshop are to;

• Uncover signs of workplace burnout and COVID overwhelm
• Devise a set of team operating principles to move through uncertainty
• Discuss personal and team wellbeing for resilience through change

Better Meetings Ahead: Facilitation Basics

When planned and conducted so that all voices are heard, meetings can unify participants. This experiential workshop provides essential tools needed for productive meetings. A mix of short lecture sessions and practice will allow us to:

• Apply tools to a group
• Name four facilitator types
• Cite at least four roles of a facilitator
• Structure a meeting using proper meeting flow
• Develop a meeting session plan so that desired meeting outcomes are met

Cooperative Language

Progress requires cooperation. This workshop will help you identify and use language that inspires cooperation within your teams. We will practice iterative listening and will leverage reactions to statements and/or personal experiences to help us:

• Use shared meaning to reach shared goals
• Discuss assertive versus controlling language
• Learn the importance of ordinal process for everyone to be heard
• Cite at least three differences between resistant and non-resistant language

Resolving conflict

Conflict is inevitable, so let me provide a simple process to guide you to shared understanding and compromise. During this class, we will use a personal conflict situation to help us:

• Identify different types of conflict
• Apply a conflict resolution model to resolve personal or professional conflict
• Explain a process to get “unstuck” from a stressful situation
• Illustrate similarities to two other popular conflict resolution models

Enneagram and Relationships

Make sense of relationship behaviors that baffle you! I help groups discover the communication and conflict patterns of each Enneagram type, then use those patterns to discuss our relationship “dances” and explore how to respond during conflict. This is a deeper dive into the Enneagram, so a basic understanding of the tool is necessary.

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Introduction to Ecopsychology

The goal of ecopsychology is to unite personal well-being with planetary well-being. This introduction is useful for teachers, therapists, psychologists, social workers, psychology students, or anyone concerned with their clients’ health. Through an ecological case study, examination of personal experiences with nature, and our own personal knowledge, participants will assess and develop appropriate nature-based interventions. This is a full-day workshop held indoors.

Participants will be able to:

• Cite at least five principles of ecopsychology
• Assess their own ecological beliefs
• Assess the ecological beliefs of others
• Apply at least three basic therapeutic nature interventions

Outdoor Life Task

The field of ecopsychology and the human-nature connection is not new. However, COVID has, for many, shown us the importance of the outdoors and nature in our health and wellbeing as well as why everyone needs outdoor spaces nearby. Parks, lakes, and, wild spaces have seen an increase in use because these spaces help us feel like we belong. So what is it that nature provides us for our health and wellbeing? In this workshop, we are going to dig into our desire to belong and be healed by Earth. We will practice, through a homework activity, getting connected to nature and its healing powers. We will share our reflections from this and one other activity to discuss their use, our own wellbeing, and the wellbeing of clients. We will see how childhood recollections in nature contribute to our current environmental identity. We will discuss two indoor nature-related activities to aid in wellbeing when we cannot go outside.

Participants will:

• Practice interventions where nature aids in wellbeing.
• Learn about childhood influences to our environmental identities.
• Discuss nature in reference to the tasks of life

This workshop would normally be held outdoors. To replace that experience virtually, you will receive an outdoor assignment upon registration and this outdoor assignment is REQUIRED for participation. It is the activity that is a key component to learning. A survey link will be included and the survey must be completed at least 2 days before the webinar to receive the webinar link. NO EXCEPTIONS.

EcoWellness

This workshop unearths the dimensions of Ecowellness based on Adlerian wellness models. We will correlate human goals of safety, significance and belonging to nature connectedness and will reflect on personal experiences to claim our environmental identity.

Participants will be able to:

• Assess and write an environmental identity
• State the significance of the three dimensions of ecowellness
• From a case study, summarize three different nature perspectives
• State a conclusion between nature connectedness components and Adler’s three human goals

Deep Experiences in Nature

Let’s investigate how outdoor experiences in local environments aid in focusing and wellness! Using an Adlerian process, we will:

• Structure an outdoor experience for wellness
• Claim our own transcendent qualities of nature
• Delineate tourist from pilgrim for deep nature experiences
• Name at least three types of ecotherapy practices involving specific plants and animals

Ecopsychology Research, Ethics and Developing Eco Resilience

This workshop analyzes some of the research evidence in the field of ecopsychology and human/nature connection as well as ethical considerations when taking clients outdoors.

Participants will be able to:

• Apply Adler’s five life tasks to eco resilience and ecowellness
• Characterize at least two aspects of eco grief
• Characterize topophilia and affirm their own principal place for wellness
• Name at least three research sources supporting nature-based interventions
• State at least three risk-management issues related to outdoor therapy/wellness

Beyond #responsiblerecreation to human-nature relationship

As part of the #ResponsibleRecreation campaign, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies seeks to “promote Responsible Recreation as a critical way to mitigate the stress and anxiety of the current COVID 19 crisis, supporting the health of America.” This project uses COVID 19 as an opportunity to deeply connect people to the environment/nature and create advocates for public outdoor spaces.

This series requires:

1. A pre-webinar homework assignment and completion of a survey of your homework reflections prior to the first webinar.
2. Two 2-hour webinars held one week apart to allow for reflection and deeper discussion.
3. ALL participants will be called on to speak about their experiences over the course of the two workshops in addition to using chat to exchange thoughts and ideas.

The first workshop will focus on homework reflection, self-awareness and self-care with regard to nature. We will begin to understand how our environmental identities are developed. The second workshop will dive deeper into environmental identity, human-nature relationship, and how concepts from the series can be used to help agencies move outdoor participants and recreationists from users to advocates.