Workplace Wellbeing Training Course: Managing pressure effectively (in you and in others)

This course is currently delivered face-to-face and live online with our expert facilitators

A one day Workplace Wellbeing Training Course

Is your team under pressure?

This one-day experiential wellbeing course is designed for Managers at all levels who experience and oversee teams in high pressure circumstances, such as:

• Teams who regularly work to tight deadlines
• Teams facing organisational changes or restructuring
• Teams losing or adding people in key roles
• Teams working with limited resources

With a fresh and interactive style, we explore the links between resilience and performance, and identify key factors that can support or erode resilience in the workplace.

To help you and your team thrive, even under pressure, this wellbeing course helps you create tailored approaches to suit your situation. It gives you an opportunity to develop the mindsets and habits you would like to role model as a manager.

During this one day workplace wellbeing training course we will aim to:

• Explore a simple evidence-based model of resilience
• Recognise the effects of stress on teams in the short, medium and long term
• Identify signs and triggers of stress among your team members
• Get familiar with your own mindsets and habits as a manager during stressful times
• Select strategies to offer within your team that enable improved resilience and performance
• Select your own toolkit of stress management and resilience practices that can help you sustain your ‘fuel’ as a manager while supporting your people

Our wellbeing training course is designed and facilitated by Doug Osborne, respected psychotherapist, who teaches counselling psychology at Roehampton University and has delivered these wellbeing short cuts across industry, for the Fire Service, Media, Tech Services, Charities, Retail and Banking & Finance, for nearly two decades.

Video Transcript

Introduction

I’m Doug Osbourne, my background’s in pharmaceuticals and then – very strange gear change – I went into the music business, which eventually led me into the world of psychology, well-being, and mental health. And in the last of these careers – the third one – I’ve worked at Roehampton University lecturing in counselling psychology.  I’ve been a consultant to the fire brigade across the southeast and the southwest – all the counties really – for about 20 years.

Why consider wellbeing?

There was a big report that the government had asked for in 2017 called the Stevenson Farmer Report which showed that most industries are still very much suboptimal in terms of their approach to wellbeing and some of the approaches to people in the workplace is very old-school… You don’t flog people to death,  you give people support. And actually if you retain people and allow people to be in a kind of optimal setting, then you’ll get much, much more out of them. They’re happier so they perform well.

What do you mean by Air Traffic Control?

Think about air traffic control at peak times. You’ve got thousands of aircraft taking off, people milling around, but we don’t give it a second thought. Wellbeing is like that in some ways because mostly we cope very, very well. Occasionally there’s a hiccup and all of a sudden air traffic control is in the spotlight. It’s a bit like that for our wellbeing. Suddenly we’ll notice that something’s up, because the normal very complex ways of managing suddenly come onto our radar.

What is the “Boiled Frog Theory”?

The boiled frog is an interesting metaphor for well-being. I want to reassure you that I’ve never boiled a frog!

It’s said that if you take a frog and pop him in tepid water and you gently begin to heat the water, the frog doesn’t notice the small, incremental changes in temperature and eventually, the poor little thing will just go to sleep and die.

As human beings, we’re very similar. We won’t notice, say over the course of a year, small, incremental increases in the demands of us. We just adjust, and then we adjust, and we adjust… but obviously all the time that’s happening we’re beginning to strip resources from ourselves – all sorts of different resources – and at some point, those resources will come to their end, a bit like the frog.

How do we respond to stress?

We can go to fight, flight, or freeze. The way that shows up in humans, in a modern-day commercial setting, would be… for example, ‘fight’, would be where you’re taking the peace out of yourself. On the way home from the office, because you “didn’t do that right”, or “you forgot that”, or “you overlooked that”, or” you didn’t say the right thing there”, you kind of attack yourself.

Something like ‘freeze’ can show up around the quality of your high-brain thinking. As we begin to have more and more pressure on us, the high-brain thinking, if we’re going into freeze, begins to stall… So, if you think of very complex relational things, like business leadership, it can begin to fog how we approach those things.

If you take ‘flight’ for example, I’ve seen flight show up in many, many different ways. Flight can show up in… not physically wanting to be present in its simplest form. But it may show up in a much more sophisticated way which is where you’ll want to avoid a topic, or there’ll be a place you don’t want to put yourself, whether that’s metaphorical or real.

What is Mindfulness?

Really, it’s the antidote to time-travelling (what I call time-travelling), which is where you go forward to try and risk assess and figure out where all the pitfalls are, or you go backwards in time to try and reassess what you did, to see you know how that played out. A difficulty with time travelling is that our mind and nervous system can barely tell the difference between reality and imagination. You can test that out. Just before lunchtime, imagine your food in your head. Even before you’ve actually got any in front of you, your body will start to respond just as though the food’s really there. So what mindfulness is about is trying to get you present – so you are time-travelling to neither the past nor the future. You’re present. And in that place, what we’re doing is we’re keeping our brain activity in the higher brain where you’ve got the capacity to strategically think, to plan, to be dynamic, which is very important – especially for things like leadership, or all the kind of higher human activities. Relational stuff really does need that part of the brain to be online as much as possible.

Wellbeing. doug@aspire-leadership.co.uk