It’s normal to struggle with confidence, regardless of leadership role or status. This topic is the most common request among high achievers.

Take-Aways:

1. Learn about confidence saboteurs
2. Reframe thought processes and expectations to increase confidence
3. Learn how to leverage confidence struggles

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn the mechanisms that create resentment
2. Learn how to adjust giving ratios to prevent resentment from occurring

Part 1: How to Prevent and Manage Stress

Preventing and managing stress is one of the top searches on Dr. Tricia’s website, the most common issue cited by leaders, and a ubiquitous concern of all people who carry responsibility and pursue excellence. It’s a huge topic that can feel impossible to cover succinctly, yet even small tactics and reminders can help give people the oxygen to navigate life demands.

Take-Aways:

1. Learn how to reduce preventable sources of stress. (e.g. over-commitment, internal expectations)
2. Learn how to cope with stress from situations outside our control. (illness of family members, business competitors)

Part 2: Energy Fuels and Drains – Their  Impact on Productivity, Fulfillment and Burnout

It’s fairly common for people to be burned out before they realize there is a problem. Taking a bubble bath or deep breathing are may provide temporary relief but does not solve the root cause. Creating a personal blueprint of fuels and drains can have a lasting impact on decision-making and accompanying energy levels. When we learn about our energy buffers and how we can control them, we can get ahead of the burn-out.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn the concept of buffer and how to assess one’s own buffer levels.
2. Learn a personalized, quick assessment system for your fuels and drains
3. Learn small tweaks to gain space within fast-paced, high-demand workdays.

Is it stress or is it anxiety? Anxiety has always been a common clinical phenomenon but continues to be confusing for people. Part of the reason is that everyone experiences anxiety sometimes.  It’s helpful to understand how to differentiate between the two and what to do if anxiety is present.

Take-Aways:

1. Learn primary categories of anxiety
2. Differentiate between stressors, situational anxiety and clinical anxiety
3. Acquire an overview of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions and the mistakes made my consumers and medical professionals with each

Everyone finds themselves forgetting what they are saying, doing or trying to find in the room they just entered. However, sometimes, these short-term memory glitches seem to be happening in yourself or others at a higher frequency than normal, and it can be personally scary and professional difficult to navigate.

Take-Aways:

1. Identify common sources of short-term memory challenges
2. Differentiate between short-term memory challenges versus cognitive decline
3. Develop tactical ways of coping with short-term memory challenges to minimize their impact.

What to Do When Every Day Feels Like Groundhog Day

Every day feels like it’s repeating itself, and it makes you wonder why. Individually, it impacts fulfillment and performance; collectively it sinks a group int an abyss of ugh.

Take-Aways: 

1. Differentiate Groundhog Day funk from mild depression
2. Acquire specific psychological and behavioral tactics to deal with Groundhog Day
3. Recognize vulnerabilities to Groundhog Day and reduce the frequency of recurrence

Take-Aways:

1. Identify personality quirks that create barriers to success.
2. Understand where strengths become weaknesses.
3. Identify specific tactics to mitigate the downside of strengths and optimize their upside.

Part 1 Topic: Tell People Who You Are

Who are you, and how do people perceive you? Many workplace misunderstandings begin because we leave it up to others to try to figure out who we are. We often assume that other people will correctly identify our leadership styles, our stress points, our personality, and our preferred communication. Those multi-layered assumptions create openings for hurt feelings and conflict.

Take-Aways: 

1. Identify the key elements of their personal interactive template that affects other people
2. Learn how to tell people what to expect from them in a way that feels professional and safe for both parties.

Want a faster way to align with others? From hostage situations to sales, the art of ensuring that people feel heard facilitates success. The techniques are surprisingly straightforward and easy to implement into daily interactions.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn how to use paraphrasing techniques to ensure accurate communication.
2. Learn how to use verbal empathy in a non-awkward way to deepen trust.

Part 3 Topic: Trust Breaks, Cats & Dogs, and Silent Diversity

Most leadership and organizational strategies fall apart when trust is broken. Often, the trust cracks that occur do not originate from bad intentions. Rather, they come from a lack of awareness of others’ needs, triggers, and vulnerabilities. 

Take-Aways: 

1. Identify and prevent behaviors that create trust cracks
2. Learn about cats, dogs, and silent factors of diversity that require different interaction styles
3. Learn what to do when you have broken trust

Part 1. How to Recognize Difficult People

Some people are annoying; some are dangerous to the health of your organization. Many fall in the middle – an energy drain that impacts you and the rest of the team.

Take-Aways: 

1. Obtain a big picture understanding of personality disorder diagnoses
2. Differentiate among coachable, uncoachable, and the middle ground in which people are coachable, but the cost is too high
3. Learn the flag system of identifying difficult people

Part 2. Roadblocks to Effectively Dealing with Difficult People

Most people have an internal moral compass about the way they should treat people and the value of humankind. Many organizations hit roadblocks when difficult people with great skill sets are viewed as indispensable.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn the common thought processes that create moral tension in dealing with difficult people, and the ones that apply to you.
2. Assess your organizational mindset about difficult people and your capacity to eject them.
3. Build a stronger individual and organizational road map on how to deal with difficult people that incorporates your beliefs and unique situation.

Many of us struggle with knowing how to set boundaries without sounding mean. Sometimes we are worried about offending someone, and sometimes we struggle with the actual words. Maybe we’ve tried to set boundaries but people run over them. 

Take-Aways: 

1. Identify the internal dialogue you have about being assertive and how to combat it. 
2. Learn specific elements of successful scripts and one-liners that apply across situations.
3. Identify types of difficult people who need unique scripts and response sets.

Soft skills do not have a well-defined flow-chart of action and result. Further, emotions can make some people feel confused and outside of control. This course cuts through the jargon and goes to the fundamental and tactical aspects of human interactions for the people who hate humans….or would rather not deal with them.

Take-Aways: 

1. Identify the points of human interaction that are annoying or confusing to you
2. Build a small spreadsheet of human personality and needs categories
3. Identify specific actions to take with each category that are palatable and sustainable

High Achievers with a track record of excellence have difficulty knowing how to deal with people who eschew “common sense” and critical thinking. It can be emotionally exhausting to figure out how reasonable one should be.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn about the common thought processes of High Achievers that surround dealing with incompetence
2. Learn about the psychological roadblocks that keep you from adjusting your expectations
3. Identify reframing strategies that will help you emotionally cope with incompetence

Despite the problems with validity and reliability, personality tests continues to be a popular mechanism in current workplace culture. Learning about their pitfalls and positives can help you maximize the financial and emotional investment while minimizing psychological harm.

Take-Aways: 

1. Acquire an understanding how personality assessments are constructed and why people can benefit more from them than others.
2. Learn about the harm creating in viewing results as objective sources of truth.
3. Learn how to use assessments to guide conversations, increase trust, and optimize interaction patterns.

Is it the sandwich approach? What do I do if I’ve already had two discussions and nothing has changed? A dominant, under-reported reason for low employee morale is the lack of specific, actionable feedback. Conversely, leaders often express discomfort about giving both positive and negative feedback.

Take-Aways: 

1. Give the type of feedback that strengthens performance and relationships.
2. Build trust foundations to optimize feedback loops.
3. Cope with the emotional discomfort of giving feedback
4. Pick the feedback process that works for your personality and work context.

Team members will share ideas and opinions when they feel:

1. Safe
2. That their opinion matters.

If we don’t intentionally create atmospheres that reward engagement, we lose valuable insight from people who want to do a great job and see the organization thrive.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn how to foster participation in group settings
2. Follow-up conversations and activities that reinforce engagement

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn how to respond to the emotions surrounding change.
2. Learn what to say and what not to say.
3. Learn ways to cope with their own stress about transitions as they lead others through the process.

Take-Aways: 

1. Learn common flags of Difficult People.
2. Learn how to know if a Difficult Person can change.
3. Learn how to communicate with those who are affected by the difficult person.

Many High Achievers want to think the best of others. It’s not naivete; it’s a lifestyle that reflects their genuine sincerity as humans. This extreme strength creates a challenge in high stakes decision-making.

Take-Aways: 

1. Identify the personal history that makes you want to “give people the benefit of the doubt”
2. Identify BEHAVIORS to assess in others (potential board members, business partners, high level employees)
3. Design a customized rubric to help you protect yourself and your business while retaining faith in humankind

Part 1: How to Prevent Bad Customer Acquisition (Interactive & Customized) 

(*Most applicable for businesses with service or repeat business models versus single point transactions) 

Between economic fluctuations and personal values systems, the dominant message among businesses is on customer acquisition versus customer discernment.  Yet, a deficit in discernment can increase legal risk and direct and indirect business costs. 

Take-Aways: 

1. Recognize the themes among ideal versus worst customers, specific for your business.
2. Identify the red flags of bad customers (customized for each organization)
3. Assess alignment between commission or other sales processes and bad customer prevention
4. Front-End Screening versus the takeaway close

Part 2: How to Identify and Fire Bad Customers (Interactive & Customized)

Sometimes despite our best efforts, we take on the wrong customers. Conversely, we may have customers we inherited from others’ decision-making. What do we with the ones who are already in our space?

Take-Aways:

1. Discuss and customize the cost of the customer matrix 
2.  Identify pathways to fire without alienating customers (including specific scripts)
3.  Identify the psychological and business traps that lead to bad customer retention

Part 1: How to Prevent Bad Customer Acquisition (Interactive & Customized) 

(*Most applicable for businesses with service or repeat business models versus single point transactions) 

Between economic fluctuations and personal values systems, the dominant message among businesses is on customer acquisition versus customer discernment.  Yet, a deficit in discernment can increase legal risk and direct and indirect business costs. 

Take-Aways: 

1. Recognize the themes among ideal versus worst customers, specific for your business.
2. Identify the red flags of bad customers (customized for each organization)
3. Assess alignment between commission or other sales processes and bad customer prevention
4. Front-End Screening versus the takeaway close

Part 2: How to Identify and Fire Bad Customers (Interactive & Customized)

Sometimes despite our best efforts, we take on the wrong customers. Conversely, we may have customers we inherited from others’ decision-making. What do we with the ones who are already in our space?

Take-Aways:

1. Discuss and customize the cost of the customer matrix 
2.  Identify pathways to fire without alienating customers (including specific scripts)
3.  Identify the psychological and business traps that lead to bad customer retention