Workshop Outlines

Motivation and Burnout (Leadership and Management)

Wednesdays @ 6:00 - 7:30pm EST : Mar 12 – Apr 16 (6 weeks)

 

Session 1: Motivation in the Workplace

• Alignment of actions, outcomes, and human desires

• What actions are available

• What do the actions get

• What do the people want

• The role of creativity and strategy in maintaining morale, productivity, and progress

 

Session 2: Individual Character and Dispositions

• Incentives and rewards

• Where are people capably maintaining their own motivation, where are they relating on external support

• Exploring and establishing possibilities for that external motivational support

 

Session 3: Interpersonal Factors

• Inspiring and demoralizing relationships in the workplace

• Matches and mismatches of personality and role

 

Session 4: Cultural Forces

• Evaluating enculturation processes at play in the workplace

• Culture shear, culture shock, and possibilities for cultural harmony

• Establishing a cultural role of creativity

 

Session 5: Structural Pressures

• What broader social and cultural forces is the workplace exposed to through its work?

• How are (and aren’t) these internalized and dealt with within the work environment?

• Possibilities for rebalancing structural pressures

 

Session 6: Creativity and Institutional Design

• Responding to feedback about motivation and burnout

• Morale considerations and conflicts across different layers of the org chart

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Rejuvenating Creativity (Personal Development)

Saturdays @ 3:00- 4:30pm EST : Mar 15 – Apr 19 (6 weeks)

 

Session 1: Orienting Towards Creativity

• The idea of “having” creativity

• Possible paradoxes around intending to be more creative

• Signs and evidence that creativity is “happening”

• Possible benefits of not being creative (?!)

 

Session 2: Creativity as a Process

• Mutually schematizing structure of representation

• Creativity as skillfully moving between moments of mutually schematizing unfoldings

• What makes for skillfulness?

• What interrupts the process?

 

Session 3: Elemental Phenomenologies and Creativity

• Creating phenomenological contrasts to explore dimensions of the creative process

• e.g. Dry-sparse versus flowing-outpouring

• e.g. Contraction-closedness versus ignition-towardness

• Finding core or resonant representations of your creative process

 

Session 4: Creative Work Jam

• Attempting to use what we’ve explored so far, let’s actually do some creative work!

• Then debrief, reflect, diagnose, digest…

 

Session 5: Addressing “Blocked” Creativity

• Establishing outposts in a “creative desert”

• Finding deep wellsprings of creativity

 

Session 6: Healing Your Relationship With Creativity

• Accepting responsibility for creative

• Consider forgiving whatever has thwarted your creativity

• What your creativity brings to the world

• Any known or secret hopes?

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Modeling Other Minds (Coaching Development)

Thursdays @ 12:00 - 1:30pm EST : Mar 13 – Apr 19 (6 weeks)

 

Session 1: Inside Views and Outside Views

• Your biggest confusions about other people

• Subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity

• Options for understanding others in terms of inside views and outside views, strengths and limitations of each

• The feeling of being understood

 

Session 2: Relating vs Reacting to Difference

• Navigating overwhelm around differences

• Noticing associations and implicit assumptions about people “like me/us” vs “not like me/us”

• Experiences of conformity and relationship to the pressure to conform

• Holding boundaries and having own permission to be different

• Holding space for others to be different

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Session 3: Sources of Difference

• The practice of noticing difference

• Different experiences: early life, economic and cultural background

• Different developmental trajectories: major ruptures and disruptions, major adaptations

• Different goals, plans, and values

• Different choices and ethical positions

 

Session 4: Finding Similarity Within Difference

• Emotional, mood, and attitude inventories as sources of granularity for finding shared ground

• Possibilities for shared perspectives

• Building rapport from simple shared touchstones

 

Session 5: Developing Resonant Analogies

• Analogies as systems of correspondence

• Finding metaphors that give both parties meaningful forms of self-representation

• Developing a metaphor together

• Re-grounding shared metaphor in individual experience

 

Session 6: Humility, Hypothesis-Testing, and Backtracking

• Permission to be non-catastrophically wrong about the other

• Navigating feelings of (perhaps mutual) misunderstanding

• Re-grounding in kindness and care towards the other