Professional Development Training Course - 2 Days

We are here to answer a single question:

How can we get the best performance from ourselves and others?

Before we can get the best from others, we must first get the best from ourselves.

This course is about how you can improve your results by improving your professional skills.

Improve your results by improving your professional skills.

There are six key skills to master:

1. Goal setting
2. Clear communication
3. Time management
4. Conflict management
5. Manage your own emotions
6. Inspire positive emotions in others

Self-analysis questionnaire: To discover what your personal strengths and weaknesses.

Every day you are making impressions in the minds of people around you. Those mental impressions can help you, fail to help you, or hinder you. The impressions you leave in the minds of others are based upon two things; everything you do, and everything you say.

Impression management is about taking conscious control of your words and behaviour, in order to always create a positive impression in the minds of others.

Success is defined as the achievement of a worthwhile and valuable goal. You cannot achieve a goal you do not set. Therefore, the first step to achieving a goal is to set it.

We will investigate the art of effective goal setting.

Having a clear goal is only the first step. You now need to communicate the goal to others.

Since you cannot achieve your goals alone, you need to gain the cooperation and understanding of other people. Therefore, you need to master the skills of clear communication.

Do you ever say to yourself, “I know what I mean, but I can’t explain it?"

You need to be able to explain the meaning of your key ideas, plans and concepts. Finding the words to express your exact meaning, is not always easy. We will show you how to find your voice.

Many people are too negative. They talk for too long about what they cannot, or will not, do. We need the conversation to be about what they can and will do.

We will show you how to change negatives into positives.

Learn how to give 'affirmative commands'.

In a similar way, many people use negative commands, such as, “Don’t worry", which in itself, induces the emotion of worry.

You need to state your meaning in affirmative terms. We will show you how.

How are you going to apply these ideas?

Conflict is inevitable, because not everyone agrees with your views.
You cannot always avoid conflicts, nor should you. But you need to know how to resolve them quickly and effectively. This course will show you the correct methods for resolving conflict.

Manage conflict with reason - a rational approach.

Typically, there are three ways people try to manage conflict, but only the first one works:

1. Reason: a rational approach to conflict management.
2. Negative emotion: too much anger, upset.
3. Avoidance: run away from difficult conflict situations.

You need to know how not to emotionalise conflicts, but rather how to rationalise them.

To rationalise conflict, we need to understand the difference between two types of language:

• Factual, objective language, and
• Subjective, opinionated, and emotionalised language

We discuss the difference, and the importance of not using highly charged, emotionalised and opinionated language, when handling conflict situations.

We will practice translating derogatory, emotional and highly opinionated language into safer, objective factual, NON emotional. This is a key skill you must master before you can properly prepare your scripts.

If you can, before you have the conflict conversation, prepare what you will say, and what you will not say.
We will show you how and practice.

It is important to propose a specific, practical corrective action and ask the other person to commit.
We will discuss what that means and how to apply it.

Differentiate between reasons and excuses

If the other will not commit to your suggested corrective actions, you must differentiate between what you will and will not accept, as a reason. We discuss the difference between reasons and excuses.

It is vital that you know when to compromise and when not to.
If you concede too much, you will compromise your standards and lose too much.
If you don’t compromise enough, you will appear intransigent and stubborn.
We will show you where and how to draw the line.

It is not enough to use the right words; you must also use the correct voice tone and body language.

We will show you how to strike the right balance and communicate exactly the right amount of assertiveness.

It is important to finish on a positive. We will discuss the vital importance of proper praise, appreciation and thanks. We will discuss how the lack of appreciation affects people and how to inspire more motivation by the use of positive praise.

We will practice these techniques, so by the end of the day you will be confident!

You are a limited resource, but you seem to be facing an unlimited demand.

You cannot do it all today. Instead, you must manage your time, prioritise tasks, organise and delegate.
These are the themes of this morning’s programme.

It is important to recognise that you are not paid for your time.
Instead, you are paid for the achievement that you can squeeze into a given amount of time.

Time management is about getting more value from every hour invested. How can you maximise the value added per hour?

In order to get more achievement from your time and effort, it is vital that you operate according to your plan, NOT your mood.

Operate according to your plan, NOT your mood.

Procrastination is the error of putting things off, because you don’t want to do them.
We will show you how to beat the common habits of procrastination.

Time management means doing the most valuable things, in the most logical order.
We will show you how to do this.

You should evaluate tasks by two fundamental criteria: their value and their deadline pressure. We will show you how.

These two criteria allow us to differentiate between two types of day: busy days and productive days.

Have you ever had a busy, but non-productive day? A day when you work hard but achieve little.

We will analyse this problem, find its causes and eliminate them.

We will get into the details of who and what wastes your time?

• Your own bad habits
• Other people’s bad habits
• Inefficient systems

You will identify problems, and their solutions.

We will introduce you to our unique time management Prioritisation App. This will give you an excellent method to perfectly prioritise your work and make you more efficient.

There will always be events that continually conspire to take you off track. We need to determine how to resist the forces that would take you off track.

We will find out how to keep to the plan. One way is through delegation.

Learn how to delegate as much work as possible, for the right reasons only.

You can (and should) delegate as much as you can, to the right people. We will discover exactly why you should to delegate, how to delegate and why many people are afraid to delegate.

The 80-20 Pareto rule suggests that, in any situation, the majority-share of the value is contained within the minority share of the content.

Your task is to know, what is the 20% portion of the job, that contains practically all the value. Then to focus your attention onto that smaller number of things that contain most of the value.

Ignore, minimise or delegate the trivial many. We will show you how.

We will apply the 80-20 rule to handling interruptions.

In any interruption, 80% or more of what they want to say to you, you don’t want to know. But 20% of what they want to say, you need to know.

How can you gain the most value from any interruption, in the minimum time without causing offence?
We will discover the secrets of 80-20 interruptions.

We will ask you a series of time management questions, to enable you to plan how you will put these time management principles to work in your life.

At any given moment, how people feel, affects how they behave.

Generally, the rule is:

• Positive feelings (optimism, confidence and desire), inspire positive behaviours
• Negative feelings (pessimism, fear and anger), inspire negative behaviours

You need to know how to minimise the negative and maximise the positive emotions.
How to transform negative into positive, is the theme of this afternoon’s training.

Many people think their emotions are beyond their control. The truth is everyone has the capacity to change how they feel, in a heartbeat, but most don’t know how to activate the positive portion of their brain.

We will show you how to flick the switch and teach you the secrets of emotional management.

Emotions affect behaviour. Behaviour affects results. Therefore, emotions affect results.

In order to change your external reality, you first need to change your dominant emotions. You do that by taking charge of your mind and directing your thoughts towards today and a better future.

We will show you how to manage your own thoughts and how to create and sustain a positive mental attitude, especially during tough times.

The next step in your personal development is to take what you have learned about the power of positive thinking and apply it to language.

It is a fact that your words affect emotions, and if you want to change how you (and others) feel, then take back control of how you speak.

Everything you say, has an emotional consequence. Recognise that everything you say will make people either feel stronger, not stronger, or weaker.

You can use this information to help yourself and others. We will show you how.

Continuous improvement is the psychology of progress. It means, never allowing complacent self-satisfaction to take control of your mind, but rather, to be always on the lookout for the next step forward.

The principle of continuous improvement is a process based upon five words: purpose, plan, action, feedback, change.

Decide upon clear purpose, write a detailed plan, take intelligent action based upon the plan, observe the feedback results, and every day, use them to change (improve) your plan.

The five-part success formula is simple, but it’s not easy.

It is not easy, because it requires that you learn the true meaning of failure.

We will discover how success and failure are opposite sides of the same coin. If you want to succeed, you must learn how to learn from failure.

The five-part success formula is simple, but it’s not easy.

Failure is built into the success formula.

Every successful person has suffered numerous failures. Winners use their failures to update their next plan, not as justifications to abandon the attempt.

We will show you how to become so resilient, that nothing will stop you from achieving final victory.

We will discover that “Contained within every defeat, is the seed of an equivalent, or greater benefit”. We will show you how to reframe negative events and transform them into learning experiences propel you forwards.

Once you have these understandings in mind, you can use them to help your friends, family and colleagues to achieve any goal they set their mind to.

When you have assimilated these mental, linguistic, and emotional skills you will become a very valuable asset.

At the end of the course, we discuss how will you put these powerful ideas into practice.

Final Summary