Transformational Leadership Intensive - Cairns Jan/09

There's a great opportunity coming up in Australia that I want to let you know about.

The next Transformational Leadership Intensive training program will be held in Cairns, Queensland from 20-24 January 2009. In this intensive workshop you will explore the meaning, context and value of Transformational Leadership and gain skills in this practical application of the NeuroPower framework.

The program will be taught by the creator of the NeuroPower framework, the author and strategist Peter Burow. My role will be as co-facilitator for the program. I will also help participants to embed the knowledge gained in these workshops in their particular work settings with practical follow-on coaching sessions.

See the flyer here - for registration details contact me.

Overview

During five intensive days you will learn more about how to weave together the three key areas of Management, Leadership and Transformational Leadership (see diagram below) to ensure peak performance for your business or organization. Subsequent coaching ensures that you to retain this knowledge and are better able to apply it to your own real-life situations.

Management – learn the six needs that effective leaders must satisfy in order to build a stable, agile, focused, performance-oriented, informed and team-centred organization

Practical skills:

• identify why teams are not functioning effectively
• execute processes to increase trust, creativity, passion, connection, knowledge and hope within teams
• coach employees on their signature strength and help them to practically embed this knowledge in their daily work

Leadership – learn the concepts of character and integration as applied to Leadership and how life stages and psycho-emotional/spiritual development changes the individual’s motivation, focus on attention and worldview

Practical skills:

• create a coherent vision and sense of purpose that aligns people to that vision
• apply character as a leader to every management dilemma for increased business performance

Transformational Leadership – learn the role the brain’s limbic system plays in motivation, communication, attitude change, perception and decision making

Practical skills:

• communicate and negotiate with each of the limbic types
• transform the energy expressed as resistance to change into the motivation and commitment to carry out change processes

These skills will enable you as a Transformational Leader to:

• provide strategic advice regarding the specific actions required to contextualize the change and engage employees in rolling out your strategy for enhanced performance
• advise leaders on the actions, processes and sequence of messages to be employed to maximize positive employee engagement
• describe at all levels of the organization the key messages needed to dissolve resistance

COACHING increases retention of information by up to 400%

These workshops are an excellent way to learn how to apply the powerful and practical NeuroPower framework at a very reasonable time and cost investment. What’s more, the program includes post-workshop coaching to practically embed your new knowledge in your own setting and ensure that you gain maximum value for your investment.

You are probably familiar with the concept of the “learning curve” that refers to how fast we learn information. The same psychologist who described that concept also discovered the “forgetting curve” which states that we begin immediately to forget what we have learned unless we revisit the information and, ideally, apply it to embed the knowledge.

Memory experiments show that within hours most people will retain less than half of the overall material presented, and after 30 days only about 22% remains. With coaching, however, the information retention increases to as much as 88% - a four-fold increase. Clearly, coaching on practical application of knowledge has the potential to achieve tremendous results.

As a workshop participant, here's how coaching works for you:

• during the five days you will first learn the theories and skills
• before you leave on Day Five you set yourself a few practical tasks to do within a set period of time
• you then have a go at applying them with your own work and personal situation
• we have regularly-scheduled coaching conversations to close the loop on your learning, exploring what has worked well in your practice and what useful tweaks you will want to make for next time.

Overall the coaching follow-up process offers you the vital opportunity to:

review your efforts
reinforce your successes
revise your approach where things need improvement
rehearse new applications and practices in advance of doing them “for real”
reengage with the learning process and thereby
retain your knowledge as you strengthen the neural connections associated with that learning

Once again, if you are interested and wish to find out more, email me.

TM

On the Road – insights from training and travels

Hello from the city of Cairns in tropical north Queensland. I’ve completed four days of training with Unique People on the application of the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) to one’s personal development and in working with clients.

The workshop looked in-depth at how neuroscience and neurobiology offer the "hard science" behind the traditionally "soft" concepts of human behaviour and interactions. I've learned a lot about the tremendous integration of knowledge across a wide variety of disciplines to produce both hands-on consulting/coaching tools and processes for personal growth.

It’s great to be in Cairns. Up here you have Australia at its most diverse: the Reef, the Rainforest and the Red of the Outback. My new colleague and friend Joe Foster put it well I think when he said “You know, I half expect to see dinosaurs roaming through the valleys here.” There’s an ancient and primordial feel to the environment here and, as a boy who grew up in landlocked diary-farming country, I find it exotic, fascinating and – at the moment – quite grounding.

For the next several weeks I will be On the Road, and as that phrase evokes the great Beat spirit of Jack Kerouac I thought I’d share a quote of his that relates to the feeling of this place that I’ve described above:

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. (from Dharma Bums, 1957)

In the same novel Kerouac writes, “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”

What a great insight. You are the master of your own destiny, and your life is the canvas upon which you can write and paint the adventures of your choice – according to your rules, by your own lights. It begs the question: how many of us are willing to take full responsibility for our lives, accountability for our actions, and deal with the outcomes that arise from them?

It’s a skill not all of us have developed. Yet it’s absolutely vital, for there can be no greater responsibility than the one you take for your self. I’m not talking in the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” way, I mean in the “ensure your own oxygen mask is in place before you assist others” sense.

After all, you are the only vessel you have to take you through your adventure on the planet, yet so many people live as though they have no choice in what they do every day. And there are few things more debilitating than feeling like you have no choice in any situation - the result can be learned helplessness, depression, resentment and emotional lashing-out. So why continue to be unhappy, or play the victim?

I reckon we shy away from responsibility because it sounds scary and we might fail. So how about a reframe…Steven Covey suggests we think of it as our “response-ability,” which takes us back to Kerouac’s metaphor of a page full of our responses to the challenges and adventures of life.

When you live according to your own standard of success (rather than what you imagine everyone else is thinking) you will be happier and healthier in life.

OK let’s leave it there for now and I’ll post more insights and thoughts as my travels continue.

On that note, I’m in Cairns until 28 September, in London from 30 September -07 October, then in Canada (Montreal, Halifax and Toronto) until 16 October, followed by Hong Kong 18-21 October and finally Singapore 21-25 October before I'm back to Sydney again.

During the coming weeks I look forward to meeting more fellow travellers and friends, both On the Road and virtually, as an outgrowth of this blog.

In the meantime, travel well!
TM