Our relationship with you is important to us. We are both dedicated professionals committed to providing quality education, training and consulting for health care professionals and to the larger systems in which they work. We believe that all people are valuable and unique and deserve to be treated with dignity, understanding and kindness. We also believe that given the tools and skills that are targeted towards their specific needs and goals, people can become better resourced to manage demands in their personal and professional lives and explore for meaningfulness in ways that are most authentic to them. In this sense, we strive to support the uniqueness of each individual’s life, acknowledging that most professionals have the capacity and the wisdom to make decisions that are aligned with their deepest hopes and values as they develop the internal resources to make choices that honor and balance the (often) competing commitments of their own (self) needs, the needs of significant others in their lives, and the seemingly inexorable demands created by the context of their profession. We believe that most choices in life relate to honoring and learning how to manage the competing commitments between the needs of self, other and context. There are publications related to this in the publications page of this website. (See Balance, Whole Brain Leadership, as well as the section on Congruence in our book, Discovering Your Mindful Heart)
We customize our education and training to the distinctiveness that exists in all individuals and in all organizations that make them unique and special. For individuals, we emphasize development of self-awareness, and courage to be truly vulnerable (which is a crucial component of any self -growth) with genuine loving compassion for one’s own imperfections. This leads to cultivating an ability to recognize weaknesses or limitations as manifestations of your strengths being overdone or overused and to seeing yourself as a whole—neither good nor bad, but a complete and complex human who is unique—there is no one else on Earth exactly like you nor anyone who can offer your irreplaceable constellation of gifts and talents. When educating partners (spouses or significant others) we try to help them establish a nonjudging, noncritical relationship in which they each feel genuinely soothed and safe and which can result in them feeling seen, heard, understood and valued. We try to function as guides to help partners stay connected to their dreams and yearnings.
An ultimate outcome of this is the development of both resilience (the ability to bounce back from an event that has already happened) and prosilience (the ability to learn from past experiences and develop the resources for becoming better at managing subsequent events when they present in the future).
Ironically, but not surprisingly, the same skills that help individuals manage their relationships with themselves and with important others translate to the skills of resonant and successful leadership in the highly demanding world of healthcare. At the heart of this work is our understanding that all organizations are comprised of people—people who bring a variety of talents, skills, experiences and desires. Organizations typically recognize that their greatest strength lies in their personnel, yet they struggle with how to motivate and inspire the people in the organization and how to link their differentiated parts into a unique and energized whole. Often, the result is a series of rigid protocols and rules that are intended to govern behavior and productivity, but that fail to promote trust or connect to the creative spirit that exists in the professional workforce.
The end product is often burnout, mediocrity and inability to manage challenges, often resulting in errors, conflict and disengagement (either emotionally, spiritually or physically—people just “leave” in whatever way they can). In extreme circumstances, inadequate or flawed resources combined with unrealistic demands or expectations for perfect performance, puts healthcare professionals at enormous risk of feeling deficient or even complicit in delivering suboptimal care, which results in moral injury. In these instances, the healthcare professional may experience guilt or shame, as if they were the perpetrator of a bad outcome. This failure of organizations, or their leaders, to cultivate a culture of safety and belonging by aligning with and attuning to their workforce can have a devastating impact on personal well-being that will permeate all aspects of the professional’s life—both at home and at work.
We see ourselves as educators who are most concerned with what each individual and team needs to succeed. While this may include tools and techniques to help support some elements of managing a current challenge, we also emphasize trying to help people learn how to manage a variety of situations—not just the one that is currently presenting—by having the internalized resources to manage from the inside, out. This kind of change doesn’t have an end point—it is a continuous journey of learning, struggling, occasionally failing, trying and learning some more. It is lifelong and results in greater capacity to lead, to build and maintain highly resonant teams, to manage conflict, and to promote choices that support greater balance in life.
Integrated Life Skills is not a recipe for communication, conflict management, teamwork or work life balance. Rather, it is designed to teach research-based and validated skills for integration that are more organic (individualized and internalized) and that result in unflinching self-awareness (for individual team members and leaders) and options for self-management, paving the pathway for growth potential. We will teach skills for exploring to understand the perspectives of others with empathic openness to what those perspectives mean, to generate awareness, acceptance and even welcoming of differences that creates a more expansive map for leaders to create a culture of belonging, safety and innovation.