Slow Down & Listen There just isn't enough time to get it all done. When we are pressed for time, there is a tendency to talk but not listen. Listening is a skill that develops by coupling effective communication techniques with deliberate practice. But most people have never learned the techniques, and the only thing they practice is poor listening habits. Work-life balance involves giving the right share of attention to both work and life goals. It also involves slowing down and listening. The Power of Listening When you really listen to people it's amazing what can happen. Start practicing it at home with your partner, with your children, with your friends and co-workers. Effective listening forms a connection that builds relationships, strengthens teamwork and helps you to resolve conflict. It's a powerful skill. Most People Don't Really Listen Sadly, when they should be listening, most people are actually thinking about what they are going to say next. Or else they are multi-tasking - thinking about the next meeting or deadline. A failure to listen is a failure to communicate. It creates problems for teams, families, projects and anyone involved. Reflective Listening: Moving Toward Positive Change Because listening is such a valuable skill in building teamwork and resolving conflict, we often include a listening skill development module in our work-life balance workshops. We teach a technique called reflective listening. In reflective listening, you make a decision to listen. When someone else is speaking, you put aside all the things you want to convey to them, and focus 100% of your attention on what that person is saying. After they speak, you reflect on what they have said, the meaning they are trying to convey and what you believe is their intent. You respond with questions or statements to convey what you understand their meaning to be. The other person may give you further clarification or confirm that you are spot-on with your understanding. When practiced correctly, the reflective listening process brings real understanding to conversations, and in the process builds mutual trust and respect. Reflective Listening at Work In the workplace, reflective listening can help you to resolve conflict and establish better working relationships with your co-workers. It serves to neutralize personality conflicts and helps you to get on the same wavelength with the difficult people you tend to have problems communicating with. It also reduces errors due to miscommunication. Reflective Listening at Home Couples and family members are often guilty of not really listening to each other. Work-life balance is about establishing a healthy ecology at home and in personal relationships. Reflective listening is a powerful technique that will help you in this process better than just about any other technique you can practice. When you really listen to someone, you send the message that you are fully present and you care about what's happening in their inner world. Learning & Practicing Reflective Listening If you're too busy to listen, you can use some work-life balance. Let us include a training module on reflective listening in your team's work-life balance workshop. We include role-plays to make sure everyone understands how to do it. And after that, practice makes perfect: every time you're in a conversation with someone else, instead of reinforcing old behavior, you can practice a new skill that will give you the power to transform your relationships.

Help Your Team Achieve Greater Work-Life Balance

When the members of a team have all achieved the right balance between work and their own lives, you can see it in the team's performance. If your team members are stressed out, communicating poorly, not resolving conflicts or prone to complaining, the solution may be a work-life balance workshop for the team. There is no better way to get everyone to step back from those daily conflicts and problems and look at the bigger picture of how they are managing their lives.

Designing a Work-Life Balance Workshop for Your Team

If you are interested in a work-life balance workshop for your team, we start with a free telephone consultation. Contact us to set up an appointment and Roger Reece will ask you questions about your team, your organization, your objectives for the workshop and the outcomes you would like to see as a result of the program. Roger will discuss with you the various elements that can be included in a workshop for your team. After the call we will send you a detailed outline and agenda for a workshop that fits your needs.

Elements of your workshop package may include assessments, personal and business goal development, experiential learning and team-building activities, group discussions, and modules for interactive training. Training modules can include a wide range of topics, such as interpersonal communication and listening skills, relationship development, time and stress management, emotional intelligence, conflict management, exercise and diet programs, and family finance management. Each participant develops a plan for achieving work-life balance, and tools are provided for making it work.

Getting Team Members to Assess Their Work-Life Balance

Everyone has habits that drive their behaviors. It's easy to focus narrowly on how we are doing the task at hand and miss the big picture:

• How well is my life working?
• Do I have the right goals in place for all aspects of my life?
• How am I doing in meeting each of those goals?
• When time is short, what parts of my life are sacrificed or put on hold?
• How are my stress levels?
• Are my career, family, relationships, finances and personal life where I want them to be?

In our work-life balance seminars and workshops, we help your team members to honestly answer these questions. Then we guide them through the process of developing a plan for achieving balance.

Work-Life Balance: Living According to Your Values

Our work-life balance workshops make people think about their lives - in terms of the quality of their experience and whether what they are accomplishing is in line with their goals. We start with a values assessment: What are your values and how would you rank them in order of importance? How are your values affecting your life choices? How can you bring your life more into alignment with your values?

Your values should be the driving force behind your life choices and goals, but it's easy for other drivers to enter into the picture and throw you off-balance. Workshop participants engage in exercises and discussions that help them to understand how to move towards greater levels of congruence with their values.

Work-Life Balance: A Vision for Success

Just as successful organizations need a vision for future success, individuals need a vision for a successful future. Most people have a vague idea of how they would like their future to look, but often it isn't clear, balanced or realistic. During our work-life balance training sessions, we emphasize the need for a clear life-vision, and each participant writes a vision statement that covers career, family, finances and other dimensions of life.

Work-life balance is about engaging in activities and behaviors that will achieve success. And since success means different things to different people, the process of defining values and then translating that into a detailed vision statement lays the groundwork for defining what success really means for the individual.

Work-Life Balance: Mission, Strategy & Goals

The next step in building a framework for work-life balance is to define a mission, the strategy for achieving it, and the specific goals that, when achieved, will accomplish the mission. During the workshop, each participant writes a life-mission statement, and works from that to define a balanced strategy for achieving their mission. Goals can then be formulated to cover every dimension of the individual's life.

The experience of building this framework is so powerful because it brings each participant face-to-face with the limitations of time and resources as well as the reality of the need for life management. Workshop participants receive valuable training in the process of setting realistic goals, and then measuring progress and achieving those goals.

Work-Life Balance Requires Skills & Tools

Once a full set of balanced goals is developed, covering all dimensions of life, the real balancing act begins: Which goals need attention? What kind of attention is needed? In our work-life balance seminars and workshops, we focus on building important skills, and on providing tools for building and applying those skills toward achieving work-life goals.

Time Management Skills &Tools

Time is a limited resource, and in a way, work-life balance is all about time management: prioritizing goals, managing priorities and balancing time spent on work-life activities in a balanced fashion. Our workshops help participants to be effective time managers by improving their time management and organizational skills both at work and in their personal lives. We also provide tools for keeping track of what needs to be done, for balancing time allocation, and for eliminating the procrastination habit and staying organized. For more information, please visit our Time Management Workshops website at www.TimeManagementWorkshops.com.

Stress Management Skills & Tools

The effects of chronic stress can not only unbalance your life, but can also have severe negative effects on your health and well-being. In our work-life balance workshops, we provide training in stress-prevention and stress management, as well as tools for diagnosing and managing stress. We teach participants how to manage the internal and external sources of stress at work and at home. The goal is not to eliminate all stress, because stress is a part of life; the real goal is to learn how to personally stay in tune with stress levels and to avoid behaviors that create unnecessary stress (either for yourself or for the people you live and work with). For more information, please visit our Stress Management Training Workshops website at www.StressManagementTrainingWorkshops.com.

Interpersonal & Intrapersonal Skills & Tools

Interpersonal skills are our communication, relationship and social abilities. Intrapersonal skills are about how we think, how we react to new situations and our self-awareness. The more we can develop in both these sets of skills, the more effective we will be at keeping our lives in balance. We always include training in interpersonal and intrapersonal skills in our work-life balance workshops, as well as tools for building and enhancing these skills. Please visit our Interpersonal Communication Workshops website at www.InterpersonalCommunicationWorkshops.com for more information.

We also recommend including DISC Behavioral Style Assessments as part of the workshop for your team. Prior to the workshop, each participant completes an online survey and receives a 20-page DISC assessment outlining her/his behavioral style. The assessments are used during the workshop as a training tool for building interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, providing participants with insights into their own behaviors as well as the behaviors of their co-workers, family members and friends. The assessments are very accurate in illuminating participants' own behaviors, and they are also effective in helping individuals and teams to build better relationships, by mapping out how the different behavioral styles interact and clash with one another. It is usually quite difficult to see the imbalances in your own perception and behaviors; but these DISC assessments show an objective view of behavioral habits that helps each person discover the ways in which they may be contributing to the imbalances in their lives. These assessments are powerful tools to help everyone increase their own interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. For more information, please visit our DISC Training Workshops website at www.DISCtrainingWorkshops.com.

An individual's emotional-intelligence EQ is a major factor in work-life balance. Low-EQ individuals often have so much unnecessary internal and external drama in their lives that they are continually in a state of emotional imbalance. Emotional intelligence is the essence of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, and focuses on four key areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. We frequently include one or more training modules on emotional intelligence in our work-life balance workshops to give participants a practical framework for understanding and improving their emotional intelligence EQ. Visit our Emotional Intelligence Workshops website at www.EmotionalIntelligenceWorkshops.com for more information.

Many families suffer from continual emotional upheaval about work, parenting, relationships, finances, and disagreements on every level; teams at work often mirror the behaviors of a family unit in this way. We often include training in conflict management in our work-life balance workshops: we help participants to build their skills in effectively managing conflict at work, at home and in all areas of life, with tools and techniques that really work. Please visit our Conflict Management Workshops website at www.ConflictManagementWorkshops.com for more information.

Practical Life Management Skills & Tools

Work-life balance includes getting personal / family finances together. If you are interested, we can include a module on personal & family budgeting and financial planning as a part of your team's work-life balance workshop. We provide budgeting and financial-planning tools and resources, as well as practical exercises that will get participants refocused on building a sound financial future.

Many people don't think about health until they lose it. Work-life balance also means exercising, eating right, staying fit, getting the right amount of rest and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. We can also include a module on health and fitness in your team's workshop. We provide practical tools for nutrition, dieting and exercising, and for breaking tough habits like smoking.

Team Building Activities

One or more fun and challenging team building activities adds invaluable experiential learning opportunities to your team's work-life balance workshop. Each activity is designed to energize the group while creatively highlighting the importance of balance. After each activity, Roger Reece conducts a discussion and debrief, drawing parallels between the experience of the activity and the dilemma of balancing work and life. Each activity takes approximately one hour, including debrief, and is a profound learning experience. For more information about our team building activities, please visit our Team Building Workshops website at www.TeamBuildingWorkshops.com.

Fun & Entertainment with Buford P. Fuddwhacker

Our work-life balance seminars and workshops are always fun and engaging. And if you want to add an extra measure of fun to your team's workshop, just invite Roger Reece's alter-ego, Buford P. Fuddwhacker, to come along as a "guest speaker" for the workshop. Buford is an over-the-top motivational speaker, inventor and country philosopher who will rock your team with music, dancing, audience participation and good-old-fashioned fun. Buford speaks on motivational topics such as positive attitude, managing stress and celebrating life. He turns the audience into a kazoo band, recruits "volunteers" to be Elvis impersonators, and stages his own version of American Idol. When Buford enters the room, there are no spectators - everyone gets involved in the fun. Laughter is an essential component of work-life balance, and Buford teaches team members how to not take themselves too seriously. For more information about Buford Fuddwhacker, visit our Fun Motivational Keynote Speaker website at www.FunMotivationalKeynoteSpeaker.com.

A Training Workshop or a Retreat

Your team's work-life balance workshop can be a stand-alone training event held at your facility or an offsite conference center or hotel; or, if you are planning a retreat, strategic-planning meeting, regional or national business meeting or other event, we can integrate a work-life balance workshop into your program. We can do a short two-hour program or a full day or more of training. We will work with you to help you plan the right program for your team.

Helping Your Team Members Make Work & Life a Fulfilling Experience

Scheduling this workshop for your team will help each team-member make their work and life a balanced and fulfilling experience. Your team-members have invested their time and energy in your organization - invest in their success. Contact us today to get the planning process started. This workshop will have far-reaching positive impact on the productivity of your team, as well on their lives and the lives of their family members. Show your team that you really care about their success.