--All participants will take part in a self-awareness activity that involves them reflecting on their own experiences in work settings that relate to today’s workshop topics.

--As a whole group, we will look at the group’s overall responses to the self-awareness exercise in order to get people focused on the topics of today’s workshop.

Model for Opening Up to New Experiences: Barriers vs. Motivators

Here we will present a model for opening up to new experiences, which contrasts the barriers that lead to communication breakdowns with the opportunity presented by motivators that can help participants open up to new experiences with others. We will use this model to help us better understand social and interpersonal relations, especially with regard to leadership.

Exercise

We will participate in an exercise that will allow individuals to better understand how opening up to new experiences can shatter a wide range of societal barriers based on stereotyping, ethnocentrism, sexism, racism and other sociopathic patterns of social behavior.

Group Discussion

Model: Six Communication Stumbling Blocks & How to Handle Them

We will discuss six key stumbling blocks in communications in diverse work environments and solutions for handling them.

Video Clip-- “Crossed Signals”

We will show a short video clip that involves a communication stumbling block at work and we again will ask participants to divide into two or three groups to identify the stumbling blocks they see and steps to resolve them.

Role Plays

We will use several role-plays that we will use to learn about how communication stumbling blocks arise in everyday work life. We will process and discuss these role-plays in small groups.

Group Discussion

Model: Managing Boundaries

We will present participants with a model for understanding “boundary management” in the workplace. In order to effectively prevent exclusion of certain team members, everyone needs to be conscious of the need to manage boundaries.

Video Clip-- “Boundaries”

We will show a short video clip involving a work situation where someone has “crossed the boundaries” of another person unintentionally and ask participants to break into small groups to identify what boundaries were crossed.

Role Play

Based in part on the discussions we had together during my interview, I will design a role-play that we can use to illustrate the concepts of boundary maintenance and mutual respect.

Group Discussion

Model: Positive Approaches to Resolving Strong Emotional Encounters

We will present a three-step model for defusing emotional encounters at work in order to reach team goals.

Video Clip: “Strong Emotions”

We will present a short video clip that demonstrates a situation involving an emotional encounter at work and we will ask the group to again divide into two or three groups to problem solve using the model we presented on handling such situations.

Group Discussion

We will discuss the topic of self-management of anger and negative emotions at work and provide some suggestions for handling these feelings effectively and professionally. We will refer to the literature on emotional intelligence.

Video Clip: “Emotional Intelligence”

We will view and discuss segments of a video on emotional intelligence in order to deepen our skills in self-management.

We will ask each participant to choose an issue that they are currently facing in their everyday work life from either Opening Up to New Experiences, Managing Boundaries, Handling Communication Stumbling Blocks or Handling Strong Emotions, and outline steps they will take for self-improvement.

We will ask several volunteers to share their action plans with the group.

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