Masterclasses

Monday 1 March

Optimising Your Resilience & Performance
with Lauren Parsons

Wednesday 3 March

Practical Ways to Promote and Manage Mental Health at Work
with Dr Nigel George

ABOUT YOUR MASTERCLASS

Feeling stressed or overwhelmed with your workload? Have team members who aren’t coping or could work more effectively? Concerned about burnout for yourself or your team?

This masterclass will help you boost resilience, reduce stress, super-charge your productivity and improve performance. You’ll discover how to create a positive culture where everyone achieves more every day, while maintaining balance to keep it up over the long-haul.

With the current rate of change, impact of technology and level of connectivity we now experience, it can be difficult to switch off or to prioritise so many competing demands. If you want to lead your team to a thriving culture that prioritises mental wellbeing and see them flourish, this session is for you.

ABOUT YOUR FACILITATOR, LAUREN PARSONS

Lauren is an award-winning Wellbeing Specialist who believes that everyone deserves to thrive. She is passionate about equipping and inspiring people to truly boost their health and happiness. With over 20 years’ experience in the health and wellbeing profession she is a sought after speaker, coach and consultant.

Described as inspiring and life-changing, Lauren is a dynamic and highly-engaging presenter, and master story-teller who will have you laughing, moving and learning in a memorable way. You will leave Lauren’s session feeling uplifted and empowered to create positive change, today!

TEDx speaker, author of real food less fuss, founder of the Snack on Exercise movement and host of the Thrive TV Show. Lauren helps busy people re-discover how to feel vibrant, confident and energised.

Based in the Manawatu, New Zealand, where she lives with her husband and three children, she can often be found hosting dinner parties, spending time outdoors or playing board games. Lauren travels regularly to speak at conferences or in-house, and specialises in helping organisations create a high-energy, peak-performance team culture, which enables people to thrive.

FEEDBACK

“The team absolutely loved your session. Speaking with some of the manager’s today there has already been positive activity in our branches!! Your session has provided practical and easy steps to exercise and this is going to make a big difference for my team.” – Andrew Daubney, Regional Manager, ANZ

“Your session was fantastic! I thoroughly enjoyed the engagement of all the staff, including the many measurable smiles!! It was all the energy, the influential audience grabbers, but also the positivity and the vibe that engaged everyone.” – Major Glen Whitton, NZ Defence Force

“Lauren’s session was inspiring and uplifting and came at a time when employees needed to be re-energized. Her genuine and authentic approach, being a working parent, was appreciated and extremely well received by our staff.” – Dominque Martel, HR Manager, Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Canada

“I can HIGHLY recommend Lauren, she is a fabulous presenter with passion, zest, humour and professionalism – she is a truly transformational person who will affect your world in a profoundly positive way! She is MUST see and leader in her field.” – Angela Cossey, Intimo International

“Such an awesome, knowledgeable and passionate speaker – a great inspiration!” – Dan Wheeler, Owner of Freedom Print

“Lauren manages through enthusiasm and inclusion to inspire all sorts of people to have a go at making changes that they know very well they need to make but don’t know where to start. She encourages that first step breakthrough”. – Stewart Harrex, Fitzherbert Rowe Lawyers, New Zealand

“Lauren ensured there was connection from the start with her powerful stories.” – Jane Warnock, Educational Leader, Tui Early Learners

“Lauren Parsons shined bright as a keynote speaker at FMI’s PD Week, engaging our delegates with an endless supply of energy that had them up and moving around with a smile on their faces. It was a joy to work with Lauren”. – Chris Egan, CEO, Financial Management Institute of Canada

MASTERCLASS PROGRAM

8.30am Registration and coffee

9.00am Session One: Boosting Your Resilience and Emotional Intelligence

In the current climate, it’s more important than ever to remain resilient and be able to respond in a calm, confident and courageous manner.

This session will focus on the fundamentals of boosting resilience to take a proactive approach to improving health and wellbeing. Great leaders have mastered great self-leadership and demonstrate these skills for their team. Be equipped to respond rather than react and ensure you last the distance, even when facing change and uncertainty.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to boost your resilience so you can respond rather than react
• The fundamentals to ensure you remain in peak physical condition to underpin your ability to perform
• How to maintain a resilient mindset and avoid negative thinking traps
• A revolutionary way to plan and structure your day for maximum energy, vitality and productivity
• Daily practises that will ensure you stay calm, balanced and in control

10.30am Morning tea

10.50am Session Two: Dealing with Stress and Anxiety in Uncertain Times

Rapid change, uncertainty and radically changed working conditions are creating fear, stress and anxiety for staff. Now more than ever, leaders need to equip themselves and their teams with practical strategies to switch out of the harmful fight or flight mode and be able to respond positively to the challenges ahead.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• The different types of stress and how to capitalise on eustress (good stress)
• How the fight or flight response affects your physiology and psychology
• Why you need to oscillate and how to do that
• The most effective way to trigger your body’s relaxation response
• Simple effective strategies to manage and prevent stress taking over

12.30pm Lunch

1.30pm Session Three: Super-Charge Your Productivity

This session will help you carve a pathway through the overwhelm and show you how to get the most important things done each and every day. You’ll massively boost your effectiveness and remain cool calm and collected, even on the busiest of days.

• Discover the biggest mistake that makes you, and your staff, lose hours every week (and how to overcome it)
• How clarity around what is truly important will transform your decision making ability
• Exactly how to overcome the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ and get the right things done
• Learn the worst way to start your day and what to do instead
• Discover how to ‘win the day’ from the moment you wake and the top morning routines successful people use to ensure a magnificent day
• How and why to carve out time for yourself as a leader to increase your resilience
• The critical mindset shift to ensure you take regular time to recharge and avoid burnout

3.00pm Afternoon tea

3.20pm Session Four: What Technology is Doing to People – and What to Do About It

Technology affects the way that we think, move, work and play. Even before the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media and technology have taken their toll on staff wellbeing as people remain constantly connected, yet socially disconnected, overloaded with information, easily distracted and lacking in movement and restorative sleep. This session will help you identify changes to foster a highly engaged, positive, close-knit team who can perform at their peak.

You’ll discover:

• The serious negative impacts of technology on relationships, wellbeing and productivity
• Why technology is a two-edge sword and how to wield it effectively
• How to wrangle technology and set boundaries that optimise wellbeing and performance
• Ways to avoid information overload and regain control
• Practical ways to ensure your team stay resilient, connected and engaged during challenging times

5.00pm Session close

The masterclass will be conducted using a combination of presentation material and group exercises; maximising your learning potential. Please note that the masterclass content will be tailored to participants’ individual needs so the length of each session may vary. Refreshments will be served at appropriate times, including morning and afternoon teas and lunch.

ABOUT YOUR MASTERCLASS

Psychologically safe and healthy workplaces enhance people’s mental wellbeing and support productivity and performance. Dr Nigel George is part of Umbrella’s team of clinical psychologists – experts in mental health and mental illness – they translate this knowledge into the workplace to increase understanding and confidence in effectively supporting people’s mental wellbeing. Helping people and organisations to thrive is their passion.

Dr Nigel George is a clinical psychologist with over 30 years experience and previously Director of the University of Auckland’s Psychology Clinic.  In this workshop you will be introduced how to:

• Develop an approach to mental health that is empowering and proactive rather than stigmatising and reactive
• Better understand mental health and mental illness
• Understand your responsibilities as employers under health and safety requirements
• Increase your ability to identify how stress and mental illness may present in your team
• Hold safe and effective conversations about mental health at work
• promote and protect mental wellbeing at work

This bespoke workshop will be tailored and updated to address the mental health challenges that New Zealand businesses and employees are facing in this evolving climate.

ABOUT YOUR FACILITATOR, DR NIGEL GEORGE

Nigel George brings more than 30 years’ experience working in a wide variety of clinical environments, leadership of large clinical teams through times of change, and a passion for evidence-based education to his interest in how people “do things well”.

“So much of clinical psychology is about unwellness, psychosis, but my doctorate looked at successful ageing. So, I like to focus on wellness – on what we do that’s right. I can focus on how we can do things better, to be better in our lives and so be better at our work.”

Nigel started his health career as a general nurse more than 30 years ago, retraining first as a psychiatric nurse before studying psychology and training in London as a clinical psychologist. He was Director of the University of Auckland’s Psychology Clinic, where he trained and coached future clinical psychologists. He now uses that high-level clinical and educational experience to facilitate various wellness workshops.

“People so often have to be unwell before they receive good, research-based mental health information. It’s great to see people come to our workshops so engaged and ready to learn ways they can support themselves and other people. It’s exciting to be part of something so positive.”

Nigel is also impressed with how engaged businesses are in supporting their teams, and how prepared they are to change how they operate to help their people. “Work used to be a place we came to toil, make money and go home. Now the workplace is less separate from home, and people expect to bring their whole selves to work. Our workshops support that.”

Nigel says he loves facilitating workshops because, far beyond just delivering information, it’s about enabling change. And he understands change, having led large clinical teams through significant change processes in previous roles.