Who can benefit from workshops?
You! Everybody! But particularly people working in a facilitative manner with other human beings under stressful circumstances or helping them to cope with stressful circumstance, amongst them: solicitors, doctors, nurses, Counsellors, police officers, teachers, life coaches, dentists, advice workers, support workers, and many others.
Many of the above people may need to take part in 2 or 3 of these one-day workshops.
Parents and carers: Understanding your own children and their emotional responses is often a complex and stress filled job. Two of these days are likely to provide a very useful foundation to your understanding of your child - if you get hooked on this then you may want to undertake the next one, but you will be well enough equipped to have plenty of new insights into the emotions driving your child's behaviour.
One of my colleagues told me the following little anecdote about how he very successfully managed an aspect of his son's worrying behaviour. It illustrates the point exactly.
His son was a twin and almost begged his brother to be able to sleep in the same room. The brother recognised this "desperation" and began to use it to his advantage, requiring certain favours from his brother in exchange for a night's sleep. Having thought carefully about the situation my colleague realised that this was about a deep fear. He remembered that at about the age of 6 this twin had sleep-walked out of the house and, on the other side of a Yale lock, he was unable to get back into the house. The little boy had spent a very frightening night outside in the garden, unable to rouse anybody to let him back into the house.
His fear, my colleague construed, was that the same thing would happen again, but that his brother would look out for him and raise the alarm if he was missing. So he reckoned a little low-key suggestion might help. He planned a simple sentence which he would just "shove into the conversation" about the differences in Yale locks and the mortice locks in the house that they now lived in, with no reference to his son's fear. So, on the way to rugby one Sunday morning the opportunity to simply point out the differences between yale locks and mortice locks was taken, i.e that you have to lock the latter with the key from the outside, so you cannot get locked outside by accident. And that was it! His son moved out that night and his dependency on his brother decreased enormously. Fear recognised, dealt with sensitively, in this case obliquely, respecting the teenager's need to "be a man" and not show fear.
What do women want? Books have been written about this and films have been made! Is anybody really any the wiser because of them? Well, yes, perhaps a little. But clearly one difficulty for many men is that whereas they prize and value emotional constancy (I hoped she wouldn't change, but she did!) women tend to permit themselves much greater emotional swings, which men simply cannot follow, by which I mean understand. Emotional Insights this will help a lot in this area! And of course women ("I wanted him to change, and he didn't!") bump into the opposite reaction, with equal and voiced frustration. A couple ways of looking at these basic emotions will help people to understand why they bump into one anothers difficulties.