services

1. Happiness: What it is, isn't and how it can be boosted Clinical Application of Positive Psychology focused on encountering symptoms through character strengths, positive emotions and pursuit of meaning.
2. Resilience: Learning strength based cognitive and emotional skills to build ability to preserve and adapt
3. Post-traumatic Growth: Surviving and Growing in the face of Adversity
4. Cognitive-behaviour Therapy for Depression and Anxiety
5. Relaxation Training
6. Cultural Competence in health care and educational settings
7. Comprehensive Psycho-educational Assessment including assessment for Giftedness
8. Positive Education
9. Personality Assessment
10. Harness the Creative Potential through Flow Training (a state of deep immersion which utilizes your strengths to facilitate creativity)
11. Ontario Human Rights Commission, on reasonable creed based accommodations in healthcare and educational settings, January 2012
12. Keynote address at Asian Applied Positive Psychology Conference, Hong Kong, January, 2012
13. Positive Psychotherapy Workshop, Hong Kong, January, 2012
14. Pakistan Medical Association & Janum network, Post-traumatic Growth, Karachi, Pakistan, January, 2012
    

Positive Psychotherapy: Concepts and Applications
Positive Psychology is the scientific study of what goes right in lie, from birth to death and all stops in between. It is a new approach within psychology that takes seriously as subject matter those things that make life worth living. Positive psychotherapy (PPT) is a therapeutic endeavour within positive psychology to broaden the scope of traditional psychotherapy. Everyone’s life has peaks and valleys, and PPT does not deny the valleys. Its signature premise is more nuanced: what is good about life is as genuine as what is bad and therefore deserves equal attention within the therapeutic context.

This workshop is for wide variety of professionals who are interested in applying and integrating PPT concepts and exercises in their professional work. Parsing happiness in three distinct pathways, this workshop will present that building positive emotions, strengths and meaning, in addition to undoing symptoms, is efficacious in the treatment of psychopathology. Case examples, in-session exercises and video clips will be used to help participants achieve following goals:

1. Comprehend theoretical foundations of PPT that all clients have an inherent capacity for growth, fulfillment, and happiness, and that promotion of positive resources of clients should be equally important in therapy as undoing of symptoms.
   
   
2. Learn that positive emotions, strengths and meaning could serve client best not when life is easy but when life is difficult. Build skills and specific strategies which cultivate positive emotions, strengths and meaning, in undoing symptoms. Understand content and process of building sustainable and authentic happiness of clients and learn to harness negative energy to manage and undo symptoms. Learn to draw attention of clients to positives without overlooking negative states and characteristics and without promoting Pollyannaish notions of mere feel-good therapy.

Resilience is the ability to persevere and adapt when things go awry. Although many things in life are uncertain, one thing is for sure, life includes many adversities. There are inevitable daily hassles; Work dumped on your desk at 4:45 pm, children who need to in different places at the same time, disagreements with your partner, still some major ones: health issues, lost job, failed relationship, even greater traumas involving loss of loved ones. Resilience is not all-or-none phenomenon, most of us are resilient in one way or the other, yet you will need more resilience; if you feel stressed more often, feel overwhelmed especially when you face a challenging situation, when work requires doing a lot, doing quickly and also perfectly, when you lose job or when your significant relationship falters? or when you notice the health of your aging parents is beginning to fade? When you find yourself pre-occupied with problems, when it is difficult for you to relax even during vacation, You need resilience!

Sorting through the conventional wisdom and scientific insights, this course presents strengths as marker and maker of resilience. During three one day sessions, monthly, participants will learn and apply ways of encountering problems and challenges by using their strengths, in order to boost their resilience. While fully acknowledging the existence and experience of human suffering, selfishness, dysfunctional family systems, and ineffective institutions, this training presents systematic interventions to enhance strengths to make life happier, more engaging and more meaningful.

Sample Topics

1. Spotting your character strengths and those you work with!
2. Using character Strengths to build resilience
3. More engagement by using one’s signature strengths
4. Using strengths for conflict resolution and stress management
5. Fostering resilience by cultivating Positive Emotions
6. Specific strengths: savouring, gratitude (vs. grudge), forgiveness, relaxation & slowness...etc for relaxed work habits
7. Positive Relationships
8. Positive Communications
9. Pursing meaning at work by using one’s signature strengths

Cultural Competence
In an exceedingly pluralistic society, cultural blindness may adversely impact the quality of educational and mental health care services, which inherently involve close interaction with individuals from a multitude of cultural backgrounds. The conflicts, if unarticulated and unresolved, may produce barriers of cultural mistrust, suspiciousness and alienation among service providers and service users. Articulating a commitment to both reasonable accommodations of creed-based values and social justice, this training, through brief case vignettes, attempts to engage service providers in a process of self-reflection to identify potentially creed-based biased attitudes and behaviors. Building further on this process, this training offers a number of strength-based creative problem solving strategies which may help service providers to strike a balance between reasonable accommodations of cultural based values and values espoused in Human Right Codes.

1. Clinical Psychology Department, Western Ontario University, Psychology Department, London, Ontario, December, 2011
2. Long Island Jewish Medical Centre, North Shore University Hospital, Psychiatry Division - November, 2011
3. Strength Based Resilience Training for Human Rights Commission Committee of Toronto District School Board - September - November, 2011.
4. Hwa Chong Institute, Singapore (in Philadelphia, USA)
5. University of Paris, France in association with Association francaise et francophone de psychologie positive
6. MaMaster University, Ontario
7. Manor Community College, Rochester, NY, USA
8. Bloorview Rehabilitation, Toronto
9. Continuing Education Workshop at American Psychological Association Convention, 2011, Washington
10. International Positive Psychology Association World Congress, Philadelphia, 2011
11. Wellington College, London, UK, July 2010
12. Geelong Grammar School, Victoria, Australia, 2008 & 2009
13. Royal St. George School, Toronto, Ontario
14. Ontario Correctional Institute, Brampton, Ontario
15. William Osler Health Centre, Brampton, Ontario