Expertise
The workshop is for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, students in psychology and others involved in mental health care and interested in applying positive psychology techniques in their work.
POSITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY SESSION-BY-SESSION PLANNING. READ MORE
Workshop Objectives:
- Understand theoretical assumptions of PPT that clients have inherent capacity to explore and deploy their strengths towards growth and fulfilment and that when this capacity is blocked, psychopathology results.
- Understand that strengths based therapeutic approaches such as PPT, are empirically related with well-being and that using positive resources (positive emotions, character strengths, meaning) decrease psychological problems and increases well-being.
- Understand that therapy is not only about repairing or fixing weakness; such an approach may manage symptoms but may not necessarily enhance well-being, which needs to be addressed explicitly.
- Learn practical strategies of identifying and using strengths, in conjunction with management of symptoms, as a smarter and efficient therapeutic approach.
- Learn to explore the differential efficacy of various treatments, because effectiveness of psychotherapy should not be assessed only through elimination of negatives but also through cultivation of strengths.
- Learn that a strength based approach is much more attractive for a multicultural clientele and can help to destigmatize concepts about mental health in non-White cultures.
- Learn nuanced but wholeness of clients, such as how their positives and negatives interact with their personality disposition as well as with the cultural and environmental factors.
Positive Psychotherapy: Learn a strength-based, empirically validated therapeutic approach which integrates symptoms and strengths to overcome psychological distress.
Flow: Learn skills to harness your creative potential by cultivating flow–a deep state of immersion marked by intense concentration, a lost sense of time, and by being “one” with the experience.
Flourish: Learn the skills and habits to grow intellectually, socially and emotionally and to translate this growth into action, habit and purpose. This workshop is based on Seligman’s PERMA theory of well-being (Flourish, 2011) including Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning & Accomplishment (PERMA) .
Strength-based Resilience (SBR): a manualized Positive Psychology training for educators in school and post-secondary settings.
Post-traumatic Growth: A workshop about surviving & thriving in the face of adversity.
Cognitive-behaviour Therapy for Depression and Anxiety: Learn evidence based cognitive-behavioural skills to overcome symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Relaxation Training: Learn mindfulness and hatha yoga exercises towards therapeutic benefits .
Psycho-educational Assessment: Cognitive & educational assessment of children, adolescents and adults.
Dynamic Strengths Assessment: Comprehensive personality assessment approach that helps to identify the nuances of weaknesses and incorporates strengths from a number of perspectives; learn a calibrated approach to use signature strengths towards well-being.
Cultural Competence in Mental Health & Educational Settings: 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. Discussing both reasonable cultural and ethos of social justice, this training, through brief case vignettes, attempts to engage service providers in a process of self-reflection to identify potential implicit biases. Building further on this process, this workshop offers a number of strength-based creative problem solving strategies that may help service providers to strike a balance between reasonable cultural accommodations of and values espoused in Human Right Codes.
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
- Spotting your character strengths and those you work with!
- Using character Strengths to build resilience
- More engagement by using one’s signature strengths
- Using strengths for conflict resolution and stress management
- Fostering resilience by cultivating Positive Emotions
- Specific strengths: savouring, gratitude (vs. grudge), forgiveness, relaxation & slowness…etc for relaxed work habits
- Positive Relationships
- Positive Communications
- Pursing meaning at work by using one’s signature strengths