Learn personalized strategies to help you do your best work. Understand your productivity patterns, cultivate a habit of deep work, overcome procrastination, enhance your creativity, and create a system for handling novel tasks.

(This talk includes strategies featured in the Harvard Business Review magazine -May/June 2022)

Anxiety is the most common mental health issue (it’s estimated that 31.3% of people will suffer from an anxiety disorder at some point during their lifetime), and “everyday” anxiety impacts many more people. Anxiety can hold people back in the workplace in various ways. It can lead to overthinking decisions, imposter syndrome, avoidance of leadership and responsibility, procrastination, fear of collaborating with smarter people , problem perfectionism, excessively weighting things that could go wrong, and wasted hours spent ruminating over small mistakes or interpersonal issues. This talk will teach practical strategies for recognizing and coping with anxiety in yourself or other people,, and how to revise common thinking errors associated with anxiety. Participants will also learn how to maximize the strengths associated with being careful, cautious, thoughtful and sensitive, and minimize the weaknesses that can be associated with this temperament.

The most important and innovative work we do often doesn’t feel as efficient or productive as less important but more familiar tasks (e.g., replying to emails or working with people we know). Important work often includes thinking about anxiety-provoking subjects (e.g., making a crisis management plan), or it involves contending with a sense of uncertainty (e.g., investing time in tasks that might pay off big or not at all or that we’ve never done before). This talk will teach strategies for identifying your most important tasks and getting them done. Based on this popular article.

Our extreme traits are often both our greatest strengths and our biggest weaknesses. For instance, strong tendencies towards perfectionism, persistence, being cautious or bold, thoughtfulness, or even a love of learning (which can be associated with low tolerance of boring but important work ) are typically both strengths and the person’s Archilles heel. This talk will teach participants how to harness the best aspects of their natural cognitive style and minimize the pitfalls it creates. This practical, down to earth seminar will focus firstly on participants getting to know themselves and, secondly, on developing a toolkit of strategies to hone their thinking habits and decision making. Participants will also learn how to recognize others' thinking styles so they can manage and collaborate effectively.

Ineffective responses to stress frequently fall into two categories - avoidance coping and/or rumination. For instance, there’s a financial decision you need to handle but doing so triggers thinking about past mistakes (rumination), so you lose confidence and put it off. Or, last time you spoke to your boss their tone was bit flat and unenthusiastic, and find yourself endlessly mentally replaying the conversation wondering what that might mean. This talk will unpack the most common self-sabotaging responses people have to stress, and present alternative coping strategies that will help participants both feel better and be more productive. We’ll cover how to understand when habits are stress-generating (e.g., failing to plan or reinventing the wheel instead of creating a template or checklist), why this happens, and what to do about it.