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Terms & Conditions
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Why our work matters
This is intended to help you consider the relevance of our work to your needs, by discussing the relationship between our activities and the needs of clients who use our support for their workplace issues or personal concerns. For further clarity or more detailed information, please talk to us. We will enjoy hearing from you.
EncourageMentors is a response to the frustrations which arise when our current behavioural repertoire isn't sufficient to successfully keep our lives on target, collaborate with other people, influence their behaviour and performance, bring about productive cohesion in groups and teams, or manage both our commitments and ourselves.
Most requests for our services arise when people recognise high levels of unhealthy stress, some interruption to their effectiveness as individuals or to potential group performance, destructive interpersonal conflict, frustrations, confusion, annoying and recurring problems, wasted resources and individual, group or organisational dysfunction.
Often enough, the cause is illustrated by this old story:
When a man struggling to feel a tree with a blunt axe was told he'd do better if he sharpened his axe he replied, "Can't stop. Too busy. I have to finish this!" Later, he realised he'd felled the wrong tree. |
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It's difficult to see the complete picture when you're inside the frame. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to choose what really matters. It's easy to get caught up in pushing for results without balancing attention to the best methods for getting them; and sometimes hard to extricate ourselves from inefficient busy-ness:
- We attend to unimportant things, leaving more vital priorities until they become overwhelmingly urgent and important.
- We know or suspect we're on the wrong track but forge ahead anyway.
- We don't plan, don't plan well or don't monitor our progress and so . . . things don't go according to plan.
- We resign ourselves to irresolvable difficulties in relationships and give up on them prematurely, naively hoping we'll avoid such challenges elsewhere.
- We allow problems to continually recycle themselves in different guises.
It's common practice to become stuck in these habits periodically: we rationalise that we are too busy to change or even pause for reflection and don't learn sufficiently from our experiences. If we did, we'd discover and use better approaches. It's common sense.
Our purpose and intentions
We help busy individuals, teams and groups address these issues at source, beginning with their own behaviours. We specialise in the efficient transfer of practical skills (practised ability) into everyday workplace or personal situations.
We encourage and help develop increased capacity for self management, personal and interpersonal effectiveness, person-centred performance management and leadership-with-heart.
Our purpose is to help people find or rediscover dignity and fulfillment in their lives, their relationships and work, wherever these aspirations are consistent with equitable relationships with other people and shared responsibility for the larger living world.
Our thinking
Personal, managerial and leadership under-performance most often stems from inattention to or misunderstanding of a relatively small number of simple, common sense ideas. What surprises most of our clients is how rare these are in practice, how much commitment and effort it takes to make them everyday practice, and how significant are the improvements that result from even their slightest application.
We work to help our clients make these common sense ideas, common practice.
We believe that:
- Much of what is called common sense is well-known or is at least plain to see if we look for patterns in the strings of daily events that form our life experience. When we choose not to see this or to ignore it, it is usually because we tell ourselves other choices are more convenient.
- This fundamental clash - between what we know and what we do - eventually causes great inner tension and stress. When this happens it is useful to be helped to rediscover what we already know and use this knowledge to get back on track, aligned with our own truth, values and aspirations.
- Between every event and our response to it there is a space within which we can make choices. Sometimes our choices - or difficulties in making them - create challenges that are difficult to work through alone. At these times we can all benefit from support and encouragement - irrespective of qualifications, expertise, status and experience.
- Most of us are capable of learning a great deal more from our everyday experiences than, typically, we do. Methodical reflection on experience and problem solving with skilled guidance helps us learn how to distill or "get" more of the meaning from our lives. This helps reduce tendencies to re-experience negative events and enables us to be more closely aligned with our personal aspirations.
- Getting more of the meaning from everyday experiences can also lead to a dependable system of personal responses that can be relied on to help resolve future challenges.
- Usually, we try to solve old problems with the behaviours and thinking that caused them; more effective solutions are found by learning to think outside of our current patterns.
- Many difficulties experienced with other people are best resolved by examining and modifying our own attitudes and behaviours; often, others' reactions to us are also modified as a result. We will at least see the difficulties in a more useful light.
- Much self-negativity selectively ignores our own strengths, self-awareness, knowledge, understanding, skill - and the systems we've created around ourselves to provide positive support. The process of clarifying and acknowledging these personal assets can do much to inspire our commitment to confront challenges and overcome difficulties.
Our effectiveness
Our work succeeds because of our focus on creating frameworks for self-perpetuated development, the care we take to ensure that we deal with the underlying causes of problems, the effort we put into modeling the message, the integrity of our processes, and the practical day-to-day usefulness of the resulting insights and competencies.
Our reputation is founded on what is timeless, generic and practical - whatever the present or foreseeable trends. Although we support all soundly-based innovations in organisation, team and individual development, we favour commonsense above current fad.
We are known for creating learning environments in which people feel safe, experience themselves as treated respectfully, and are supportively and significantly challenged to develop their capacity.
Whether or not this approach succeeds with you, depends on very many factors including your openness, willingness and commitment to making change - and your readiness for it.
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