Why do employees attend training sessions?  Motives are likely to mixed, but will range from a passionate interest in the topic to being told they had to go.  Not surprisingly, responses to training sessions are equally varied: ‘loved it’, ‘boring, waste of time’.  A trainer’s job is to meet the positive expectations of the enthusiasts and to show the sceptics that even mundane-seeming subjects can be both interesting and useful, but whatever the views of the participants, the real measure of the success of a training programme is the extent to which the new strategies are practised back in the workplace. 

In the Challenge of Change Profile we have a scale called avoidance coping, which is described as the ostrich principle for dealing with issues – stick your head in the sand and ignore them.  If you're the sort of person who puts off making phone calls because you're afraid of the response you might get, who postpones tackling a project because you don't know where or how to start, or who focuses endlessly on the trivial tasks at work because the big, really important one pushes you out of your comfort zone, you might be what we call an 'avoidance coper': you've learned to respond to the pressures in your life by trying to avoid thinking or doing anything about them.  This might work in the short term, but all you're doing is compounding the problem and making yourself miserable.  

This is a continuation of last week's two part blog. In light of recent tragic international events developing sensitivity to others couldn't be more important. 

One of the scales in the Challenge of Change Resilience Profile measures Sensitivity.  We usually talk about this in conjunction with the Detached Coping scale: people who are high on both have what we call Detached Compassion, which means that they can pick up quickly and accurately how other people feel but don't themselves become identified or involved with the emotions.