Partial Description of Seminars & Workshops

Stress Management

Who Me? Stressed?! Kicking Your Stress Habits
(1 to 3 hour workshop)
Stress is a part of everyday life. Experts agree that some stress is good, but stress can also be destructive and turn into distress. This workshop will help participants explore the distinction between “stressors” and stress. Participants will explore their coping patterns, coping ruts and coping skills. Each participant will walk out with ideas and a plan that will help them better manage daily stress.

Enhance Your Stress Resiliency Quotient
(1 to 3 hour workshop or 8-session training course)
In this highly competitive and goal driven culture, in the midst of worklife balance challenge, where job stress is blamed for high burnout rates, many are looking for meaning, calm and productivity. What keeps us from getting sick, making bad decisions, critical mistakes or harming ourselves and others? The research is in! If we are to be productive, innovative, find meaning and purpose that makes life worthwhile, we must learn to enhance our stress resilience behaviors and quotient.
This seminar will help participants explore the paths that lead to strength in the midst of change and / or stressful events. It will provide participants techniques for tapping into the inner powers that ensure we spring back and recover readily from whatever life throws at us. Interactive exercises will be used to walk participants through the wellness behaviors that will RECHARGE their stress resilience quotient.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will be able to discuss the four dimensions of stress resilience and the applicable research.
2. Participants will be able to discuss the economic cost of stress and stress-related illness.
3. Participants will better understand and be able to discuss the application of stress resilience behaviors throughout their worklife.
4. Participants will identify specific ways they will enhance their own perspectives, actions, and behaviors to strengthen their four stress resilience dimensions and better synergize the six dimensions of wellness.

Physical Activity

Fitting In Fitness
You would think that, with 1,440 minutes in every day, it shouldn't be that hard to find 30 minutes daily for moderate physical activity, as the Surgeon General recommends. But with today’s fast pace, it can be very difficult! For many people, days are a blur of work, household chores, errands, time with family and friends and, of course, sleep. With everything going on, finding those 30 minutes a day for physical activity can be very challenging. Are you looking for that 30 minutes? This class has been designed just for you and will provide solutions that hundreds of employees have used successfully at work and at home to fit in fitness.
Learning Objectives:
• Participants will be able to discuss the three components of fitness and give some practical examples they can do
• Participants will identify "target times" during their day for easy fitness wins
Participants will be able to list five fitness activities they can realistically fit in at home
• Participants will be able to list five fitness activities they can realistically fit in at work

Personal Fitness Plan for Busy People:
Develop Your Own Personal Fitness Solutions
If you are like most people, you have a hard time working physical activity and fitness into your busy lifestyle. Even when you get your plan in action, often the goals we set up seem to dissolve when the reality of day-to-day life seems to get in the way. This workshop takes you through steps that identify how to work fitness into your busy life in a way that you will enjoy it, and stick with it over the long run. Participants identify their preferences, goals, barriers and solutions, identify realistic goals, and put together a step by step plan for success. The workshop closes with a fun partner exercise demonstration that teaches injury prevention and leaves you feeling refreshed, energized and inspired.

The "I Hate to Exercise" Solution:
Proven Strategies that Motivate People to Exercise
Exercise is a “downer” for many of us for lot of different reasons. Thousands of people who hate to exercise have overcome their obstacles and found joy in getting and staying fit by using the techniques participants learn in this fun and interactive workshop that covers:
• How to devise a plan that will work for your individual needs, preferences, and body type
• Ways to get started
• How to stick with it
• Methods to avoid exercise burnout
• How to work fitness into a busy lifestyle
• Realistic goal setting
• Cognitive ecology: Positive self talk
How do you make physical activity and fitness work in your life? Start by recognizing your motivations: Why exercise? What gets in the way? What are you roadblocks, and how can you get around them? What are your personal preferences and personality styles? This workshop also blows away the myths that send people in the wrong direction and ultimately make exercise a drag, if you fall prey. Come away with many ideas and a plan that you have put together based on your own unique interests and circumstances. The workshop closes with a fun partner exercise demonstration that teaches injury prevention and leaves you feeling refreshed, energized and inspired.

Nutrition

Rev Up Your Metabolism (1-2 hours)
This workshop will help participants gain the knowledge and skills necessary to speed up their metabolism and enhance their opportunity for effective weight loss and maintenance. Participants will learn about the downside of fad diets and how to avoid the "roller coaster" of dieting. The workshop will explore nine principles that will help you “rev up” your metabolism and get you on the right path to losing weight and keeping it off – forever!
This workshop is designed to help participants:
• Learn the basics about metabolism and its affect on successful weight management and weight loss
• Better understand why fad diets fail in the long term
• Explore different ways to increase muscle tone and strength – a foundation for speeding up metabolism
• Create a plan to put into action nine principles that will help you “rev up” your metabolism

Back Health

BackSaver (1 to 2 hr. workshop)
Explore the multi-dimensional issue of back health. Experience practical exercises to stretch and strengthen to develop and maintain a healthy back. Find out how back pain originates, and what perpetuates the pain cycle. Learn how to eliminate back pain through:
> workstation awareness,
> healthy lifting techniques,
> understanding the musculoskeletal system and
> the mechanisms of back pain triggers.
Find out how diet, hydration, rest and sleep, smoking and secondhand smoke, sitting and lying styles, lifting techniques and clothing affect back pain. Gain awareness of healthy postural alignment and the body as a linkage system, spinal stabilization, cumulative trauma, flexibility and balanced muscle tone, active recovery and muscle relaxation for pain relief. Please wear sneakers and loose fitting clothing.

Tobacco and Smoking

Best Ways to Quit Smoking I
Want to quit or help someone else who does? This workshop is for people who want to quit smoking, or be supportive in the right ways to someone else who wants to quit. Smoking, like other addictions, has many factors that cause it to be hard to give up. Just knowing that you want to quit smoking doesn’t mean you know the best ways to quit for good. In this workshop you will find out what methods researchers have found to be most successful, identify the nature of your tobacco dependence, and work on ways to come up with your own personal plan for success.
Best Ways to Quit Smoking II
Once you have considered the pros and cons of quitting, why you like and don’t like to smoke, what’s getting in the way of quitting, and what triggers your urge to smoke, you’ll be ready to explore your plans for successfully quitting for good. In “What’s the Best Way to Quit Smoking II,” you’ll prepare your plan and figure out the specifics of how to make it work for you, in your own personal situation. This program is followed by coaching sessions that help you stay on track while you go through the quitting process.

Break Free from Smoking
This 10-week program gives you the tools you need to succeed with quitting smoking. Break Free from Smoking is designed and led by smoking cessation facilitator with 13 years of smoking cessation experience, including 3 years as Senior Research Coordinator with the Tobacco Treatment and Research Program at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
When people try to quit smoking, high participation and long term success results from carefully introduced and implemented smoking cessation interventions based on established best practices. Wellness Without Walls uses proven strategies for optimal participation, smokers’ confidence in quitting, and long term success rates. The program is built around a smoking cessation course that starts by assessing the nature of tobacco dependence and creating the awareness and trust needed to make the right preparations for success. Participants experience is tailored to meeting individual and group needs focused on behavior change support and relapse prevention. This program works best when introduced with programming for overall organizational wellness support. It includes wellness coaching follow up support designed to build a foundation that supports a smokefree lifestyle.

Health Living and Aging

Workshop Description
Healthy Living: Answering the Wellness Challenge (1 to 3 hours)
Wellness is a lifelong journey. It is an active process of making choices and commitments that enhance the quality of life and maximize personal potential. Wellness Without Walls builds on a core philosophy that people enhance their wellbeing by taking responsibility for engaging in behaviors that develop optimal health and generate a healthy culture by supporting others on their wellness journey.
This workshop is designed to help participants:
• Understand the six dimensions of wellness and their interconnectedness
• Assess their current state of health and well-being
• Explore strategies to increase opportunity for optimal health and well-being, with an emphasis on diet and nutrition, physical activity, and stress management
• Develop a healthy living action plan that will re-energize their health and strengthen their wellness support network
Healthy Aging
Aging Well: The Secrets to Successful Aging and Healthy Life (1-2 hours)
In 1874 Henry Amiel said, “to know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” This workshop will use data from some of the landmark studies on aging (MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America and Harvard Study of Human Development) to help participants understand that lifestyle choices, more than genes, determine how well we will age!
The workshop is designed to help participants:
• Gain a basic understanding of the scientific theories of aging
• Assess your wellness IQ
• Take a hard look at everyday choices and decide what changes could be made that would make a BIG difference to aging well
• Begin putting an Aging Well action plan together

Behavior Change

Changing for Good: Bridging the Barriers to Health Behavior Change (1 to 2 hr. workshop)
In this introductory workshop, participants begin to understand what is getting in their way of being able to make lasting lifestyle changes. Participants will look at their motivations and goals and discover what they can do to make their desired changes part of a livable, healthy lifestyle. If you've started on a wellness journey and sometimes get sidelined by obstacles and barriers, this workshop will give you the tips and tools that wellness coaches utilize to insure success.

Work Life Balance

Work Life Balance – How to Make It Work
(1 to 2 hour workshop)
This workshop addresses the multiple demands of living in today’s fast-paced world and how to gain balance in order to enhance your health within all the dimensions of wellness. Discover ways to increase your energy rather than draining it.

Self Care / Consumerism

Being a Wise Health Care Consumer (1-3 hours)
(Delivered in conjunction with self care manual)
Knowledge is power: These days we know that “an apple a day” is not enough “to keep the doctor away.” Research shows that individuals do a better job of making health care and self care decisions when they better understand how to make them and have confidence in their choices. This workshop will help participants get the most out of medical visits and give them some basic guidelines for when to have health exams and tests. Delivered in combination with implementation of the self care manual appropriate for your worksite population.
This workshop is designed to help participants:
• Become better aware of how to use your power to control your own health and self care decisions and actions and get the best results
• Gain insight into making wise decisions about doctor and emergency care visits and prevent avoidable visits by knowing when and what self care actions are appropriate
• Learn to ask the right questions to get the answers needed to make wise medical care decisions
• Become more familiar with the “what, when, and how” of medical exams and tests
• Understand the basics of medications: over-the-counter, home supplies, and medications