Welcome.

Posted on 20 April 2016 by Jon Lavin

Thank you for visiting the People Workshop.

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You probably want to know more and my guess is that you have these questions in your mind:

  • What is it that I do?
  • How do I do it?
  • Could my approach suit you?

So let me answer those questions:

As I explain elsewhere, “My speciality is working with people so they have more freedom and choice in how they manage relationships. This might be in the work place or in life generally.”

That happens in two ways:

Firstly, from the personalised, business skills workshops that I offer, covering a range of topics, listed here.

Secondly, through my in-depth, individual work, offered either face-to-face or by telephone.

This is informed by practical life experience, making lots of mistakes myself and the theory and expertise to back it up. If there is a need to explore why things in your life are like they are, you may want to consider the idea of personal sessions, explained in more details here.

Please explore my background and if you have any questions or queries whatsoever please contact me. I welcome a phone call to discuss your particular challenge and will never try and persuade you to use me if I don’t think that there is a match with what I can offer. My interest is in your success and you being the best you can be – that is how I have built up my business.

Thank you for checking this out.

Jon

Posted in Behaviours, Change, Leadership, Management, People, Relationships | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Relationships in the workplace

Posted on 10 May 2016 by Jon Lavin
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Poppies and sea

When you look at how much of our lives we spend at work it’s really quite attention-grabbing. I did a very rough calculation based on 40 years and 40 hours a week – and I took out holidays and weekends. It works out approximately at 4900 hours. That’s a lot of hours, especially if you do lots of overtime and weekends. All of that time, you’re probably going to mixing with people – usually, quite a large number of people.

We are ‘relationship seeking’, says Eric Berne, originator of Transactional Analysis. So for all of that time, we’re moving in and out of relationships with other people. So here, I’m categorising any interaction with another as ‘relationship’.

Then there’s what happens when we go home, another set of relationships, and where we came from – our parents and families.

So how we are in relationship with others is very important and has a major impact on the results we get generally and particularly in the context of this article, at work.

I hear a lot of talk about ’employee engagement’ at the moment. I believe that for employees to be ‘engaged’, so actively involved in what they’re doing, thinking about it, in the ‘here and now’, they’ve got to be in relationship with their manager and probably, the team they’re part of, at least, if the job is being done properly.

I see it as the role of the manager or team leader that they have the skills and ability to develop these relationships with as many team members as possible, any exclusions being the exception. This requires a lot of self-awareness and confidence, plus the ability to build high levels of trust with a wide range of character types. I think it also requires the ability to see the world from the view point of the other person – ‘putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes’, we say. That’s quite difficult to do in my experience. However, we can donate the time to get to know the people in our team and so increase the likelihood of all of us coming from the same angle.

I think this is about the ability to value the uniqueness of others in all the different forms and approaches that manifests in, and finding ways of harnessing those skills and abilities.

These are not easy things and I am aware of the relatively few, good people managers I come across in my work but it is possible to develop these skills. You need to have the intention to want the best from ALL relationships. Also, to be prepared to use the feedback we all get, especially when things don’t go to plan in a relationship, and be continually revisiting and adjusting your approach so that you get more of what works. This way, you automatically get less of what doesn’t work.

Never under estimate the power of intention.

 

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Stormy seas

Posted in Behaviours, Business Skills, Integrity, Leadership, Management, People | 1 Comment

The Importance of relationships

Posted on 27 April 2016 by Jon Lavin

IMG_0697I was drawn to write this after attending a conference last weekend on “Soul-Searching, Soul-Making & Soul-Breaking”. The emphasis was on psychotherapeutic relationships but it could have been on any sort of relationship really.

I spend most of my work time working with individuals and small groups, either privately or in the workplace. Coming from an industrial, engineering background, I tend to come at things from a very practical, down-to-earth background.

So the conference was interesting in so much as with each speaker, I mentally moved backwards and forwards along a continuum between work/life and psychotherapeutic/life relationships as to how applicable each idea put forward was. The common theme within each was the depth of relationship we have, in whatever setting we are in, has a major impact on the outcomes we get. This in turn is influenced by how much of us is available to be met, or meet, in relationship. How much of the history that we drag around with us and radiate out through body language and words keeps us from entering into deeper relationship with another? From a therapists point of view, how much of me is available to meet the client in their suffering?

The results we get in life are very much dependant on how we are in relationship with others and how well we know ourselves. Studies on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) show that high levels of EQ have a significant impact on how successful we are in life.

My point is that in order for healing, development or deeper relationship to come about, we need to be able to connect at different levels, unconditionally. For that there must be an absence of fear which means there must be trust and the intention to be non judgemental.

So in order to work with issues and problems, we have to have awareness about our impact on others, we must feel safe, the lines of communication must be open at different levels and we have to be available.

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Posted in Behaviours, Change, Integrity, Management, People, Psychotherapy, Relationships | Leave a comment