FE293 Tough Enough - Handling Difficult People with Grace

** This syllabus is subject to changes in order as lectures are being developed and as students share their specific needs as this is the first time running this class - adaptations will certainly happen! You can expect two lectures a week with the occasional extra bit of reading or watching for you.

Week One

Self Help Rant

Identifying Issues

Negative Self Talk and Ways to Get it Out of Your Head

Week Two

Monsters Under Your Bed? How to move them along or to a place they aren't causing you stress

Terms and Studies you need to know (Imposterism, Fundamental Attribution Error, Milgram and more)

Emotional Intelligence

Week Three

Advocacy for you and the ones you love (challenges are everywhere!)

The Fine Art of Persuasion

Crazy Makers

Week Four

Calm, Confident, Conflict - (what a week this will be!)

Developing A Growth Mindset

The Four Agreements Applied to Dog Training

Week Five

Building and Learning Resilience (because, reality check, life happens)

Studies of Note and their implications for you (Harlow, Elliot)

Week Six

joy, Creativity

Taking Care of Yourself (Maslow, Meditation and Emotional, Physical and Social Self Care)

Setting Yourself Up for Success

This is from week four - this is a good lecture to share as a sample of the kind of work we will be delving into

Tough Enough

Developing a “Growth” mindset

You’ve heard the term “growth mindset”, and likely a “fixed mindset” as well.

Here’s a quick overview in case you aren’t familiar with either:

You may already have a good understanding of growth mindset – and if you are playing with TEAM you’ll be familiar with one concept of it – “not yet”! Yet is a hallmark word for growth mindset! What a growth mindset does is allow you develop and grow. It’s a learning process but from it can come relationship improvements and an understanding of our potential to change. The presumption that we can always improve, learn more or do better turns out to be critical in terms of developing resilience and facing tough situations.

Here is Dr Dweck speaking about teaching growth mindset to students. It explores a little of the science of why a growth mindset can be such a positive:

Resilience has it’s own lecture in this class but it’s pretty apparent that a growth mindset will support and improve a resilient attitude. A growth attitude will also push you to realize that mistakes and errors are exactly that – no more, no less than information we can use in the future. A fixed mindset is an element too often of blame being assigned for life events, and self confidence being eroded internally.

So how do we move from fixed to growth mindsets? We recognize that it will be work and we set aside time to work on it.

Accept that change and errors as an opportunity to learn and experience life. Stop worrying about what other people think and

Find your driving force and hang onto it – this may involve learning some new skills to move negative thinking and thoughts that are not positive along

Embrace your strengths – it’s not bragging! Honest! Writing them out and referring to that list in moments of doubt may help. Poll your friends and coworkers/clients about what they see as your strengths if you are stuck.

Understand that life is full of ups and downs – peaks and valleys will happen so let them come. Do not become too emotionally connected to either extreme as you know “this too shall pass”.

Ask questions – of yourself, of others. It’s trite but true happiness (at least the internal type) is a journey not a destination so enjoy the learning you can do along the way.

Be thoughtful – not only to others but yourself, not only in terms of being kind, but also in terms of reflection.

Value process goals at least as much as outcome goals and when one goal is met, set another! Effort matters more than talent. That’s a huge shift in thinking for many of us.... but effort is what will build talent. Trust me ;)

Take action, even imperfect action. It takes time to learn let alone master something. Be willing to experiment, reflect and test.

Realize that you are you – no one else can be responsible for your attitude and thoughts. Even in imperfection you are way ahead of most of the world – simply by virtue of caring and working on yourself and your partner as hard as you are <3

Homework: What are three key points that you can see an application of the notions of growth mindset to yourself and dog sports in? (or your own difficult situation) Are you applying them now? How can we start to build them into your training and planning?

Quizzes to explore

http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~bshipley/MindsetQuiz.w.scores.pdf