Curious Responsive Assertive Focused Thoughtful Yes!

Did You Know? Greetings This site is being updated. I hope you will find items of interest and benefit October 2011 Go well  michaelmallows@gmail.com

Clean and Crafty Training is different to 'conventional' training. For some delegates, the different approach pulls them out of their comfort zones, which they find uncomfortable at first. Other people like the challenge - especially when they learn to embrace the 'discomfort' and recognise it as part of the journey toward personal evolution and professional development. Our expectations and previous experiences of change, difference and (dis)comfort will determine whether we react or respond at any given moment to any given event, and whether we move toward or back away from an experience or seek the comfortable illusion that the future can be predictable if we avoid change in the present. 'Real' learning requires that we step out of our comfort zones of habit and familiarity and into the relatively unknown where we cannot so easily predict the outcome. Many will resist this small step because of what is, I believe, the daddy of all addictions i.e. The call to comfort. The call to comfort can make that small step, seen perhaps through a haze of fear, seem an impossible chasm full of unknown dangers.  The physiological, emotional, cognitive feelings and emotions stirred by the prospect of taking a leap of faith can result in people on training programmes, as elsewhere, try swimming against the tide hoping to preserve the status quo, sometimes doing their best to learn nothing, even if it means disrupting other people's learning. Anxiety, frustration, resistance, resentment, aggression, inappropriate humour, can happen anywhere, and the Crafty approach incorporates and explores those elements and uses them as part of the learning process. A lot of training does not work because it pays little heed to these blockages, or because trainers have a set agenda to get through in a set amount of time.

Crafty events have time boundaries, of course, as well as agreed outcomes - both implicit and explicit, as in the topic titles: Clean and Crafty Presentation Skills Team Building Conflict Resolution Meetings Counselling Celebrating Diversity Parenting Teens Working with Teens And many more

So far, so familiar to most people who attend training or seminars. However, crafty events have no fixed agenda, no role-plays, few case-studies, and delegates are discouraged from telling stories or even talking much about anyone who is not in the room. Instead, people are encouraged to think about their contribution to the ongoing problems they experience with those people and helped to develop strategies and techniques for handling things differently. This requires emotional intelligence, which is very much what Crafty training helps to develop.