The Choice: Un-box your PhD process & take charge of your performance

The Choice is an experiential personal leadership course that provides you with tools and insights to become more in charge of your own performance as you proceed with your PhD process.

In any PhD process productive and joyful periods alternate with more challenging ones. In the Choice you will discover ways to lead yourself and others more effectively, increase your impact and improve your personal vitality. The unique combination of physical approaches (such as boxcoaching), systemic constellations and group reflections will give you deep insights in your in current ways of acting, communication styles and effects. You will experience and feel how you can use your personal strengths and drives effectively in your collaboration with others, while overcoming recurring obstacles and increasing your impact.

This leadership course is useful for anyone who is interested in learning by doing and recognizes any of these questions:

How can I…

• stay focussed?
• deal with a workload that is too heavy?
• maintain or regain the joy I feel for my work?
• bring up difficult issues with my supervisor?
• pursue my own ideas while maintaining a good relationship with others?
• become more perceptive when supervising others?
• make better use of my own strengths and the strenght of others?
• measure if something is good enough?
• find a balance between my working life and social life?

 

Approach

The Choice consists of three half-day workshops and a personal coaching session. During the course you will work on your specific personal leadership question or challenge. Boxing is a powerful and playful tool to experience, feel and understand your current ways of acting, communication styles and effects. How is your balance? Are you standing firm? How do you relate to others? And how does this change if you are under pressure? Do you prefer to lead or follow? How do you set boundaries? What is your unique strength and where does your autopilot take over? You will learn to become aware of and listen to your body as an important instrument to make choices and transcend impeding behavioural patterns. Individual and group reflections will help you to link the newly acquired insights to the activities and requirements of your work situation.

 

Programme

Boxing Clinic 1: sensing the current situation Define your learning goal. Become aware of your personal strengths and drives, dominant (verbal and non-verbal) communication and conflict styles and effects. Discover your ‘auto-pilot’ habits, and explore and experiment with communication styles different from the ones you’re used to using.

Boxing Clinic 2: increasing your impact Look at recurring issues from a systemic perspective. Practise with being strong and flexible when interacting with others. Identify how to manage yourself and other effectively. Identify conditions for impact and more productive ways to communicate and collaborate. Use your body signals to make choices and decisions.

Individual coaching session In a personal coaching session, you’ll deepen your insights and identify tangible follow-up actions that you can apply in your PhD work context.

Workshop 3: Achieve sustainable results while maintaining balance Working on real-life cases using systemic constellations and intervision approaches. Help each other to apply and further integrate insights in your daily work practices.

 

Outcome
After The Choice you have increased your ability to:

• recognize and make better use of your own strenghts and those of others
• interact and resolve conflict more effectively with colleagues
• strike a more comfortable balance between firmness/flexibility and steering/letting go
• create conditions for having impact when you communicate
• more deftly reduce and handle stress and create work flow
• network and resolve issues with PhD colleagues

 

Trainers
The Choice is facilitated by Linda Admiraal & Peter Slenders (www.cocooncoaching.nl). Distinctive to their way of working is their personal approach, use of experiential approaches and the creation of a safe, pleasant learning environment.

 

General Information

Target Group:	PhD's
Group size:	8-12 participants
Course duration:	4 sessions
Language:	English
Credit points:	0.7 ECTS
Self-study hours:	low
Name trainers:	Linda Admiraal & Peter Slenders
Venue:	Kenkon, Wageningen and WUR campus: See course schedule.

How to prepare yourself: The Choice is a personal leadership programme. During this training you will work on your specific personal leadership question or challenge. Kindly prepare yourself by reflecting on why you have subscribed for the training and what you would like to learn. We will use this as a starting point during the first workshop.

Focus of the first workshop: During the first interactive workshop we will make use of boxing and physical exercises to create insight in your communication patters. You will become aware of your personal strengths and drives, dominant communication patterns, conflict styles and effects. We will explore automatic reactions and ways of behaving and discover some first insights in how to move beyond them.

What to bring:

1. comfortable (sports) clothes
2. shoes are not needed, we will work bare foot
3. extra sweater and socks in case you feel cold between the exercises
4. bottle of water
5. notebook and pen

Fee

Reduced fee: • PhD candidates of Wageningen University with an approved Training and Supervision Plan (TSP) who are registered at one of the WU graduate schools (EPS, PE&RC, VLAG, WASS, WIAS, WIMEK) • Postdocs of Wageningen University who are registered at one of the WU graduate schools	€310
University fee: All other PhD candidates / Wageningen University postdocs and staff	€620
External fee: All other participants	€1240

Fee includes study and training material and coffee/tea.

Please note that with your official registration you are kept to the cancellation conditions, and that being present all 3 course days is obliged.

Cancellation condition

You may cancel free of charge up to 1 month before the start of the course. After this date you will be charged the University fee (€ 620). Unless:

• You can find someone to replace you in the course and supply the course coordinator with the name and contact information of your replacement.
  In this case you will only be charged a € 50,- cancellation fee.
• You (PhDs and postdocs of Wageningen University) have a valid reason to cancel (illness or death in the family 1st or 2nd degree).
  In this case you will be charged the reduced fee and your supervisor/PI must send a mail indicating the reason for cancellation.

Note: If you would like to cancel your registration, ALWAYS inform us. Someone else may still be able to take your spot.

Information

For more information please contact wgscourses@wur.nl