Effective behaviour in your professional surroundings

Effective behaviour means getting the best out of yourself. This is achieved by understanding your own strengths and weaknesses and continually striving to improve and grow, both professionally and personally.

In this interactive course you develop personal and professional leadership skills to successfully work on your PhD project and beyond.

You will learn how to:

• build and sustain professional relations with your supervisors and other colleagues
• develop assertiveness and negotiation skills to help you stand up for your professional needs
• express yourself authentically both verbally and non-verbally
• strengthen your self-insight and discover your strengths and pitfalls
• develop stronger self-management skills
• present yourself in professional settings including meetings and conferences
• and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

You will receive short introductions on the theory, varied exercises, role plays related to your PhD and feedback from the trainer and fellow participants.

Theoretical models provide you with a framework that helps to analyze your actions and their effects. This analysis helps you to function more consciously and effectively.

The trainer has a person-oriented and practice-oriented approach and makes you aware of your behaviour and coaches you to further develop your professional behaviour.

The group functions as a mirror and deepens your learning through feedback, examples, recognition and concrete tips.

Programme

The course consists of 4 days, with 2 weeks in between the training days. You use the time between the course days to put into practice what you have learnt in the classroom.

Before the course you are asked to define your learning goals and share them with the trainer.

At the end of the course you describe in your personal development plan how you will further implement the learnings during your PhD.

We work on the following themes:

Building professional relations: We work on your collaboration and communication skills and practice the skills that help you build good professional relations. You learn where you are on the Introversion- Extraversion scale and what that implies for your professional interactions.

Assertiveness and negotiation skills: You learn how to assert yourself in a clear and respectful way. We strengthen your negotiation skills to help you stand up for your professional needs.

Personal leadership: self-awareness and self-management: You learn to recognize your strengths, weaknesses, values and emotions. This self-awareness enables you to organize what you need to carry out your PhD project and to adapt to different situations. You learn how to set professional goals and make sure you meet them.

Resilience: Learn how to bounce back from setbacks and failures, learn from them and maintain a positive attitude.

Work-life balance: You gain insight into your sources of stress and energy. You learn to relax through short mindfulness exercises. You learn to recognize a disturbed work-life balance and what measures to take to restore your balance.