Menu:

What's your best lifespeed?

Enter your email to get a free article answering that question.

Email:

You'll also receive our monthly newsletter Women's Careers.

Training and Speaking

Training and Speaking


Successful employees make
successful businesses

Businesses that realize people are their most important resource use training to increase employee productivity, confidence, skills and abilities. This investment has many benefits - enhanced health and well-being, increased productivity, and reduced absenteeism - all good news for the bottom line.

Kathleen Johnston, MA is available for training workshops and speaking engagements on various topics related to career development, workplace wellness, and counselling . All of Kathleen’s training topics are intended to help develop individual and team core personal competencies - resulting in increased energy, productivity, interpersonal effectiveness and well-being.

Listed below are some of Kathleen's most popular workshop and speaking topics. these are suggestions only - Kathleen always customizes workshops to the unique needs of the client group.

Workshop Topics

Keynote Speech Topics 

Workshop Descriptions

Leading From the Inside Out

The foundation for effective leadership lies in knowing oneself. This workshop explores the leader within each individual. Participants will clarify their personal values, principles, vision, and goals.  They will learn how to apply an ethics-based decision-making model. They will recognize changes they want to make in order to enhance both workplace and personal success, and create an action plan for change.

Thriving in Hectic Times

Work has changed drastically in recent years. More and more people are facing overwhelming workloads, trying to cram as much as possible into every hectic day. In this workshop you will understand the health risks from stress overload, examine your individual stress symptoms, identify current coping strategies, and learn several strategies for managing your daily stress. Learners will also create a personalized action plan to safeguard and improve their long-term health and vitality.

How to Find More Time in Your Day


Remember how it feels to play?

How often have you arrived at the end of your day and felt like you'd accomplished nothing, even though you'd been crazy busy all day? The secret: while the number of hours we have in each day is fixed, our energy levels are not. We need to manage our activities to fit our cycles of energy, and build in time for renewal.  This results in increased capacity and improved performance.  This workshop walks participants through an analysis of how they currently use time, and reveals their biggest time wasters. Participants leave this workshop with practical tools for structuring their time for increased productivity and enhanced well-being.

Smart Self-Care

Statistics Canada's Work Absence Rates Report (2001) estimates that $12 billion is lost annually in the form of decreased productivity and health-related costs. The good news is that smart self-care can reverse this trend.  In this workshop, participants will examine six dimensions of life (physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, relational and vocational) in relation to their significant work/life priorities. They will learn how to apply specific self-care strategies, including setting meaningful goals, monitoring energy reserves, honouring the person inside, maintaining good boundaries, nurturing the soul, and asking for help.

Adapting to Change

This workshop is designed to help participants understand the concept of change and acquire the tools necessary for adapting to new circumstances. Learners will recognize the different types of change and their unique responses to it, assess their flexibility and discover some practical tools for effectively adapting to change.

Interpersonal Communication Skills


You don't need to shout to be heard

We tend to assume that communication is a natural skill. In fact, effective interpersonal communication is a learned behaviour that significantly affects your ability to work effectively with others. This experiential workshop is designed to advance your interpersonal communication skills. Effective communication increases your self-confidence and your ability to get along and work more effectively with others.

Assertiveness Skills

Assertiveness is the ability to express yourself clearly about what you want, without demanding that others agree with you.  This workshop helps participants understand their assertiveness style and introduces them to the skills needed to increase their communication effectiveness. Participants will learn the difference between assertive, aggressive and passive behaviors, and how to apply assertive behaviors consistently in their life.

Work/Life Balance Satisfaction

Work/life balance is a hot topic in today’s work world. Many people think they can divide their work and personal lives up into tidy little compartments of commitments and if they do it just right, they will achieve a magical balanced state. This erroneous belief is the source of much of the dissatisfaction people feel about their work/life balance. In this workshop participants discover a new perspective: balance is simply the feeling of satisfaction that comes from concentrating on what really matters most.  Participants will clarify their vision, values, and goals in relation to their current roles and responsibilities. They’ll also  identify role and priority conflicts and create strategies for increased satisfaction.

Take Charge of Your Career


 

How do you rate your career progress? Are you where you want to be? Are you doing the type of work you want to do? In this workshop, participants will examine the purpose and values they wish to express through their work and what motivates them to do well. They will articulate their knowledge, skills, abilities and experience, and clarify their ideal work environment. The result will be a plan for ongoing fulfillment in a career that both meets your needs and allows you to live your life to the fullest.

Preventing Burnout

Burnout describes a crisis in one aspect of people’s lives—their relationship with their work. Stress overload, work overload or work addiction all eventually lead to burnout. The concept of burnout is not restricted to the social or human services fields—the important variable is the intensity of the work. 

Research in the field of mind-body medicine has shown that people need to regularly replenish their energy and rejuvenate themselves if they are to maintain their health and vitality. This experiential workshop is designed to help participants understand the warning signs of burnout and provides  several practical self-assessment tools and meaningful discussion. The workshop is based on the principle that burnout is reversible and can be prevented through intentional monitoring and self-care.

Keynote Speech Descriptions

Satisfied or Stressed? It's Your Choice!

Stress is neither "good" or "bad"—it is simply the energy we use to respond to our body's automatic call for action every day. Come and explore your personal vision for wellness. Learn about the long-term effects of stress overload and your risk factors. Discover your Personal StressType: are you a Worry Wart, Basket Case, Speed Freak, Loner or Drifter? Create a personal plan to build your resilience to work/life stress and increase your levels of personal satisfaction.


Superwoman is Alive & She's Stressed!


How many jobs do you currently do?  How many roles could you change or delegate?

Many women continue to carry out the traditional female roles of wife, housekeeper and primary caregiver to children and elderly parents in addition to their paid work. The demands of these multiple roles, combined with not enough hours in the day to get everything done, leads to stress overload–with devastating costs for physical and mental well-being. 

Despite the fact that Canadian women make up half the workforce, our culture still hasn't figured out how to support their participation. This is not about the blame game. This is about understanding what's going on in your own career and what you can do about it.   Yes you can "have your cake and bake it too!"  

This session can be delivered as a Keynote or a Seminar.  Women who've attended rave about the freedom they feel to start to do things differently.  

                                      Clarify your reality!    Change your attitude!  Create strategies!  Control outcomes!

 

Celebrating High Achieving Women's Careers

What defines a high achieving woman?  Kathleen Johnston's ongoing research into this question has identified the key characteristics of high achieving women. Kathleen shares the results of her research through the inspiring stories of high achieving Canadian women. She highlights the choices these women have made and what they say about those choices in retrospect.

You'll find this an illuminating look at the challenges and satisfactions of the high achieving woman's career journey.

Would you like to schedule a workshop or speaking engagement for your organization? If so, please contact Kathleen.

The choices we make shape our lives. And the choices we make are, ultimately, our responsibility. - Eleanor Roosevelt