The vagaries of presenting in a hotel.....

(thank you Linda Simpson).

For those of you who have attended my Train the Trainer workshop in the past, you know that I often say "something always goes wrong" when you are presenting. Sometimes it's the technology that won't cooperate, sometimes it's the food that doesn't arrive. Well yesterday it was the heat - none of it. The hotel could not, somehow, bring heat to our meeting room (but could pour it into the women's washroom, where we retreated frequently to warm up). Apparently the guy who knows how to turn on the heat was off that day. So I eventually gave up and put on my winter gear to present, hence the photo above. Luckily the participants were very good sports about it.

...and I'm not even in Whitehorse yet! This is southeastern Ontario...

Call for presentations: “Safely in Our Hands: Helping Our Helpers Stay Healthy”

Are you interested in sharing your ideas/new approaches to helping other helpers who are facing compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma? The Association of Traumatic Stress Specialists will be holding its annual conference September 29 – October 3, 2010 at the Delta Airport Hotel – Toronto, Canada.

Click here for more information.

Becoming a Strong Workshop Presenter - Recommended Resources

If you are interested in becoming a Compassion Fatigue trainer, but have limited experience as a public speaker, here are some resources I would recommend to help you get more comfortable doing presentations.

1) Consider purchasing my Ebooklet: Designing and Marketing a Compassion Fatigue Workshop in 10 Key Steps The ebooklet goes through each step of designing, delivering and marketing a workshop, with a particular focus on Compassion Fatigue training.

2) Visit Bill O'Hanlon's website Paid Public Speaker

This website includes the option to attend a Speaker’s boot camp. O'Hanlon also sells his ebook Becoming a paid speaker which is full of tips and ideas and suggestions from one of the foremost speaker in the field of psychology. I think it is a worthwhile investment for anyone who is fairly new to the public speaking world.

Bill recently added some online tutorials on the basics, such as the video "Tech Secrets for Speakers" which I had the opportunity to preview. In my opinion, if you are a real beginner, and have no tech experience whatsoever, I believe you will find these videos useful. They may be a bit basic for anyone who has been dealing with microphones, laptops and public speaking for a while.

The Compassion Fatigue Workbook is finally ready!

The Compassion Fatigue workbook is based on the one day workshop Walking the Walk: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue, which has been offered across Canada to thousands of helpers in the fields of healthcare, community mental health, correctional services, education and the military since 2001. This Workbook was designed for distance learners and those who prefer working at their own pace.

The Workbook offers a comprehensive description of compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization and leads the reader through experiential activities designed to target specific areas in their personal and professional lives. It provides concrete strategies to help the reader develop a personalised strategic plan for identifying and transforming compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization.

Topics covered include:
Understanding compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma
Symptom checklist, targeting areas for strategic planning, understanding warning signs
Assessing contributing factors; Evaluating self-care, identifying triggers
Solutions: personal, professional and organizational strategies

No. of pages: 85 pages - Spiral bound
Copy Price: $59.00 CAN plus shipping
**Bulk rates available for orders of 20 copies or more. Contact whp@cogeco.ca for bulk orders

To purchase this workbook, you can visit the CF Solutions Bookstore.

Staying up to date with new findings on Compassion Fatigue

Here is a very simple strategy to keep up with news releases on topics related to Compassion Fatigue. Go to google alerts and sign up to receive notification of any compassion fatigue related news releases on the web. You will then receive an email letting you know when someone posts something on this or any other topic you want to be notified on.

Upcoming Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer Workshops in 2009

A two-day intensive retreat with Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed., CCC.
Certified Counsellor, Compassion Fatigue Specialist, Director of WHP
Next workshop dates: November 24-25, 2009


Location: Donald Gordon Conference Centre Kingston, On.
A beautiful location and great food. A nice starting point for a two day intensive retreat to become (or hone your skills as) a compassion fatigue trainer.
*Limited to a maximum of 20 participant*
Certificates of Completion will be provided

Cost (includes lunch and morning and afternoon breaks): $598.00 CND including gst. This fee covers cost of materials including training manuals and handout templates.

To reserve a spot you must send a $100 non-refundable deposit along with your registration form.

Prerequisites
This workshop is aimed at helping professionals and educators in the helping fields. No prior Compassion Fatigue training is required but a basic working knowledge of the topic would be best (by reading some of the recommended materials ahead of time).

Workshop Description

Some past participants of our one day Compassion Fatigue workshop (Walking the Walk) expressed an interest in receiving help in designing a workshop to bring back to their communities and developing skills and knowledge base to deliver compassion fatigue workshops themselves. This train the trainer workshop offers tools, handouts, strategies, training material and marketing strategies to adapt Walking the Walk to your community's specific needs (and to your own presentation style). You do not need to have attended WtheW in the past to benefit from this training.

Because of the small size of the group, we will customize certain aspects of the training to your specific needs. A questionnaire will be sent ahead of time to establish your needs/goals and objectives and aim to fulfill as many of these as possible.

Day one will be experiential (you will participate in a one day CF workshop) and Day two will discuss tools, strategies and techniques to develop and deliver the workshops on your own and become a CF educator and trainer.

What differentiates this workshop from other educational sessions out there is the extra layer of understanding and validation that we hope to convey to our workshop participants. Therefore, the train the trainer workshop is designed to take you deep first, to gain a true and thorough understanding of your own relationship to CF. Then we go into the didactic details (what to teach, how to teach) and finally talk about the mechanics of the whole process (how to customize this for your own work needs/goals etc.).

For more information, visit our website or email me: whp at cogeco.ca

Launching the new Compassion Fatigue Solutions Bookstore!

I am very pleased to announce that after many months of work and a very helpful computer programmer, my bookstore is finally ready. Now, this is a very soft launch as there are only two products in the bookstore at the moment (an ebooklet and a Train the Trainer workbook) but it will grow over the coming months. The goal of this bookstore is to create a web-based resource centre for helpers seeking distance learning resources and workbooks to assist them as individuals and/or as trainers.

Go take a look: www.cfsolutionsbookstore.com

Currently available:

Ebook: Designing and marketing a compassion fatigue workshop in 10 key steps

Contains:
• Self assessment exercises to help you evaluate where you are starting from.
• Strategies to identify and develop your very own workshop style
• Key books and resources in the field
• Marketing and promotion: lessons learned and things you should know and many more tips, ideas and strategies.


Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer - Workbook

This manual offers tools to help you design your own CF workshops and assist you to become a compassion fatigue trainer. The material included in this manual is based on WHP’s one day workshop Walking the Walk: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue which has been offered across Canada since 2001.

Enclosed in this manual you will find:

• A description of the 17 Educational and experiential goals of the Walking the Walk course.
• A extensive resource list (books, links to websites, articles, etc.)
• An appendix with handouts that can be used for your training sessions.
• A copy of three articles written by WHP: Low Impact Disclosure , Running on
Empty and Transforming compassion fatigue into compassion satisfaction: top 12 self-care tips for helpers.