Workshops
We offer workshops in acting, singing, auditioning, communication skills, personal growth, creativity and leadership.
The following is a summary of our available workshops. For more information and to schedule a workshop at your organization, please contact us here.
How To Achieve Your Goals
An interactive workshop for meetings, conferences, training and special events
People and organizations thrive on several key factors. Leadership, communication, creativity, and productivity expertise and skill contribute to success. Knowing how to perform at your best is important; acting on what you know is critical. Hard work and a sense of vision and purpose combined with relentless action are the keys to success. But nothing is more important than knowing how to set and achieve powerful goals.
This workshop provides keys to how to achieve your goals. Whether you are a business professional, artist, entertainer, educator, health care worker, or anyone with the desire to achieve more for yourself, for your organization, and for the improvement of the world, one of your best strategies for getting there is to constantly focus your dreams and ambition with powerful, passionate, achievable goals.
Program Highlights
When you book or attend How To Achieve Your Goals you can expect a lively, humorous, and motivating message that includes:
- What type of goal-setter are you?
- What do the most successful goal achievers say about setting and achieving goals?
- What are the facts on goals?
- What's so smart about SMART goals?
- How many goals should you set at a time?
- What prevents people from achieving their goals?
- What are the three most important things to do right now to move toward success at achieving your goals?
- How can you best develop distinctive values that will help you achieve your goals?
Ten Key Qualities
How To Achieve Your Goals shares insights and opportunities on ten key qualities that lead to increased creativity, communication, motivation, leadership, and results:
Giftedness: All people have talents and gifts that can be developed to help them achieve their goals.
Action: Sharing our talents and gifts encourages happiness in our selves and in others. Encouraging others to share their gifts creates mutually enjoyed energy for success.
Communication: Making every conversation meaningful, open, and honest facilitates intentional and successful results.
Exploring: Our gifts and our lives are meant to be explored, utilized, shared, optimized, and transformed. Life is a learning adventure. Opening ourselves to the spontaneous and to the unexpected creates vast opportunities for learning and success.
Practice: Achievement takes practice! Embrace imperfection and grow from there!
Love: Love is a renewable, limitless resource. Love encourages more love. We are free to choose a loving response to any interaction. We, and others, benefit every time we choose a loving response.
Service: The essential question is, "How can I help?"
Encouragement: Lifting, supporting, applauding, rewarding, and recognizing others increases practice and sharing.
Persistence: Staying motivated through each learning experience and relentlessly working to achieve your goals.
Leadership: Sharing inspiration and responsibility with the courage it takes to achieve success.
The Five Step Process for How To Achieve Your Goals
Knowledge is the first part of achieving your goals. Here is a a five step IDEAL plan, developed from our extensive experience and research into creating success. Each step includes one key question to ask yourself for focus and direction.
1. Identify your dream.
2. Drop whatever stands in your way.
- What is your dream?
3. Express a plan for success to people who matter.
- What stands in your way?
4. Act relentlessly on your plan.
- How will you achieve your dream?
5. Learn from feedback every day.
- What's next? What will you do next to work your plan?
That's the process -- the workshop will help you internalize that knowledge, inspire your plan, and propel you into action toward creating success.
- What have you learned today?
Creating and Sustaining Success
A weekly program for setting and achieving meaningful, passionate, life-affirming goals.
Have you ever set important goals only to see them fade away into the distance, unachieved?
Do you find yourself setting so many goals that you lose track of them and wonder whatever happened to the success you were expecting?
Creating and Sustaining Success is a weekly intensive, highly interactive program where you will take a fresh look at setting goals and put in place the actions you need to move forward with confidence, passion, and eagerness to achieve your highly prioritized goals.
Program Goals
- Identify your greatest goal opportunities
- Discover your gifts and focus your goals around your strengths, rather than your weaknesses
- Develop your capacity for goal achievement
- Learn and practice a process to optimize your results in every transaction and relationship
- Create a goal achievement plan that will energize your days and set you on a path toward transformational success
- Create and sustain meaningful success
What To Expect
Who Should Attend
- Meaningful conversations with your peers about your most important goals
- Highly interactive individual and group learning activities
- Stimulating conversation
- Insights from your peers and group coach
- Creative techniques and motivators
- Assessments that reveal your greatest opportunities
- Processes to help you pick, prioritize, and powerize your goals
- Enjoyable, relevant assignments that build your skills and momentum toward success
- Practice with a tool kit for optimizing your transactions and relationships as you drive forward to better results
>>Attend our program on "Creating and Sustaining Success"
- Creative artists, actors, and musicians who are looking to develop an edge that will lead to success
- Business professionals seeking a way to take their business and career to the next level of accomplishment
- Managers, supervisors, and leaders who seek to energize their teams and drive toward improved results
- Human resource professionals looking for a program to move performance management from a punitive to a energized culture
>>Bring our program for "Creating and Sustaining Success" to your organization
The Improv Workshop
Are you in touch with your inner artist? Are you looking for ways to dramatically improve your creativity?
Whether you are an experienced actor or someone looking to finally play the role of a life time, The Improv Workshop can be the spark that lights up your world.
During The Improv Workshop you'll explore the essential elements of improv and develop the senses, skills, and power you need to act and live more spontaneously.
Improvisational acting improves your ability to think fast, perform, and communicate more effectively in everything that you do. Each session you will work on fundamental skills and build on your ability to create possibilities, deal with all "offers", and refine a personal and group energy that is compelling and powerful.
Using a series of fun games and exercises you’ll be able to use each situation, each conversation, and each scene to your benefit and the delight of others.
Whether you’re an actor, aspiring performer, artist, or just someone who wants to have fun, you will enjoy this chance to explore the world of improv, creativity and artistic play.
Learn from an experienced actor, artist, musician and coach with a degree in theatre and years of touring in both structured and improvised performances.
The Improv Workshop is presented in weekly sessions.
We take a "good clean fun" approach to improv and so these workshops are suitable for all ages. Both children and adults find these games and exercises fun and challenging. Exploring improv and other forms of artistic play makes a great family night for your church or community organization and you'll be talking about it for months afterwards. To bring an improv workshop or series of workshops to your church or community organization, contact Doug.
The Improv Workshop is also great for:
- Team Building
- Staff retreats
- Congregational retreats
- Conventions
- Community center courses
- Conference sessions
- Parties
- Special events
Deeper Conversations
Strengthen your interpersonal dynamics
What could be more important that building and sustaining mutually helpful and respectful relationships? During this program you will explore your own personality traits, share stories and insights with others, and practice the keys to creating the deeper conversations that lead to more satisfying relationships.
You'll explore the joys and benefits of substantially deeper conversations, talking about what matters the most to you. Using a set of guidelines for effective dialogue, you'll experience communication from an authentic, radically true perspective. Without judging your conversational partners, you'll learn more about the relationships in your life and practice the skills that can solidify those relationships into satisfying, profoundly deep experiences.
Who needs to develop deeper conversational skills? Everyone! Imagine that you can increase your ability to understand and to be understood by those around you. Consider the feelings you'll share when your conversational partners feel listened to and appreciated.
During this workshop you will discover, explore, and practice how to:
Deeper Conversations provides you with the tools and practice that will make every conversation a more rich and fulfilling experience. People may begin to wonder why they enjoy talking with you so much, and you'll know exactly why.
- Create a series of agreements
- Listen actively and with empathy
- Understand your conversational partner's points and opportunity
- Express yourself openly, creatively, and authentically
- Share responsibility for success within your conversation and in the agreements you'll create
Deeper Conversations is also great for:
- Relationship building
- Couples conferences
- Team Building
- Leadership development
- Staff retreats
- Congregational retreats
- Conventions
- Acting companies
- Conference sessions
- Parties
- Coffee house sessions
- Special events
For more information and availability, contact Doug.
Understanding Yourself and Others
How to communicate more effectively
Do you realize that three-quarters of the people in the world see things fundamentally different than you do?
Do you ever wonder why some people are so hard to understand? Does conflict seem to slow you down and make you uncomfortable? What are the keys to interacting more effectively and communicating with anyone you meet?
During this one day study of interpersonal dynamics you will take and utilize a DISC assessment to bring new insights to how you interact with people and what it is that you, and others, are looking for in your relationships. The results may surprise and intrigue you as you explore the skills that powerful communicators use to establish rapport, build relationships, and achieve successful results.
Understanding Yourself and Others is also great for:
For more information or to schedule a session, contact Doug.
- Team Building
- Staff retreats
- Congregational retreats
- Conventions
- Conference sessions
- Parties
- Brainstorming sessions
- Special events
Conflict Resolution Skills
How to handle conflict more effectively
Did you know that people tend to follow the same pattern for handling conflict over and over -- even when it's not effective? What happens when communication breaks down or stops altogether? How do you handle a clash of perspectives or personalities?
Conflict Resolution Skills builds on the powerful work of Dr. Kenneth Thomas and Dr. Ralph Kilmann, utilizing their Conflict Resolution Instrument as a way of identifying our preferred patterns of conflict interaction and identifying the additional choices we have available.
During this session you'll explore the five basic conflict resolution strategies and determine which of the five you tend to over-use. You'll explore and practice a method of collaborative conflict resolution that provides hope for mutually beneficial outcomes rather than win/lose conflicts that simply perpetuate themselves.
Learn and practice how to:
- Assess your personal conflict style
- Practice handling unexpected conflict
- Create collaborate conversations that lead to reduced conflict
- Use conflict to your advantage, rather than getting stuck as a victim
- Expand your conflict resolution flexibility
- Avoid unnecessary conflict
- Compete fairly and vigorously when the situation requires
- Build better relationships through skill conflict management
Conflict Resolution Skills is also great for:
- Team Building
- Staff retreats
- Congregational retreats
- Conventions
- Leadership development
- Project launches
- Conference sessions
- Special events
For more information or to schedule a session, contact Doug.
Developing The Art of Leadership
A complete program for front line leaders
Leading teams and organizations today requires a balance of the creativity of an artist and the process precision of management. Supervisors, managers, pastors, consultants, professionals -- we're all leaders seeking to influence outcomes and inspire people. How we do that makes the difference between effort and success.
This ten session program will help you develop the skills that are most essential for leaders today. Using a combination of independent study, reading, coaching, action learning, and classroom dialogue you will explore, discover, and practice the competencies that drive organizations toward transformational results.
Each session is 3.5 hours long and includes a complete workbook.
For more information about public workshops, or to bring this program to your organization, please contact Doug.
- Leadership Foundations
- Recruiting for success
- Building effective teams
- Conversational Leadership
- Conflict Resolution
- Coaching and Feedback
- Leading Effective Meetings
- Presentation Skills for Leaders
- Leading Change and Innovation
- Developing productivity and shared leadership
Developing Creativity
A fun program to generate more ideas and enhance your creative life
Are you in touch with your inner artist? Are you looking for ways to dramatically improve your creativity?
During Develop Your Creativity you'll explore a variety of artistic approaches to unlock and magnify your creative joy. Improvisational acting improves your ability to think fast, perform, and communicate more effectively in everything that you do. Collage increases your spatial awareness and helps you create new inspiring connections. Music unifies your whole being and sparks previously untapped creativity. Storytelling and dialogue can improve both your self knowledge and your interpersonal dynamics.
The appreciation and creation of new works of art can lift your spirit to new heights.
Using a series of fun games and exercises you’ll be able to act and live more spontaneously.
Whether you’re an actor, aspiring performer, artist, or just someone who wants to have fun, you will enjoy this chance to explore the world of creativity and artistic play.
Learn from an experienced actor, artist, musician and coach with a degree in theatre and years of touring in both structured and improvised performances.
Developing Creativity is available as a full day workshop or three-day retreat.
We take a "good clean fun" approach to artistic play and so these workshops are suitable for all ages. Both children and adults find these games and exercises fun and challenging. Exploring improv and other forms of artistic play makes a great family night for your church or community organization and you'll be talking about it for months afterwards. To bring an improv workshop or series of workshops to your church or community organization, contact Doug.
Developing Creativity is also great for:
- Team Building
- Staff retreats
- Congregational retreats
- Conventions
- Conference sessions
- Parties
- Brainstorming sessions
- Special events
Are you interested in exploring one or more of these topics but not yet ready for a workshop? Check out our recommended reading and resources.
Do you have a training staff and an interest in delivering these programs at your organization? Contact Doug for details on purchasing our workshop facilitator's guides and training materials.
You may also be intererested in how to:
Comments or Questions? Contact us here.
Copyright 2008 Dorinda Dercar and Doug Smith.
