Author: Iulia Grosman

What are the Mechanics of a Burnout?

Knowing the dynamics and mechanics of a burnout can be extremely valuable. Burnouts do not come into being from one day to another but are often the effects of a long-term process. It can sometimes take up to ten full years for a burnout that has long been brewing to settle in. Knowing the mechanics of a burnout and being vigilant of the early warning signs can help you to potentially prevent burnouts from happening.

 

 

The chief candidates for receiving a burnout are often people with a high professional drive that desire to work and tend to work hard. These simple facts can act to masquerade many of the early signs of a burnout and might prevent anyone from noticing that a burnout is about to set in. Understanding the professional causes and individual characteristics, as well as the behavioural, emotional, and physical warning signs can help you to detect things much earlier and take action.

 

 

Who is Anne?

Anne de Wergifosse is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés, she is passionate about individual and collective support. She delivers the How to Prevent Burnout at the European School of Administration, as well as many tailor-made team buildings for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

 

 

How to Finish a Project and Avoid Procrastination?

It can be very tempting to postpone things you do not like doing towards the future. This phenomenon is known as procrastination. There can be a myriad of reasons to procrastinate. Maybe you are missing a certain tool or are missing some data that requires an unpleasant phone call to get a hold of. Whatever your reasons may be, and no matter how natural this behaviour may be, you will still want to avoid falling into this trap.

 

 

A convenient mental trick to get yourself to act in a timelier fashion it to give yourself a shot of ‘artificial adrenaline’. You can take a stopwatch and allocate yourself a specific amount of time for a clearly defined specific task. It helps to think of yourself as an expensive consultant: your time is very valuable and wasting it on procrastination is a very expensive proposition that needs to be avoided. Make sure you have all the necessary preparation at hand, start the clock, and get cracking.

 

With this simple trick of the mind, you should have a much easier time to get yourself to both start and finish a well-defined task in an absolute record time!

 

 

Fight Procrastination with Artificial Adrenaline!

 

 

Who is Sabine?

Sabine Finzi is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés, she is passionate systemic coaching. She delivers Facing Change at the European School of Administration, as well as Overwhelmed working at home? Drawing the line between professional and private lives for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

 

 

How identifying your own values may help develop your resilience?

Work can be a complex and occasionally frustrating affair, an opportunity to develop your resilience. Just the thought of this can be a rather stressful event. Though it is worth noting that work itself is unlikely to become less complex itself, there are still plenty of things you can do to feel better prepared and more confident about it. Identifying and remaining loyal to the values that guide you in life is a key aspect of this.

 

 

Regardless of how crucial and impactful these values are to us we still rarely examine them or actively apply them to situations occurring in our daily work life. Becoming better aware of our values and viewing day to day situations through their lens can help us use them more effectively as guides in our lives. It also helps us to better identify sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in our daily lives. In that way, they can aid us in becoming more satisfied at work.

 

 

Who is Heather?

Heather Nehring is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés. She delivers the Developing your Resilience at the European School of Administration, as well as many its online version. She facilitates the training course Handling Difficult Situations for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

 

 

How to Organise Your Writing?

It is a common occurrence: you need to do a lot of writing in a relatively short amount of time. This may seem like a rather daunting and potentially stressful situation. Luckily, the simple act of bringing some organisation into your work can help you a lot in working more effectively and efficiently when a lot of writing needs to be done.

 

 

When faced with a massive amount of work it can often help to take a minute in advance to map out what exactly you will be doing. Writing is by no means an exception to this. Questions you can ask yourself include what kind of text you need to produce, for whom, why it needs to be written, as well as when it needs to be done by.

 

Specifically, we can focus on the what and the who questioned stated above. Knowing what kind of document you need to produce can help you a lot in establishing what exactly needs to be done in terms of writing and selecting information. A short note for example requires significantly fewer details and examples than a more elaborate briefing, let alone a long report. Tracking down and filtering the right information becomes significantly easier once you have determined the nature of the document.

 

For whom you are writing is also crucial in making your job just a tad bit easier. Putting yourself into your potential reader’s shoes makes it much easier to determine what exactly they need. What is it that they need to know? Are there things you can safely assume them to already be aware of? Only including the relevant information should save both you and your reader valuable time.

 

Pausing for a moment and asking yourself these very simple questions should give keep you from making many a common mistake.

 

What? Who? Why? Where? When? How?

 

Who is Alex?

Alex Townley is one of our key trainer at AIM & Associés. He delivers Writing with Impact and Writing with Impact while Teleworking the European school of administration. He can help you organise your writing when you are under stress, in order to report back to the hierarchy in a more efficient way.

 

 

We propose remote delivery in times of crisis.

In less than 2 weeks, we adapted our offer to remote delivery, taking into account your new needs. The offer is via several online plateforms, respects GDPR security issues, favour an easy registration process via EULearn, proposes additional technical support and friendly course schedule to each and everyone situation.

 

Online Plateform

Online courses are designed and delivered through Zoom as it favours interactivity and small groups peer learning. Participants may attend training without downloading anything on their computer. Adaptation to other plateform might be enquired upon request (Webex, MS Teams, etc.).


GDPR Security

Under a KS-12 Zoom Education licence, all 20 adjustments required by the European Institutions have been applied to ensure the security and privacy of participants is respected.

 

Registration Process

While online plateform and links are managed by AIM, online registration is managed by the course managers through EU Learn or their official learning plateform. AIM directs all messages towards the course managers only, not to participants.

 

Technical Support

Frequent technical support to ensure that participants are able to connect to Zoom, their audio and their camera device is organised few days before training. Technical support slots and details are communicated by AIM once order is confirmed.

 

Course Schedule

All courses follow a standard morning schedule (09:00-12:30) including two short breaks. Participants are encouraged to join the virtual classroom 25 minutes before the course starts, for additional technical support and set-up.The 90 minutes afternoon Q&A takes place from 14:00 to 15:30.


Tailor-made Design

AlM is ready to design and develop further tailor-made courses specific to your needs or adapt additional previous face-to-face courses to online learning.

 

Further details & order process

All requests and orders may be directed to adw@aim-associes.com.

What are the dimensions of a negotiation?

There are many dimensions to a negotiation. Becoming aware of these dimensions and mastering a toolbox of micro-skills can greatly help you to navigate the day-to-day challenges you will encounter in a professional environment. Having a greater awareness of these dimensions, as well as of yourself and of the challenges you may face will enable you to choose between many different approaches and options more freely.

 

 

Besides awareness, several other dimensions deserve some further attention. Confidence for example is also a crucial key element in navigation day-to-day negotiations. Being able to confidently assess a situation and make decisions on the most favourable course of action is key to tackling issues. This even holds true when these issues might arrive completely out of the blue, and an ad hoc action is required.

 

Finally, besides confidence on your own side, it is also crucial to be able to inspire confidence in your negotiation partners: creating a mutual ambiance of confidence is much more beneficial to all involved than fostering an air of manipulation. Being aware of all of these dimensions and getting the chance to work on them should greatly help you to structure your actions and to enable you to further your development.

 

 

Inspire confidence in your negotiation partners.

 

 

Who is Serge?

Serge Wynen is one of our key trainer and coach at AIM & Associés, he is passionate about fostering awareness, learning and confidence. He delivers Day-to-day Negotiation at the European School of Administration.

 

How to chair a meeting?

 

Having effective meetings can be a daunting exercise. This holds especially true when we are talking about a meeting amongst peers without a formal hierarchy or a formal chairperson. Even under those circumstances there are some tips, tricks, and formulae you can use to make your meetings more streamlined and effective.

 

 

 

The fact that the meeting has no formal chair does not need to mean that there can be no role division of tasks. You can even argue that in this case having a role division only becomes more important. One effective and interesting way you can divide tasks is by looking into the three P’s.

 

The first of these P’s is the P for Product. The person in charge of Product makes sure that that the meeting has clear objectives, as well as a workable agenda. This person is essential for making sure the meeting is effective and does not stray too much of the path.

 

The second P stands for Process. No meeting can be effective without proper time management, so it is important that someone keeps close watch on this. This task can be neatly combined with taking notes or minutes of the meeting to make sure that the discussions and their outcomes will not be lost from memory in due time.

 

Lastly there is the P for People. Everyone in a meeting has a reason to be there and has the potential to contribute something meaningful to it. The important and rewarding task to make sure this diversity of thought and experience is used to its fullest falls to the person in charge of this P.

 

Giving some thought into who will take which task can make your meetings much more structured, effective, and efficient. Of course, there is no reason that the same person should always have the same tasks, so feel free to shake things up a bit every once in while!

 

 

Product

Process

People

 

 

Who is Anne?

Anne de Wergifosse is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés, she is passionate about individual and collective support. She delivers the Productive Team Meetings at the European School of Administration, as well as many tailor-made team buildings for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

 

 

Where to start when there is too much work to do?

No matter how stressful a situation may be when there is too much work to do, it is important to keep one key fact in mind: no good will ever come from panicking. Taking a deep breath and getting yourself a nice and warm cup of coffee or a glass of water is much more effective than diving right into the action like a headless chicken.

 

 

 

Now that you are relaxed again the next step in establishing order is to record every single thing you still need to do, down to the very smallest of chores. This may seem daunting but will help you to establish order further down the road.

 

The next step is to also record why all of this work need to be done. Is the task for today’s meeting, a favour to the boss, or a more long-term priority? Writing this down and becoming consciously aware of this will help you to be more effective.

 

Whilst you are doing this it might become clear that some of these tasks fit together logically. Maybe they are all part the same mini project, or all use the same software. Make sure to group these together so that you can also do them together.

 

The final step is to create realistic expectations about when your listed tasks can and will be finished: not everything can be done right this very moment, and neither is that necessary. It is important that you are honest about this both for yourself and towards those around you.

 

At the end of this whole process you will have created both an effective to-do list, and a to-do later list. These will help you navigate even some of the tougher stressful situations with a clear mind, and a much greater personal effectiveness.

 

 

Don’t spend time panicking,

spend time planning ;)!

 

 

Who is Katie?

Katie Challans is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés. She delivers the Personal Effectiveness course at the European School of Administration, as well as its online version. She can help you master your day as well as your outlook on things ;).

 

 

How to Improve your Public Speaking?

Many people have a great fear of public speaking. Having a safe environment in which to practice and learn from and together with your peers can greatly help you to improve your ability to speak in practice. Public speaking is best not viewed in isolation. By receiving feedback you can become aware of what you are already doing well and get rewarded for continuing to do it. The setting of interpersonal communication also allows you to gain a great amount of ideas for improving yourself, followed up by plenty of immediate chances to work on those improvement points.

 

 

 

Self-confidence can often be key in delivering a good performance in public speaking. Having the gusto to keep active eye contact, thus remaining in touch with your audience, can greatly increase the impact of an act of public speaking. Simultaneously you will get the chance to practice your verbal skills, your tone of voice and pacing, as well as effective use of body language. Other focus points include making sure your words are effectively structured as well as the often forgotten, but nonetheless crucial emotional content of your message. Practicing a great deal in a highly interpersonal setting therefore greatly helps you to accelerate your growth as a public speaker.

 

Who is Jean-François?

Jean-François Abeloos is one of our key trainers at AIM & Associés, he is passionate about Emotional Intelligence. He delivers Oral Communication and Oral Communication while Teleworking at the European School of Administration, as well as Conflict Resolution for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

 

 

How to Manage Conflict and Still Feel Well?

As unpleasant though they may be, interpersonal conflicts of all sorts and sizes happen and will happen to all of us. Invariably someone will end up pushing your buttons, end you are faced with the consequences of it. No matter how unpleasant this feeling may be, there are certain things you can do to manage conflict while still feeling well.

 

 

The natural response that we tend to default to when faced with conflict is the so-called outward approach. We will blame the other person for the fact that we feel bad. Using this mindset, the logical next step would be to seek to change the situation, first and foremost by trying to get the other person to change their behaviour. Though this approach can work in certain rare cases, putting the onus completely on the other makes for a tiresome and exasperating approach. Instead, it might be worthwhile to realise that when someone manages to push your buttons, the problem lies with you having these buttons in the first place.

 

That brings us to a different way of tackling this situation: the inward approach. Instead of shoving the blame of an unpleasant situation onto someone else, we instead take a break and truly listen to ourselves. Instead of initially focusing on the mental side of this problem, we focus on the physical. Truly listening and experiencing your own heartbeat, breath and general physical sensation can help you acknowledge what you are feeling and give it a place. You might start to notice patterns when you do this: do you often feel the same way or have the same thoughts over and over. Becoming aware of this is a good first step in regaining control of yourself and to stop seeing yourself as a passive victim.

 

Using the inward approach rather than the outward approach can help you to master yourself and develop a greater self-awareness. It also prevents you from getting stuck in a dynamic of blaming others or fruitlessly trying to master external circumstances. This should help you to manage conflict, while still feeling well.

 

 

 

How skilled are you to adopt an inward approach to conflicts?

 

 

Who is Séverine?

Séverine Buyse is an AIM Trainer & Coach, facilitating resilience and wellbeing training for the EU Institutions for the past 10 years. She delivers the Create your own Wellbeing in Times of Crisis at the European School of Administration, as well as Compassionate Communication for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.