Category: stories

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.

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.

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.

We have all faced this situation at some point: you need to prepare for a negotiation, and you do not rightly know how. Luckily, there are many things you can do to prepare yourself in this situation. One of the tools you can use is making a strategic analysis of all the people and parties involved in a negotiation (including yourself). Having the right information after all, is key for being adequately prepared.

The first part of the analysis is pinning down is the likely objective of the parties involved in a negotiation. What do you think the goals are they are trying to achieve? An example of this could be being confronted with a status quo-oriented party that wants things to remain exactly as they are.

Having determined the goal of the negotiation a logical follow-up step is to then start looking at the assets that a given party can bring to the table. What is it that they have to offer, and what might help them in pushing for their goals? If we continue our example from the previous paragraph, our status quo-oriented negotiator might have an almost dazzling command of the facts and can positively drown you and everyone else in them to try to stall the negotiations.

Of course, no-one only has assets. There can also be limiting factors that can prevent you from achieving your goals: constraints. It is well imaginable that our status quo partner might have poor relations with the other parties in a negotiation and is not particularly well-liked.

No analysis of a negotiation can be complete without figuring out what the stakes for the parties involved are. What can a party gain from a negotiation, or conversely, what do they stand to lose if things fall apart. Drawing upon our example again, the status quo negotiation might be confronted with a substantially increased workload should the negotiation not go their way.

Now that we have made an analysis of all the elements involved in the strategic analysis, we should be able to extrapolate an effective strategy from these elements. If we do a similar analysis for ourselves and all the other parties involved in a negotiation we should be able to have a both a solid idea of the strategy we will be using, and have a good idea of what to expect from our fellow negotiators. Good luck!

Who is Neil?

Neil Urquhart is a veteran communication skills trainer, coach and facilitator with 20+ years international experience on four continents in Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Egypt, Sweden, Spain and the UK. He delivers the Day-to-day Negotiation at the European School of Administration, as well as Analysing and Solving Problems in Times of Crisis for the European Institutions, agencies and bodies.