Day 2

This workshop takes the ideas in Mario’s presentation further, expanding to personal strategies as well as those for the future of work, including implications for the age of A.I..

You’ll be guided through a handful of techniques and exercises that should help you improve your thinking, emotions, time, benefits, and worldview, both in your personal life and professionally.

Opening ourselves up to nature as a teacher and guide can help us enhance our education and connect with the world around us. It can also help us become better leaders by learning from nature’s wisdom.

How can we integrate nature-based education and leadership into our learning experiences? How can we design learning opportunities that encourage learners to explore, discover, and align with the creative principles of life? For 3.8 billion years, nature has been evolving and creating the conditions for life on Earth.

By listening deeply to nature, we can gain a better understanding of ourselves and our potential.

In times of challenge and stress, it’s natural for parents to doubt their own parenting abilities and become more anxious, restrictive, and intrusive. Sometimes in high stress times, a parent’s sense of humor goes into hiding. The world-wide mental health crisis we are seeing among youth today is due to these reactions in our families and our schools.

There is a way out and that is to foster greater trust, collaborative problem solving, creativity, and reducing stress through humor. In this workshop, we will show you how to accomplish this – whether in your own household or with parents you encounter professionally.

Paired with Leo Thompson’s “Levelling up with ‘Learning to Learn Skills’”.

Following on from Leo’s day 1 presentation, this very practical workshop will apply neuroscience and involve participants in an interactive experience in which they will walk away with new learnings and new skills.

These skills will help participants take their ability to learn to the next level as they begin to integrate it into a metacognitive, self-regulating, experiential, higher-order learning framework which they can use as part of a tool kit for life. Built on the research of gamechangers, iCanStudy, this taster session will leave you wanting to go further down the rabbit hole of powerful learning skills, which can be fully experienced in iCanStudies’ training program – already with many complimentary resources on the Internet.

Leo is looking forward to a fun session with his participants on a topic closely aligned with social-emotional learning.

Paired with Ed Dunkelblau & Maurice J. Elias’s “Emotionally Intelligent Parenting in difficult times: It’s the laughter you’re after”.

What is the relevance of empathy in the age of AI? Empathy is the ability to both feel and understand what others feel and to imagine different points of view. It is essential for enjoying the arts, forming positive personal relationships, and creating solutions to complex, global problems. Empathy engages our head, heart and hands. It’s a crucial part of what makes us human.

Yet, feeling and caring, especially in response to the suffering of others, has its costs. “Unconscious empathy can trigger empathic distress, which can lead to apathy, ill-health, and burnout. Come learn about the different facets of empathy, and how it impacts our well-being. During this session, we’ll explore how to activate “conscious empathy” while we work to create a more just and caring world.

Join this workshop to understand more fully this essential, complex, and trainable human quality: compassion, and to learn some easy practices to cultivate it for yourself.

Emory University’s program CBCT® (Cognitively Based Compassion Training) reflects the coming together of the rich lojong tradition (“mind-training” tradition of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism) and recent scientific understanding. The protocol relies on perspectives from both worlds to provide a program accessible to people of diverse backgrounds, including those with a strong faith tradition and those with none.

CBCT understands compassion as a natural capacity of the human heart and is designed to expand our compassion and make it more inclusive. In this way, compassion is understood as a capacity or a skill that can be trained like any other. Much like learning to speak a language or to play a sport or musical instrument, compassion can become effortless and spontaneous through practice. And notably, it is never too late to start. Neuroscientists have established that intentional efforts to train our minds produce measurable and lasting impacts on the structure of our brains, no matter our background or age.

In this interactive workshop, join us to explore CBCT’s eight sequential steps for training compassion. Participants will come away with practical approaches they can apply in their everyday lives.

In this workshop participants will engage with SEE Learning® (Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning).

SEE Learning is an education program designed for students in pre-school through university. Participants gain knowledge of the underlying science that informs the program while engaging in the activities and reflections that foster the cultivation of attention, self-compassion, systems thinking, and other competencies that promote mental health.

Through this workshop experience participants not only know what SEE Learning is and how it works, they will gain access to personal strategies and practices that foster personal flourishing and wellbeing. Personal connections will be made to help participants bridge conceptual understandings to applied practices so that they are empowered to engage in the SEE Learning practices.