If you would prefer to watch a video of this blog, there is a link below. If you prefer to read, here is the text from the video.
I get asked all the time “What is the Hot Button Workshop all about?”.
It sounds like an easy question, and it is, but there is some deeper context to it.
I’m going to start with what it’s not about. It’s not about infotainment, it’s not lighthearted, it’s not entertaining. It’s more like a college level course on human behaviour. Not observational based human behaviour but how and why people react the way they do. What can we do about managing the risk of things going off in an awkward direction, and how to redirect back to a state where we can avoid escalations and purposefully de-escalate when things do go askew.
So what do we study? We study psychology, biology, instinctive response systems, how interactions unfold and how to manage interactions as they unfold.
Now the question, again, what is the hot button workshop all about? A good answer is, it’s about different things to different people. If you’re in management, it’s about how to manage people when they’re not performing at their best. If you’re in a personal situation it’s about how to manage interactions better so you can draw closer rather than drifting apart. If it’s about your internal reaction to your personal experience, it’s about how our brains operate, how we get triggered and how to diffuse that emotion so it doesn’t impact the way you’re interacting with others or your performance.
This is all serious stuff, it’s not infotainment. It’s not to be expected that you are going to come into this workshop, whether delivered live in person, live online, or on self directed video using our LMS (learning management system). Within all of those formats we will be touching on potentially, for some, sensitive topics while we learn what happens when we get triggered, how to detect when we get triggered and how to manage our reactions to our triggers. Because at the base of it we are all pretty much the same, we all react to whatever is coming at us. If we get triggered and react in a triggered way then we are likely to trigger whoever we are interacting with and we will have a high risk of things escalating. And when those chasms are formed between people, we don’t work well together, or live well together, or interact well socially with each other. These are cultural problems that we can all easily observe.
For example, when we talk about corporate culture, what are we really talking about? We are talking about a culture at a place of work that includes a common social culture and all the team member’s personal lived experience, or culture. We can ask, what is corporate culture in the first place? Is it making a statement that our client or our product or our people are important to us? Or is it about being able to act in a way that demonstrates your stated cultural priorities are actually important to your organization because it’s consistently expressed in observable behaviour.
That’s really the power of the hot button workshop. It’s enormously informative, and it’s serious stuff. So, again, don’t expect to be entertained. Expect to be informed.
We’re looking forward to meeting you and sincerely hope that you choose to reach out to us so we can start the conversation together. There is a fascinating and mutually beneficial journey ahead.
Thank you for your time.
James Lauber, Director of Business Development for GraftOn-SST and Lead Facilitator for the Hot Button Workshop
Here is the link for the video version of this blog: https://vimeo.com/666121241/b1e6e0b3ab