Overview of preventive products

• Personal coaching
Personal coaching is intended for lower and leading personnel wanting to increase their effectiveness, seeking to reflect on their professional functioning, looking for guidelines to deal with bottlenecks. Cases in point are: strengthening of personal effectiveness, development of leadership qualities, acting in a forthright and decisive manner, and learning to handle emotions. Balans & Impuls also offers much coaching to managers to work consciously to increase personal effectiveness and to achieve the desired objectives in the development of the organisation. Coaching consists of intake/diagnostics, drawing up an action plan for 8-10 coaching sessions.

• Coaching online
Coaching online is intended as support and practical training in case of minor mental complaints, stress or problems. After having made an inventory of your questions and bottlenecks, a plan is drawn up. On line sessions are combined with exercises and guidelines to work on at home and on the job. If your functioning in professional and private life is seriously hampered by some complaints, we offer you professional guidance from a psychologist or some other expert. Coaching online consists of 5 - 10 sessions.

• Group training: Mental resilience in an emotionally demanding profession
Some professions involve more confrontation with human suffering than others. Rescue workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance personnel, soldiers, police officers and firemen are examples. It is their job to assist others in emergency situations, to ensure safety and to increase chances of survival.
It is rewarding work if you can make a difference and save lives. On the other hand, you are confronted with the harsher aspects of the world we live in. You can get first hand experience of the fragility of life, which can come to an abrupt end. You also may have to cope with strong and emotional reactions of pain, grief and anger of precisely those people you want to help. As someone said: ‘On the thin line between life and death, you find out what life is really about’.

Take care of yourself first, then of your comrades
The dictum ‘Take care of yourself first, then of your comrades’ is of military origin. You can only help others if you have taken care of your own health, not only physically, but also mentally; the latter is often overlooked. Especially professional rescue workers need a high mental resilience. They really need some guidelines to maintain their mental condition, especially when they are exposed to an (over)dose of dramatic events. This mental training provides practical guidelines to maintain you mental condition in emotionally demanding work.

• Group training: Humane Management
Practical development of a humane style of leadership: you learn to get the best out of your vital staff members. You adopt guidelines for steering people with respect for their identity and personal ‘instructions for use’.

De difference between success and failure is made by knowledge and skills, the interplay between lower and leading employees, organisation and private life. The personal mental make up of the employees is also crucial. What are his ‘instructions for use’? Or, as someone in a leading position told me: ‘when I buy a CD-player, a manual is always included; a person’s manual can only be learned by trial and error’.

Training in humane management provides a vision enabling you to limit the errors and to realise an active positive cooperation with your employee, also in case of disfunctioning and psychological shortcomings. The book “Hoe mensen werken” (How people work), written by drs. Heilwine Bakker, dr. Liesbeth Eurelings-Bontekoe and prof. dr. Anthony Gaillard is included in the training.

• Group training: Balance between work and private life
‘Balance’ is a buzz word nowadays. Sometimes you feel like a tight rope walker, cautiously balancing between home and work, stress and relaxation, discharging and loading energy. How to keep your balance? How to keep private life and work healthy, nice and exciting? By managing yourself consciously and carefully. Our course Balans in Werk en Leven (Balance between work and private life) has been developed to help you with exactly this.
The aim of the game is to find a healthy balance between demands imposed on you and by you on the one hand and the need to relax on the other hand. Managing your personal capacities and making choices is the guiding principle.

• Team coaching
Teamwork of employees to realise a product or a service is quite common nowadays. Everybody wants to cooperate in a pleasant way. Still, we all are often confronted with stress, irritations and frustrations. Some people work hard, others are cutting corners, some people vent their anger on their colleagues, others are doing their own thing quietly. It is quite a challenge to cooperate with many different people for a common goal. Fixed patterns always emerge in interpersonal relations. These patterns can be healthy or ineffective. It is difficult for members of the team to get a clear view on these patterns and change them for the better. Such changing needs good coaching.

Team coaching is intended for teams with stagnating cooperation, or wanting to improve their style of cooperation. A coaching program is drawn up based on a team analysis. Such an analysis consists of interviews with team members and an observation of a meeting, resulting in a report with conclusions and recommendations. The training program consists of 2-3 training days and 2-3 sessions “training on the job” during a routine meeting.

Structure and objective of the group trainings
The trainings as mentioned above last three days, distributed over a period of three months. The second day takes place two weeks after the first one and the follow-up after six or eight weeks. The group consists of up to 12 members. The trainings are given by academically trained psychologists. The group is split in two parts regularly, giving ample opportunity to put the guidelines into practice.