Wellbeing Courses

Proactively focusing on employee wellbeing is a concern for most organisations. Simultaneously, employees are more and more aware of the importance of maintaining the physical and mental health.

It’s definitely not an optional extra and professionals who sacrifice a focus on their wellbeing end up burning out and fail to reach their true potential.

Our approach to training in this area is to give delegates the insight and skills that contribute positively to the maintenance of their own wellbeing in their own organisational setting. We avoid meaningless fads and focus on what scientific evidence tells us about health, pressure and stress, and how to navigate the challenges that come our way.

Our wellbeing training courses cover a range of relevant topics and can be run as either in-house workshops or in a webinar format.

Our three categories of wellbeing programmes:

Psychological Flexibility

Thinking and behavioural skills which help us respond to life’s challenges more effectively and pursue our meaningful goals.

Working Sustainably

Skills that help us deal with pressure and stress and develop a way of working that’s sustainable over the longer term.

Bite-sized Learning

Brief workshops, covering a range of workplace wellbeing topics. Perfect for ‘learn at lunch’ sessions, offsite sessions or webinars for a distributed team.

“Richard’s talk was insightful, informative and gave me that a-ha moment! Richard listened to our brief for his talks intently and got the material spot on. We wanted a talk that went deeper into the science whilst keeping a clear everyday application. Richard has a skill of talking to a large audience in a very personal, individual way, this has been my highlight of our speaker series so far!”
Katie Beales, Senior Learning & Development SpecialistBCG Digital Ventures

Psychological Flexibility

Psychological Flexibility is a set of thinking and behavioural skills that supports holistic wellbeing, resilience and goal-attainment in the workplace.

By practicing these skills, we become more self-aware and mindful of our approach, we learn to use values rather than emotions to guide our behaviour, and we learn how to persist in the pursuit of meaningful goals.

The scientific evidence supporting psychological flexibility is extremely powerful and the approach has been used in a wide range of organisational settings to boost employee health and satisfaction at work. Principles-led, it can be developed in a variety of ways, which is reflected in our courses. Click here to learn more about the concept.

“We asked Richard to run a few of his ‘PsychFlex 101’ sessions and 55 of my colleagues signed up for the initial workshops.

I was really impressed with their feedback, and their comments in the brief online survey we used afterwards illustrated just how keen they were to learn more and start putting this all into practice.”

Lorraine O'Sullivan - Group People DirectorDentsu Aegis Network Ireland

Me at My Best: a guide to psychological flexibility

This is our flagship wellbeing programme, which represents an excellent deep-dive into all of the skills of psychological flexibility. Delegates learn and practice techniques to increase their mindful focus, to reduce the impact of their unwelcome thoughts and emotions, to deal effectively with psychological discomfort, and to put their values into practice on a daily basis.

They will learn the role of our thinking and emotions in our inner life and how to gain greater focus on what really matters each day.

This programme can be augmented by one-to-one coaching sessions in subsequent weeks, to trouble-shoot and clarify as delegates implement their learning and deal with real-world obstacles. ‘Me at my best’ can be run as an intensive one-day programme, a four-part online programme or a self-directed online learning experience. Get in touch to discuss your needs and to find out more.

Working Sustainability

Working sustainably is all about acquiring the skills to better respond to the challenges we encounter, while also developing a resilient mindset and helpful, healthy coping habits.

We challenge delegates to explore how they respond to setbacks and pressure and explain how changes to their mindset and habits will assist them in persisting in a healthy and sustainable way.

Our training programmes are highly interactive, memorable and evidence-based, with an emphasis on action-planning for sustainable behaviour change.

‘A mind like water’ – Dealing effectively with pressure and stress

This workshop demystifies job-related stress and explores the mind-body interface, so that delegates understand where their experience of stress comes from. We share a combination of thinking and behavioural skills to help delegate re-appraise pressure and respond to it in a more sustainable and effective way.

Delegates will learn how to deal more effectively with the things they can’t control and and how use healthy and sustainable coping strategies in the face of pressure.

‘Fit for the future’ – Developing a resilient outlook

This day-long workshop focuses on identifying appropriate thinking and behavioural responses to challenges and setbacks, and building an effective strategy for boosting resilience. We cover the building blocks of resilience, how to overcome setbacks and how to persist in the face of challenges.

This workshop can be augmented with the completion of a Resilience questionnaire (the RQi) and individual feedback, to provide a truly tailored and individual insight into their resilience journey.

Wellbeing Essentials

Bite-sized learning to boost your wellbeing

These 90 minute workshops represent an interactive and impactful way to introduce key wellbeing concepts to your employees. Designed to fit in with ‘learn at lunch’ or offsite gatherings, the sessions are designed to capture delegates’ attention and cover skills they can put into use immediately.

When operational arrangements mean day-long workshops aren’t practical, our Wellbeing Essentials sessions are a fantastic alternative. And for geographically-distributed teams, all of our Essentials sessions can be delivered remotely via webinar. Just get in touch to find out more.

Our Wellbeing Essentials workshops can also be run in combination as an ongoing wellbeing programme across several months. This ensures that a number of relevant and impactful topics are covered, with time in between to reflect, experiment and embed new habits.

Fresh Starts with Wellbeing

The perfect place to start! We explore what ‘wellbeing’ actually means, how previous attempts to make changes related to wellbeing haven’t always worked and how to take advantage of the psychology of the fresh start.  We’ll also look at how to cultivate new, healthy habits to kickstart meaningful personal change.

Coping with Pressure and Stress

Sources of stress are almost a given in the workplace. And while organisations need to focus on minimising sources of stress, it’s how we deal with the remaining stressors that matters. That said, not every coping strategy is equally healthy or sustainable. In this workshop, we look at some of the common difficulties we face, the importance of perceptions of control and the need to have a well-stocked ‘coping toolkit’.

Healthy Sleep Habits

Sleep represents the very bedrock of our wellbeing yet it’s also something we take for granted – and even deprive ourselves of! It’s fair to say that not investing in our sleep will undermine all our other attempts to be healthy. In this session, we bust common myths about sleep, explain how it contributes to our wellbeing and how sleep disturbance gets in the way of everything. We’ll share some simple but impactful tips for improving the quality and duration of your sleep.

Think about your thinking

Our minds are incredible thinking machines, but the ‘stuff’ they produce can often lead to unwelcome feelings and unhelpful behaviours. We can get caught up with worries, memories, assumptions and judgements, all to the detriment of the priorities right in front of us. This session teaches attendees key ‘defusion‘ skills, so they can see their thoughts for what they are – not what they say they are.

Compassion and Wellbeing

While it may not be a word we frequently hear at work, research has demonstrated the powerful impact of self-compassion and compassion for others when it comes to our wellbeing. In this session, we demystify what compassion actually is and explore some simple ways to develop a compassion habit.

Connect and Thrive

Connection with others at work is core to being human. When we don’t have enough, we experience loneliness and all its toxic health outcomes. This session explains the role of connection and allows delegates to better understand their own needs, while also learning simple, practical steps to improving their relationships with those around them. 

Dr. Richard MacKinnon has coached many of our employees over the past years and all have found him to be hugely beneficial for both work and personal life. Richard also recently completed a session on the benefits of sleep for our employees who have provided fantastic feedback on how the session has helped them through the challenging climate we are living in. The ‘Healthy Sleep Habits’ session gave fantastic insight into how such a simple and free thing can benefit you greatly!
Laura Bourke - People Solutions PartnerDentsu Aegis Network
“Given the challenging context we’re all living through at the moment, I asked Richard to run one of his webinars. The session was insightful, evidence-based, engaging and interactive. We learnt how the skills of psychological flexibility can be put into practice in our everyday lives and how they impact our wellbeing and resilience. I’d have no hesitation in recommending Richard and the WorkLifePsych team when it comes to workplace wellbeing events”
Ed Ling - Chief Growth and Operations OfficerMediaCom

Healthy at Home

With so many people working from home, either on a permanent or occasional basis, it’s important to remember how this new context can impact our wellbeing. This workshop explains what to pay attention to when maintaining your psychological, physical and social wellbeing while working away from the office. From the importance of your workstation set-up, the benefits of proactive communication, and why managing boundaries with intent is key to avoiding burnout.

Mindfulness Essentials

A mindful focus on the here and now is one of the core skills of Psychological Flexibility. Yet our workplaces are littered with distractions and we’re actively encouraged to multi-task! This multi-tasking can lead to anxiety and overwhelm, which is where mindfulness comes in. This session represents an interactive and accessible introduction to developing mindful focus and attention management, to give delegates the ability to better notice when their attention wanders and how to direct it where it’s most helpful.

Resilience Essentials

Frequently misunderstood, resilience is simply a collection of skills that help us deal with life’s challenges. There’s no one, perfect way to be resilient, so context is very important. That said, we know how our thinking, our emotions and our behaviour can either support or undermine our resilience, so this session serves as the perfect introduction to making resilience-enhancing changes.

Developing Psychological Flexibility

Psychological flexibility is a skill set that boosts our wellbeing and sense of meaning and purpose. It can be described as the ability to focus on the present moment, to detach ourselves from unhelpful thoughts and emotions and take action in the directions of what really matters to us in life. This workshop explains how these skills work and how to start building psychologically flexibility habits.

Healthy Use of Technology

In our 21st century lives, technology is pervasive – at work and at home. While our devices can doubtless make life easier, they can also get in the way of us being the kind of person we’d like to be. Whether it’s mindless scrolling on social media or the inability to step away from the email inbox at night, this session explores how to cultivate a healthier relationship with our technology, without abandoning it completely!

Discussing Wellbeing and Stress

There are any number of topics that we can find uncomfortable to discuss, but our wellbeing and that of our colleagues needn’t be one. In this session, we explore how to raise the topic, how to respond effectively when someone else raises it, and some of the ways we can have an effective, compassionate and quality conversation as a result.