My Excellent Life

Virtually all professional speakers, presenters and facilitators know (just as I was taught) that if you want to prevent disagreement during a public workshop or seminar (and you want positive evaluations from your participants) you must carefully control, or even avoid completely if possible, anything having to do with the following topics:

• Race
• Religion
• Sex
• Ethnicity
• politics

How can you avoid of these potentially explosive, extremely sensitive topics when underlying them are questions about Values?

Living in an increasingly contentious world of dwindling resources, multi-cultural perspectives, exploding populations and instant access to communications and information, how do we open the dialogue on these sensitive topics and the underlying values-issues that run through them? The looming clash of cultures and ideologies, and perhaps even the future of all human kind, may depend upon how human beings resolve “questions of value.”

And it’s not only on the world stage that these questions of values (or lack of) cause conflict and pain. Every human relationship is founded on one set of values or another. Families, communities, businesses and organisations large and small sooner or later have to face the question of values if they are to continue to survive and grow.

• What are your values?
• Where did you get them?
• Do they really matter?
• Are your values as “good” as the spouse or partner or of those of your co-workers
• Do people really act on the values they purport to extol?
• Are you instilling the “right” values in your children?

What will I learn:

Sorry! There are no guarantees for this workshop. No workshop presenter in Australia or anywhere else I have found for that matter, has been able to produce a commercially successful, publicly embraced “values workshop”, until now.

We can guarantee that you will have an interesting experience. You will also get the opportunity to:

• Learn to use a tool that will help you to examine your own values and place them on a hierarchical scale.
• Learn how your intimate relationship can benefit by using T.I.G.E.R.S values
• Learn how to use T.I.G.E.R.S values in all your relationships personal and professional. Your intimate relationship will benefit profoundly.
• Consider a philosophical perspective that suggests most of what people “value” i.e. Freedom, justice, equality, honour, truth etc.” are merely “sub-values” subservient to a “scientifically verifiable, universal life value.”

 

This workshop comes with a Warning and a Request

. Warning: This workshop is rated “R.” “R” for real world. R-rated values issues will be discussed and it is likely they will illicit strong emotion (which is one of the issues we will exam). Please do not attend if you feel you do not want to have your cherished ideas and values challenged (perhaps you remember the people of Athens killed Socrates for merely asking questions about values related issues).

The Request is that you challenge us (i.e. your colleagues and instructor) with your honest views.

Some of the topics, concepts, experiences we will entertain during the workshop.

• Consider our nomination for the two most influential, intellectual, “value hero’s” of all time … no not Christ or Mohammad or Buddha or Galileo or … well who do you think?
• Nominate your own intellectual, physical and or personal hero for inclusion in this course (be prepared to elaborate and defend your nomination). In fact, just who is a hero? And why?
• Consider a philosophical perspective that suggests most of what people “value” i.e. Freedom, justice, equality, honour, truth etc.” are merely “sub-values” subservient to a “scientifically verifiable, universal life value.”
• Take a survey that will help you to examine your own values and place them on a hierarchical scale.
• Examine why boxing, singing out loud and dancing are more important to teaching values than studying the Bible! (how does one teach values anyway?)
• If values are the ultimate motivator and determiner of human behaviour, then why does merely being in a hurry dramatically diminish “values driven behaviour?” And what does the expression “fatigue make cowards of us all” really mean?
• A large person is unjustifiably screaming obscenities at you as he approaches. He angrily shoves you into a wall ? What do you do? And if your answer is “it depends?” If the perpetrator’s actions were totally unjustifiable, why does it depend on anything? What does that have to do with values?
• Social Psychology suggests that “a lot more than values” determines our behaviour. What determines our behaviour if not our values? These same social psychologists suggest Australians, more than ever before and more than many other cultures, commit the “fundamental attribution error?” Why is it so strong in our culture? Should it be?
• And much more…

Come and enjoy getting “comfortably uncomfortable,” and allow your belief systems and comfort zones to be challenged. Come and:

• take some short values surveys
• share your “hero stories”
• learn about the so-called “universal, life value
• meet other people who have as much interest in values as you do

Come and have an “Excellent Values” experience.

  Excellent Values Flyer (pdf)