Corporate & Executive Workshops

 

Your Creative Zone
Igniting Hidden Gifts and Untapped Talents PART 1

Your Creative Zone is a course that demonstrates how to use creativity to strengthen, enrich, and spread resources of effectiveness to targeted areas of business. Thereby facilitating a clean transfer of the individual and team’s creative resources to areas where participants are less effective.

Participants will be able to solve problems and achieve goals in a more organic and systemic way. When new strengths are discovered, released, and developed, suddenly things that were problems are no longer problems anymore because they resolve naturally and easily.

People are often not aware of the thinking they use when they are being effective or even brilliant. This course examines the structure and principles behind individual, and team, skills of excellence. This practical course identifies what works and makes more of it; thus increasing the productivity of individuals, teams, and whole organizations.

Participants will explore their own creative processes and areas of effectiveness. The innovative strategies that will be taught are cognitive processes that are independent of content, which can then be analyzed and adapted for other areas of business, such as solving organizational problems, delegating, or product development. 

Participants will learn:

• Use everyday states of consciousness that support insight and creativity
• Methods for discovering and exploring one’s own creative process and refining it
• What to do when “blocked”
• How to develop effectiveness in targeted areas of business
• To discover and spread resourceful strategies and skills for lateral use in many other contexts of business – taking what works and making more of it

 

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Your Creative Zone
Igniting Hidden Gifts and Untapped Talents PART 2

Almost every product or service of a business is the result of human creativity. It was long thought that creativity can’t be taught.  One had to be born with it. Are there actual steps that can access and amplify creativity? Imagine a team where the individual creative styles of its members form something more powerful than the sum of its parts?

Creativity tends to be thought of as an individual experience that occurs “naturally,” in unique ways. Creative people, for the most part, are not aware of the mental elements they use while being innovative. This course examines the structure and principles of creativity and flashes of insight. These principles are put to practical use by identifying and adding to the creativity of the participants, thus increasing the productivity of individuals, teams, and whole organizations.
 

In additional to Part 1, participants will learn:

• Specific ways to enhance, stimulate, and direct creativity in individuals AND teams
• Techniques for identifying different types of creative people
• How to manage group inventiveness, i.e. building teams with innovative synergy
• How to identify employees with potential and ability to contribute to what is needed
   

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Who Should Attend?

All levels of company employees that relate to the company’s products or services. Any employee wanting to increase his/her effectiveness in a specific area of business.
 

"Todd was able to connect with everyone on various levels, helping us to see different perspectives and gain clarity within ourselves in a time when our professional path was unknown."

Individual Workshops

One-On-One Creative Breakthrough Training

What if. . .

Someone listened to your words and what’s behind them – someone whose ears are tuned to your pitches and tonal variations – to hear not only  your words, but also the intentions behind your words, the messages from your deeper self?

What if. . . 

Someone listened to you, allowed you to show emotion without judging you and without analyzing you! Now imagine you get to talk to, meet with, this person regularly?

What if. . .

You had this coaching relationship where you creatively breakthrough limits (whether in the form of negative self-talk or pictures or undefined feelings), and become more fully ALIVE and aware?

What would it be like having someone in your life often more committed to what you want than you are?

Imagine someone providing truth and direct feedback about your strengths, or where you sell yourself short – someone who believes you can handle whatever happens and unearths your creativity to do just that.

This is what I offer people.

By combining my core competencies in music, creativity, psychology, NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programing), and coaching, I help children and adults:

• Develop their particular genius (natural gifts)
• Redirect their anger, frustration, limiting emotions
• Recognize old energies in new satisfying, delightful ways of being in the world
• A personalized approach under a specific framework: remove assumptions, ask questions, and identify the structures that create the true foundation of their genius.

“Todd is a highly-skilled, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and entertaining trainer. He uses many techniques to connect with his students and clients. For example, he employs questions, hypotheticals, and written exercises to engage with the material. As a result, the material becomes understandable, relevant, and even fun.”

Children and Families

One-On-One Creative Breakthrough Training
Children & Adolescents

When working with children or families, I focus mostly on expanding the client’s world model, to open new possibilities, to broaden the scope and depth of their interpretations to include a wider range of options and choices.

This is a step-by-step process. Most family problems I encounter are limitations in the clients’ representation of the world and not problems with the external world per se (there are exceptions). It’s the judgments, thoughts, and feelings about the experience that gives it meaning.
 

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Family gifts Awareness Training & Development

Family gifts awareness training is a program offered in various ways and durations to achieve generative change within a family.

When working with children or families, I identify the underlying system that holds the present structure in place. Often the family members are not aware of this structure. I work in partnership with the parents and children to realign the limiting structure.

Through creative interactions that support the development of both child and family, each members’ strengths are drawn out. This results in a smooth flow of actions that make it easy for each member to blossom in, and as, the family.

I met Todd in 1984, when I was five years old. I had told my parents that I wanted to play the piano, and had taken a few lessons with a stern Polish woman who had a very traditional approach to learning music. She slapped my hands if I lifted them too far off the keyboard, and scoffed at me when I admitted my ultimate musical dream was to learn to play “Memory” from the musical Cats. It didn’t take long before I stopped wanting to take piano lessons. 

My parents, always clever when it came to child psychology, told me that I was free to stop playing the piano if I wanted to. That, of course, made me realize that I didn’t want to stop playing the piano. I just didn’t want to take lessons with that teacher. Like any kid – and indeed, any self-aware adult – what I really wanted was music lessons that were fun. Given the approach of most music teachers, however, that’s a surprisingly difficult goal. My parents had no idea where to find someone who’d fit the bill, and so one afternoon, my mother asked the guy tuning our piano if he knew of anyone good. 

“I teach piano,” said Todd. And that’s how it all began.

Todd has now been a part of my family’s life for more than 25 years. We started with “Memory,” moved on to the theme from my favorite cartoon, “Duck Tales,” and have since worked – or, I should say, played – our way through everything from Dave Brubeck to Beethoven. 

I was a very stubborn and shy child, and liked to express my displeasure with certain music books by hiding them behind the piano (a stupid hiding place, given that Todd could see them). But he never let on that he saw the books. Instead of forcing me to learn in someone else’s style, he adapted to my own. When I made up a little ditty for my father, he brought me in to his recording studio and helped me lay it down on tape. When I was too frustrated to continue with a lesson, he took me on a walk around the neighborhood to listen to sounds. He told me stories about the composers whose music I was learning. He showed me how to read a fake book. I wasn’t good at reading music, so he encouraged me to play by ear. Todd taught me musical theory in such a hands-on, natural way that I didn’t realize that, by the time I graduated from high school, I knew much of the material that is taught in first year college courses.

As a result of Todd’s teaching, music became more than an extracurricular activity.  It seeped into my life, adding color and nuance to my experiences, both at and away from the keyboard. I see and hear things differently because of Todd. I think and write differently. I experience more joy. Being his student molded the way I experience the world; his teaching shaped who I am today. 

Some of Todd’s teaching methods are unusual, to say the least – I remember one afternoon when I was about ten when he somehow convinced my entire family to sit in a dark room and let him lead us through a guided meditation. But his unconventional approach is exactly what makes him so effective. It just takes one conversation – let alone ten minutes listening to him play – to appreciate not just his prodigious musical talent, but his gift as a teacher. 

I still take lessons with Todd. So does my mother, who decided several years ago to pursue her childhood dream of learning to play the piano. Knowing Todd has changed my life.