Next Element helps companies to communicate effectively.

Don will be presenting on his ICore propietary program with special focus on skills-based training in three specific disciplines;

influence

lead-generation

accountability

FREE attendance is extended to Next Element friends and clients, courtesy of PKM Steel.

Date: Saturday, April 28

Time: 8:00 am-5:00 pm

RSVP: BY APRIL 20th to Gerald.divelbiss@pkmsteel.com

More About Don

Don Spini, Author of the Best-Selling book, Sixty-Seconds to Yes.   Don has development systems that will assist any committed individual in taking the necessary steps to be successful in today’s environment.

Don brings with him 25 years of successful leadership, sales and sales management experience from both a corporate perspective and as an entrepreneur at the highest level.

When success is no longer an option, failure is no longer a choice, you are left with trying to achieve greatness.

Have you attended an Next Element Seminar?

If so, here’s an opportunity to chat with, and ask Jeff questions.

For 1-hour, you and 9 other individuals will be in a chat room with Jeff King.  This chat room will be a Q & A, and discussion in a video-conference format.  No question is out-of-bounds, and if you have been to a Next Element seminar you are eligible to participate.  We can talk about communication, drama, change, motivation… anything goes!

How do I sign up?

•     Get a Google+ account (you have to have a Gmail account to do this)
•     Find Jeff King and join “NE Chat”
•     E-mail Jeff King at jeff@next-element.com to reserve a space
•     Video chat and webcam is required
•     When the day arrives for the chat session, log into your Google+ account and join
the NE Chat circle and the action will begin!

When are they?  May 14, June 25, July 16 – 2:30pm Central DST

How do I pay?  Oh yea and how much? $40 per chat session

When you reserve your space with Jeff, you will receive an invoice from Michele (michele@next-element.com).  You may pay by snail-mail or PayPal.

What if I have questions as to how to get started?  E-mail Jeff@next-element.com

Brett Bailey, director at Meramec Adventure Learning Ranch (http://www.meramecranch.org/), is part of a statewide program that works with at-risk youth to discover and capitalize on their strengths and inspire change in their perspective. As a Great Circle ® agency, Meramec offers experiential adventure and wilderness programs in an effective way to teach skills that are therapeutic in a real-life environment.

Meramec is one of the most extensive high adventure facilities in the Midwest. With a 28-element high ropes course, team development initiatives, zip lines, and an adventure lake, ranch programs utilize outdoor, adventure, and wilderness experiences to help participants focus on key attributes to make a positive impact in the world around them.

Bailey says camp attendees gain mastery of skills and demonstrate how efficacy can change their lives. Though many of the youth have faced extreme cases of abuse and neglect, Bailey says after they work through building a fire, lashing logs together, or conquering a 40-foot tower by climbing and rappelling, the camp is truly a catalyst for change.

“We believe no other place builds that integrity, service, and interdependence between individuals better than the outdoors,” Bailey says.  “It’s pretty neat to watch efficacy grow and translate that into concrete examples, or use the river as a metaphor for where they are in their journey of life.”

Meramec Adventure Learning Ranch offers programs ranging from a day trip to 8-14 day cottage trips designed to meet specific objectives for the group’s treatment goals. Each program works to inspire growth and efficacy while also placing participants into a state of disequilibrium. Bailey says when a person feels off balance, it is natural to reach out for something stable. Research and personal success stories have proven that working through nature’s survival challenges can inspire change in hard-wired responses. The combination of the outdoors and the idea of disequilibrium go hand-in-hand to make each group adventure a purposeful trip.

“We give youth the ability to recognize they have something unique and special to offer,” he says. “I believe that inspires a lot of purpose, which goes a long way toward developing efficacy and hope. Next, they can reconstruct perceptions of things that have happened in the past. They will say to themselves, ‘That experience wasn’t my choosing, but I can use it to make me into a better, stronger, healthier person.’”

One year ago, Bailey and his co-director, Kassey Odneal, discovered the talents of Next Element and brought Nate Regier and his team on board to develop an assessment that could track the progress and outcomes of the work at Meramec. After deep, thorough discussions of Meramec’s goals, objectives and programs, and an onsite visit, Regier certified Bailey and his team in NEOS®, an assessment program that tracks three attributes of effective functioning: openness, resourcefulness, and persistence. Next Element also offered training in self-efficacy and Process Communication® for portions of the Meramec team.

“Brett and Kassey are passionate, full of energy and have a deep commitment to their clients,” Regier says. “Our work has been primarily research-focused and we are  equipping the Meramec team to be intentional about the work they are doing around self-efficacy. The time we’ve spent with them to design a product that will measure the ranch’s progress and outcomes is very unique to their goals – it is not a cookie cutter approach.”  Bailey says Next Element has also taught them how to more effectively bridge the transfer-of-learning gap, which is essential to the work Meramec offers its young participants. He says with any adventure program, the biggest challenge is making an individual connect what they’ve learned, or the skill they’ve mastered, to a situation at home.

“The cool thing about Next Element is that they are geared to individual and team development,” he says. “They are focused on changing and inspiring growth in each individual, and that’s our focus as well. In some ways we are a different animal as there are not too many programs in the Midwest that do therapeutic expeditions for this type of at-risk youth. Next Element has experience working with all those things, both in the adventure realm and therapeutic realm. That was a big selling point for us.”

Building relationships and changing perspective which can inspire is what Meramec is all about. Bailey says he witnesses incredible success stories of the youth who’ve come through Meramec programs. At the end of each journey in the woods with a fire, primitive hut and edible plants and amazing youth, he gains more perspective each time.

“If we can inspire and facilitate a change in our kids’ perspectives through the growth of efficacy, then instead of viewing a mountain as too high or too big, they will see they have the ability to get over it,” he says.

###

By Rhonda McCurry, Contract Writer

• Have your meetings become a forum for competing agendas, apathy and wasted energy?
• How much time do you waste arguing, nitpicking policies, chasing rabbit trails, delaying decisions, and talking around the real issues?
• Is scheduling another meeting the only guaranteed outcome of your time together?

While meetings have a place and purpose, too often they are experienced as unneeded, unproductive, and unsafe, thus fostering a cynical and apathetic attitude among participants which negatively affects the organization at large.  Effective meetings build alignment around common goals, support innovation and decision-making, and facilitate direct, accountable action, and include each participant as a valuable part of the process.  In this live audio conference, you will learn tips to notice and combat drama in your meetings, identify logistical details to keep meetings on task, engage and motivate a diverse audience, and facilitate a more safe, creative, and accountable meeting atmosphere.

The result: More enthusiasm, more productivity and innovation, less wasted time and energy.

 As our guest, you are eligible for 20% off the *registration fee!

Essential Techniques for Productive Meetings
February 14, 2012
1:00PM EST – 2:30PM EST (Noon – 1:30PM CST)

Please see this attached marketing publication for more details: LORMAN ED_ProductiveMtg_Feb14_2012

Register online: http://www.lorman.com
Call: 866-352-9539
*Discount code: F2716129
Priority code: 15999

We look forward to having you in attendance and will be prepared to answer your questions and provide you the latest information on this topic.

Aren’t non-profits different than the rest? Don’t the people inside the walls of a care-driven, faith-based company have healthy, happy hearts?  Often the people who work in these environments are uniquely altruistic and do the job for the right reasons.  And is that statement entirely true?

For many, there is a great sense of fulfillment working within a business committed to providing long-term care for people in need. Kidron Bethel Village of North Newton, Kansas, is such a place. The 26-acre continuing care retirement community features independent living townhomes and apartments, assisted living apartments and health care (skilled nursing) rooms, and was established in 1926. The company sets high goals and strives to give its residents the very best through its compassionate staff and quality living amenities.

Cindy Vanover, the CEO of Kidron Bethel Village since April 2009, says her work gives her the sense she can make a difference in the lives of the people she serves every single day.
She saw compassionate people giving of themselves until they simply were running on empty. The company’s leadership team desired more trust, more accountability, and to work toward productive and effective communication.

When Vanover met Next Element colleagues Nate Regier and Jamie Remsberg, she was hungry for a new approach to the challenge of drama in the workplace. Her staff members were very good at their jobs; however they wanted the opportunity to improve the process of communication. Personally, Vanover was searching for answers to guide her executive team to the next level. She says Next Element offered a path that seemed like it just might work.

“It was clear there was drama in my team, and you can’t have team alignment or effective communication when you’ve got a mis-aligned team,” Vanover says. “I wanted to raise awareness of dynamics and drama and address our personal responsibility for self awareness and change, to own our actions and be accountable, and to be grateful for what each individual brings to the team.”

Next Element spent the first six months of the year working through the Process Communication Model (PCM) training, specifically to help reduce drama at Kidron Bethel Village. The next phase was one-on-one coaching and teamwork, a dramatically helpful experience for the company’s executive team. Vanover says each person was given individual time with Remsberg, who coached them through meetings, communication strategies and how to manage their own sense of fulfillment.

Regier says when a company decides to eliminate drama, it saves energy and money, improves morale and reduces turnover.  PCM provides tools to manage healthy conflict, leverage diversity and lead professionals through reinforcement training, then into real-time practice where they can immediately apply effective communication skills at work.

The results from Kidron Bethel Village are real and measurable. Through Next Element’s meticulous data collection, the Kidron Bethel team was able to document reductions of 20 to 40% in six key areas including behaviors such as blaming, micromanaging, and manipulating in a mere 8 months. A significant portion of these positive changes occurred during phase two of its commitment, which focused on group and individual coaching to support the new application and integration of skills.

“Insight and learning only take effect when applied in real-life situations on a daily basis,” Nate Regier explained. “I applaud Cindy and the Kidron Bethel leadership team for courageously persevering through a tough period where new skills were tested. This is where profound change happens.”

“This dedicated effort makes Cindy a visionary leader,” Regier says. “She realizes there are no quick fixes. It takes hard work and courageous leadership to achieve these kinds of results. Her ideal team is benevolent, and she wants her folks functioning at a higher level.”

Randy Keasling is the director of human resources for Kidron Bethel Village. He says when team members identify drama, it ceases to be effective. As each person is trained to recognize when drama occurs, they can also develop ways to work around it.

“Less drama equals less stress, and that is a good thing in the workplace,” Keasling says. “We can recognize drama and reduce it because people can call it what it is. Our people have a new, honest and effective way to communicate with each other.”

Keasling is using PCM training to redesign the company’s employee evaluation process as well as during the hiring process, to ensure team support in the success of a new employee.

Vanover says Next Element has given her team a new language to make distinctions about emotions and behaviors – an internal code to help navigate away from ineffective, non-productive behaviors.

“We now have a higher level of effectiveness in relationships,” she says. “We try to communicate better so we’re not re-interpreting one another. We are checking assumptions and are aware of where we are. We are listening to understand, and I think all those are really important parts of what we’ve learned though Next Element.”

<em>
Article written by:
Rhonda McCurry, contract writer</em>

Join us for the 39th Annual International AEE Conference

Nov. 3 – 6, 2011 in Jacksonville, Florida.

Exhibitor and Sponsorship information

Greetings,

We’d like to thank all of our long-time sponsors and partners in the experiential education community who are supporting and attending the 39^th Annual AEE International Conference November 3-6 in Jacksonville, Florida. We’d love it if you could attend and wanted to let you know that there are only a couple days left to get the Early Bird Registration rate – the rate expires this Friday 9/9!!! You can get the early bird rate AND the membership discount if you become a member prior to registering.

The conference is expected to be another great opportunity for everyone in the experiential education community to come together for professional development, networking, learning, sharing, and building bridges across disciplines and fields of study. Find out more about the conference, the schedule, the workshops, and more at: http://www.aee.org/conferences/intl

If you’re considering either registering for the conference, exhibiting to show your support of the experiential education community, or placing an ad in the conference brochure, here are some links that will get you started.

• Sign up to become an AEE member and get an extra month of membership free (renewals also get a free month)! Sign up to get the member registration rate for the conference!
• Register for the International Conference by the early bird deadline, September 9th (only 4 days away!!!) to get the early-bird rate
• Promote your organization with a booth in the exhibition hall (comes with two complimentary conference registrations)
• Purchase an ad in the conference program to promote AEE and to promote your organization, business, or non-profit. Ads due by 9/30.
• Supply auction items for the silent and live auctions at the conference by contacting membership@aee.org
• Other options to support the conference are available, too – see the conference pages

There’s only a week left to register at the early-bird rate so sign up today! And make sure you’re a member to get the most savings.

Have a great week, and again, thank you to all our partners and sponsors for their exceptional support of the experiential education community.

Paul Limoges
AEE CEO

Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook

~  Judith Ann Pauley, Ph.D., CEO, Process Communications, Inc.

Contact us with questions or to learn about upcoming certifications.