This interactive training supports participants in building practical wellness skills for everyday life. Sessions are designed to be flexible and can be tailored to the needs of the group. Facilitators work with hosts to select from a range of wellness topics, with each topic taking approximately 30 minutes. All sessions include an overview of available mental health and wellness services and supports.

Topic options include:

• Stress management: understanding stress responses and identifying practical strategies to support balance and regulation

• Rest: recognizing different types of rest, understanding their role in well-being, and identifying practical strategies to incorporate intentional rest

• Boundaries: understanding, setting, and maintaining boundaries to support personal well-being
• Grounding: understanding how it supports emotional regulation, and exploring practical strategies to calm the nervous system

In-person or Virtual Training

This skill-based training, provided by Western Health & Wellness staff, is geared to students or student-facing staff. In it, you will learn to recognize crisis, distress, and next steps for support; understand what drives emotional triggers and reactions; communicate calmly and de-escalate tense situations; set clear and appropriate role boundaries. Participants also learn about campus mental health and wellness services and how to connect students to appropriate supports.

Participants will leave with:

• Understanding triggers and activations, and the brain's role in emotions and reactions

• A clear understanding of what constitutes a crisis and distress

• Awareness of boundaries, including roles and limits when supporting others

• Confidence connecting to campus mental health and wellness services and supports

• Awareness of grounding and co-regulation strategies to support others while maintaining personal well-being

2 to 3 hours | In-person Training

This interactive workshop explores the role of rest in supporting overall well-being. Participants are introduced to different types of rest, develop a deeper understanding of stress and stressors, and consider the importance of balance in building sustainable wellness practices.

Through guided reflection, participants explore their own patterns and experiences with rest, including the role of boundaries in supporting intentional rest. The session also includes practical strategies for incorporating rest into everyday life.

An optional hands-on component, such as succulent planting, pot painting, or rock painting, can be included to support experiential learning and reflection. Associated material costs can be discussed at the time of booking.

1 to 1.5 hour | In-person Training

Mind The Gap is a workshop focused on the skills needed to foster meaningful engagement in interactions where there is a differential ("gap") in power and identity. Participants will learn three concepts - inoculation, critical empathy, and compassionate accountability - and have opportunities to translate these into interpersonal skills and strategies that can be applied in their individual roles as current or future leaders and clinicians.

Learning Outcomes

• Social Inoculations
  • Develop self-awareness of one's social identity and position in relation to existing structures of power.
  • Leverage verbal and physical cues to address anticipated pushback or disconnection in interpersonal engagements.
• Critical Empathy
  • Deepen one's understanding of empathy, with an emphasis on both connection and differentiation to bridge diversity in lived experiences.
  • Demonstrate curiosity and active listening as critical empathy practices.
• Compassionate Accountability
  • Differentiate between Expectations, Boundaries, and Compassionate Accountability.
  • Utilize "Both And" approaches that leverage empathy while holding someone accountable.

Dive into this 2-hour workshop designed to help participants understand how their personal identity, lived experiences, and socialization shape how they show up in conflict situations. Drawing from conflict mediation and crucial conversations frameworks, this workshop foregrounds the relationship between identity and conflict management styles to help participants learn about the drivers of conflict: need and value. The workshop will then provide practical approaches grounded in critical empathy, such as active listening and asserting statement skills, to help participants navigate these needs-based and values-oriented conflict in both personal and professional contexts.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• reflect on how identity bears down on one's conflict management style;
• differentiate between needs-based and values-oriented conflict with the goal of adapting one's approach in context;
• practice critical empathy strategies of active listening and asserting, grounded in an understanding of how identity and impact show up in relation to need or value in conflict situations

Join us for this workshop where participants will learn about rest as a radical and necessary practice to support wellness and well-being, especially in a time dominated by grind culture, political unrest, and large-scale injustice. Drawing on the premise that there are both systemic and individual factors to stress that are often tied to one's social roles, identities, and lived experience, this session highlights the important role of balance in healthier models of rest. Participants will also learn about how reclaiming rest can serve as an act of resistance and healing to challenge these pervasive systems. Finally, participants will engage in self-reflection, grounding exercises, and boundaries as part of a holistic, collective care approach to well-being that goes beyond conventional notions of self-care tied to inequitable cultures of productivity and consumption.

By the end of this workshop, participants should be able to:

• gain an understanding of rest based on an agency-oriented model of health, wellness, and well-being;
• develop familiarity with the notion of stress and stressors, and the role of balance in rest practice;
• engage in self-reflection about the individual practice of rest, including grounding exercises and boundary-setting;

Speak Up, Stand Up is a workshop geared towards providing participants with some fundamental understanding of microaggressions and its various types, as well as the nature of its impact on both individuals and community networks within the university. By providing opportunities for reflecting on one's power within one's role as staff or student leader, this workshop will also cultivate interpersonal skills like active listening and asserting as pragmatic ways to address microaggressions from the lens of compassionate accountability.

By the end of this workshop, participants should be able to

• develop knowledge about the nature of microaggressions and its myriad effects;
• develop awareness of one's power as a student leader to be able to address microaggressions;
• deploy active listening and asserting statement skills to hold accountability while maintaining empathy during times of conflict;
• practice skills with which to prevent and address microaggressions in support of a more inclusive university culture