Join us at the Canadian Institute of Stress …to train as a
On-Line Course Prospectus 2009 - 2010
Needs: Today’s rapidly changing workplaces are proving to be high stress incubators. Disability rates have tripled. The best people solve the stress problem simply by leaving. And corporately critical change programs are often derailed by stress. Corporate stress-disability rates have doubled from 1999 to 2008. Juggling work and family is rated, by dual career families, as a top stressor, leading work absences to rise in Canada by 22% from 2007 to 2008. Prescriptions for anti-depressants and minor tranquilizers now rival, in $ terms, those for high blood pressure and related cardiovascular problems. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimates that 70 to 80% of all visits to the family doctor are now stress-related.
Market growth: In 2008, the demand for wellness services and products in North America — quite aside from conventional health care — was conservatively estimated at $102 billion annually … growing at a rate of 15% per year in 2006. And these wellness consumers, becoming evermore sophisticated, (a) rate stress control as their #1 priority and (b) are seeking credible professional partnerships to help them.
Our core belief and mission in training and certifying Stress & Wellness Consultants. Based in two decades’ research at the Institute, we believe that for each of us there is one uniquely best pathway and tool kit out of wearing stress and into the performance and satisfactions of peak wellness. Working with an Institute Coach, each client is refreshed as they then discover, travel and enjoy their fully personalized path.
Our mission in training Consultants is to meet each person’s need for a trusted expert partner on their journey from less stress to greater wellness.
The following section will provide an overview profile of the coonsultant-in-action, of who we are preparing our graduates to be. Clearly, the Stress & Wellness Consultant is not a psychiatrist, psychotherapist or clinical specialist To help you understand our Coaching system, we present, first, its development and then how the Consultant applies its core features in action.
Development: In 1980, the Canadian Institute of Stress launched a 20-year longitudinal study, directed by Drs. Hans Selye and Richard Earle. Their research was focused by two primary questions:
- Do any of the much touted "stress management" and "wellness" techniques actually work? and …
- Since people differ widely in their vulnerabilities to stress, and in how they participate in their stress process, are there particular techniques which work better for some individuals than for others?
Having tracked the results experienced by over 14,000 adult research subjects instructed in a range of leading stress control and wellness techniques, the answer to both questions is "Yes" …… a scientifically solid and clinically useful "Yes" underpinning the the Institute’s "V.Q. System" for stress and wellness coaching.
Further clinical trials in Japan and Ireland as well as in North America have confirmed that the V.Q. System for group and individual coaching produces such long term results as these:
| Program Results at Four and Eight Months Follow-Up
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| At 4 months | At 8 months
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| Doctor’s office visits decrease | 22% | 53% |
| Days absent from work decrease | 42% | 58% |
| Below target blood pressure | 49% | 91% |
| Immunoglobulin A increase | 24% | 31% |
| T cell increase | 16% | 28%
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| Stress hyper-reactivity down [EMG/GSR] | 41% | 46% |
| Stress recovery time down [EMG/GSR] | 28% | 36% |
| Ability to relax at will increase [EMG] | 17% | 31% |
In summary, the V.Q. System significantly improves objective measures of most clients’ wellbeing, their "vitality quotient" or V.Q.
Core features of our Coaching System … supporting the Consultant in action
Based on training both of staff at the Canadian Institute of Stress and, more recently, of consultants in several collaborating clinical settings internationally, continuing refinements of the Institute’s "Vitality Quotient" (V.Q.) System have produced a coaching methodology which:
- Is logical and step-by-step structured yet encourages and builds on the unique motivations and circumstances of each client [individualized yet systematic]
- Provides a straightforward yet scientifically sound framework both for understanding the client’s present state and for quickly developing the client-consultant partnership [partnering]
- Is based on reliable and validated questionnaire tools for profiling both (a) the extent and (b) the primary sources of the client’s over-stressed condition [client profiling]
- Clearly, quickly and credibly focuses the coaching process on the two top priority self-management skills which, when effectively applied, will provide greatest benefit for the client’s stress control [focusing]
- Engages the client’s discomforts to develop initial motivation for making progress [motivating]
- Focuses on incremental, manageable behavioral changes as the primary basis for improving mood, physical and cognitive symptoms, and overall self-management [manageable]
- Capaitalizes on the power of leading edge body-mind techniques [e.g. autogenics, visual imagery, and neurolinguistic programming] for focusing, accelerating and firmly grounding the client’s change process [leading edge]
- Draws flexibly and selectively on a broad range of proven self-management interventions, ranging from cognitive and neuromuscular techniques to behavior modeling, environmental modification, or nutritional interventions [wholistic]
Client groups served by Stress & Wellness Consultants
The Wellness Continuum
- The walking wounded for whom chronically elevated stress is indicated by such problems as: fatigue, headache, muscle tension/spasm, sleep disturbance, generalized anxiety, difficulties or reduced satisfaction in relationships, depressed mood, motivation or enthusiasm, frequent and/or unusually prolonged minor illnesses, as well as stress exacerbating other conditions [e.g. arthritis, allergies, dermatological]
- The worried well for whom frequently recurring periods of high stress are interfering with health, or with satisfaction and participation in relationships, work / career, or personal life more generally.
- Upon appropriate medical or other professional referral, the casualties for whom revitalization is a central or adjunctive aim in treatment of a diagnosed illness or problem-in-living [e.g. sleep disorder, addiction, anxiety or panic attack, disruptive career change]
You will learn how to engage,
coach,
benefit your clients by skillfully using …
 | Your knowledge foundation — the distilled essence of bio-psycho-social and spiritual concepts of wellness and wellness-under-stress … enabling you to quickly develop a motivating relationship-for-learning with any client. The heart of your knowledge concerns how each of the five "Vital Skills" can empower your client for the performance and satisfaction they are seeking … as highlighted in the following Section.
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 | Your communications and marketing framework, "Wellness for Stressful Times" (WST) is your core, yet flexible message of "What I do for my clients, and how I do it". You will learn how to present WST as a one-hour seminar presentation … or as a half-day coaching session for groups … or as compacted to a 2-minute on-the-spot infomercial about stress & wellness coaching. WST includes such self-assessment tools as "Do I Need Stress Coaching ?".
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 | The Personal Wellness Plan (PWP)
is a flexible two-hour process, a blueprint complete with assessment tools, for guiding your individual client’s wellness self-discovery … discovering their uniquely personalized, strongly motivated action plan … for moving beyond painful stress into higher levels of wellness.
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 | Autogenic body~mind technology + on-line Action Diary are the leading edge tools you’ll then use to partner with your client in their 4-week Start-Up wellness program … focusing and supporting their growing progress in wellness and stress control.
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Five "Vital Skills" for stress control & wellness -- Twenty-five (25) years’ research in the Institute’s Body Age program have shown these five skills — when uniquely tailored to each client in their personalized prescription — to be the heart of their progress in achieving these results:
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The five "Vital Skills" you’ll learn — for yourself and your clients — are …
1. Clarifying personal values, goals & satisfiers
2. Developing self-affirming relationships
3. Relax deeply, anytime, anywhere you choose
4. Personalized essential exercise
5. High performance nutrition
| The five "Vital Skills"
clients’ Program Results at Four and Eight Months Follow-Up
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| At 4 months | At 8 months
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| Doctor’s office visits decrease | 22% | 53% |
| Days absent from work decrease | 42% | 58% |
| Below target blood pressure | 49% | 91% |
| Immunoglobulin A increase | 24% | 31% |
| T cell increase | 16% | 28%
|
| Stress hyper-reactivity down [EMG/GSR] | 41% | 46% |
| Stress recovery time down [EMG/GSR] | 28% | 36% |
| Ability to relax at will increase [EMG] | 17% | 31% |
… plus others
Our 12-step coaching model
Underlying and weaving together your skillful use of the Institute’s proven tool kit you will learn to use our 12-step coaching model — productive with any client — for actually doing deeply beneficial coaching. An excellent coach helps their client to more and more deeply connect with the coach throughout these 12 steps …
- focusing on and then evaluating their current situation;
- identifying their problems and aims;
- seeing clear personalized pictures of things being "better";
- focusing on the benefits and daily satisfactions of "better";
- prioritizing their change objectives;
- clarifying possible solutions;
- selecting solutions;
- developing their plan to achieve targeted benefits;
- implementing their plan;
- modifying the plan in light of experience;
- periodically evaluating, and actively appreciating their progress; and
- continuing this coaching process upon mutual agreement.
Having developed your professional skills, now you need to deliver them to a growing roster of clients. Your "doing well by doing good" is the win~win principle you will master in your training, driving your growing success in your practice as a Stress & Wellness Consultant certified by the Institute. Based in our 29 years’ experience, you will learn …
While each candidate for training brings a unique roster of aims and career experience, four selection criteria seem paramount in their decisions to train with the Canadian Institute of Stress [CIS]. These are ……
1) Reputation
- The CIS was founded in 1979 by the internationally acknowledged "father of the stress field", Dr. Hans Selye, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., as well as 20 other professionals who understood the importance of his work, including six Nobel Prize laureates and Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan.
- Dr. Richard Earle, who was Dr. Selye’s last post-doctoral student (1979 — 82), has directed the Institute’s development over the past 20 years.
- Today, the Institute comprises more than 200 professionals across Canada plus an equal number of leading practitioners and stress scientists around the world … in countries including the U.K., Italy, India, Japan and the U.S.
- CIS’s preventive, clinical and workplace programs have been widely adopted and further developed in such diverse settings as a Florence spa, an executive clinic in Tokyo, a degenerative diseases revitalization program in Dublin, and an elite athletic training center in Dayton.
- Powerful fundamental principles about human stress and well-being coupled with a creative desire to help people become "more" have been the driving forces in the Institute’s success and reputation.
- Certified Consultants are trained in these distilled principles and supervised to develop competence and comfort in their application. Our graduates take pride, as do we, in their presenting themselves as having been trained and certified by the Canadian Institute of Stress.
2) All-you-need flexible tool kit
We provide our graduates a coherent, highly efficient kit of all the foundational tools they’ll need … whether they are coaching one-to-one, presenting to a group, or consulting on the many aspects of stress or wellness. And, the Institute backstops its graduates with the more detailed information or professionally complex perspectives that atypical situations may occasionally require.
- The Consultant’s tool kit resources all steps essential to successful coaching, from establishing a shared, motivating focus with the client, assessing needs and aims, through clarifying goals / obstacles / resources in play, to developing and then implementing each client’s individualized step-by-step action plan.
3) Uniquely personalized client focus … distinctive in a one-size-fits-all world
Each client has one uniquely best pathway from stress to a high level of wellness. Our 20 years’ research tracking "what works for who", the results achieved by over 14,000 clients, has produced the Institute’s "Vitality Quotient System" … the concepts and tools required for each individual to develop and pursue their uniquely best, fully personalized Rx. People become strongly motivated when their personal uniqueness is recognized and supported. Results soon follow.
- The Vitality Quotient System Ô
and StressType Ô
tools are proprietary to the Institute, originally published by Warner Books (1989) and then by Time-Life Books (1997).
- Client motivation is a hallmark of every successful practitioner. Creating and the focusing this motivational resource underlies all Institute tools, including the Wellness Self-Portrait, our Personal Wellness Plan, and our Autogenic Technology [integrating autogenic relaxation, visualization and affirmations for body~mind reprogramming.
- "Reduce Your body Age" is not only one of our workbook titles, it is a powerful communications focus for us [based in 20 years’ Institute research on stress and biomarkers of human aging], having especially strong appeal in today’s "boomer" market.
- The stress Ù
body age link not only has intuitive meaning … integrating and making sense of a host of body~mind dysfunctions … it also rests firmly on 40 years’ scientific study of aging biomarkers.
- The Institute has pioneered leading edge study of "satisfaction", clarifying the psychological and the biochemical consequences when this elusive life resource is in short supply … as it is for 87% of today’s adults. Since 1993, CIS has been developing simple yet powerful tools to raise satisfaction levels (both worklife and personal) buffering the negative effects of high-stress lifestyles.
4) Support to consultants’ practice development
The Institute is committed to its quality assured programs’ benefiting as many of those in need as possible. Hence we give top priority to your success, both as a student and, then, in your coaching practice. Please revisit Section "D" to learn how we resource your practice development.
Background
In 1987, the Canadian Institute of Stress [a Certified Educational Institution — Human Resources Development Canada] launched its first train-the-trainer and counselor certification programs in association with Air Canada’s health promotion and E.A.P. programs. Since that time, trainees have included psychologists, physicians, addictions counselors, nurses, hospital chaplains and others.
Eligibility for Training
Candidates must (a) hold current active standing in a health and human service or human resources professional association, and (b) be able to demonstrate at least two years’ coaching experience … where at least 30% of professional practice has been in individual or group coaching]. Alternative experience-based equivalencies will be considered.
Training Format … the Web + Teleclasses
Respecting trainees’ busy schedules, all lectures, in-class discussions, and coaching-your-progress sessions are held by telephone conferencing, with preparatory reading, lecture materials and A.V. resources available for downloading at our dedicated web site.
The two-hour lectures, including class discussions are held from 10:00 A.M. to noon [EST] on each of 14 Saturdays. The 2-hour small group coaching sessions are scheduled from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. on Wednesday evenings.
Entered by password, teleclasses are accessible from any location in North America. Long distance and teleconferencing charges are included in the program’s tuition.
Duration & Dates of Training
Fourteen weeks
- mid-September through December, or
- February through mid-May
Tuition, materials and tools $3800.00 [Cdn. funds] payable upon submitting your application. An 80% refund is available to those notifying the Institute in writing, not later than one week prior to Week 1 of their intention to withdraw from the course.
Courses are limited to a maximum of 12 students.
E-mail the Institute, marking "Certified SWC" in the subject line of your e-mail. You will receive your application form within 24 hours. Thank you.
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