Advising for Thriving: Connecting Existing Advising Practices with the Science of Well-being (to be presented March 8, 2022 at the NACADA Region 2 Conference!)
As advisors, we support students’ well-being and thriving every day. We highlight their strengths, support their self-efficacy, build authentic relationships, and help them make meaning out of confusing experiences. Positive psychology has similar aims: to highlight and bolster our strengths, to develop our individual and collective self-efficacy, to support caring relationships, and to ultimately help us make meaning in our lives. This session will help us think through our own advising practices and what we know works anecdotally, and then connect those practices with existing research in the field of positive psychology. Attendees will leave with both a better understanding of how science supports their advising and a toolkit of exercises to help further integrate positive psychology into their advising practice. 

Holistic Advisor Well-Being: Developing Strategies for Individual and Team Self-care
If you’re an advisor, you’ve probably felt it: increased email traffic, greater institutional oversight, stressed out students, and what feels like less and less time. If you’re an advising administrator, you’ve seen it in your team: advisors feeling disengaged, mixed student feedback on advising, and advisor turn-over. We care deeply about our students and want to make sure they are well – but what are we doing for ourselves and our advising teams? The goal of this session is to help each participant work through an individualized plan to support their own and/or their team’s well-being. The workshop will be a mix of concept overviews based on empirical research, activities pulled from positive psychology, and experiential components that allow participants to actively engage in self-care strategies such as mindfulness, breathing, and yoga. To that end, we will cover the following topics and run through the following activities:

From Languishing to Flourishing: Regaining Control of Your Well-being as an Advisor 
As institutions appoint Chief Wellness Officers and students clamor for stress reduction and resources, we may find ourselves as advisors continuing to give emotional support without understanding our own sources of stress and fulfillment. Using Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework – positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement – advisors in this session will evaluate their own well-being and identify specific and individualized habits and behaviors that will help them move from languishing to flourishing. This process will also provide a framework for advisors to use in their own advising practice. 

Presenting as Teaching: Making Presentations More Interactive, Educational, and Fun 
Presenting is part of life as any professional, whether we do it every day or only a few times a year. For advisors, we may do group advising, meet with incoming students at orientation, present on behalf of admissions, or share our ideas and expertise with colleagues in our institutions or through organizations like NACADA. Some of of us love presenting; for others it inspires deep dread. No matter how presenting comes up in your professional life, this session will provide a framework to make the experience more fruitful and fun for you and your audience. This interactive presentation will walk participants through a fun exercise that helps identify audience, tone, main points, best practices for engaging audiences, and our individual presenting style.