Healthcare Training Institute - Quality Education since 1979
Psychologist, Social Worker, Counselor, & MFT!!

Section 1
Track #1 - Introduction

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Welcome to the Home Study Course sponsored by the Healthcare Training Institute, homestudycredit.com.  This course is entitled, Males Vol.2: Interventions for Balancing Stress and a Workaholic Life Style.

Our primary intent for this home study course is to provide quality education to foster your professional growth.  The Institute has provided quality education since 1979.
 
Hi.  My name is Jared Baxter.  I will be the narrator of this CD set.  We appreciate that you have chosen us as a vehicle for you to earn your Continuing Education Credit.

The purpose of the course is to assist you in increasing your knowledge regarding how to treat patients, clients, etc. dealing with balancing a workaholic life style.  As each case study is given, if the concepts seem to be applicable to your situation, I encourage you to turn your CD player off and make a few notes regarding the application of the principle to your setting.  However, these notes are for your purposes only and are not to be sent to the Institute.  Also each track is very content dense.  So feel free to replay the track to review the content either for your own purposes, or if you feel appropriate play the track in an individual or group session for client education.  Also permission is granted to reproduce this CD.  We encourage you to duplicate and give copies of this CD to colleagues, clients, etc. as you deem appropriate. We feel the information on our CD's is valuable.  Thus, we have an interest in distributing CD's in as many ways as possible, to benefit the greatest number of people, who have a need and are receptive to this practical information.

The questions in your Answer Booklet are sequential and deal with the section of content that preceded it.  For this reason, to facilitate the answering of each question, you might read the question from the Answer Booklet prior to listening to that CD track.  By knowing what the question is ahead of time, you will then know the content to listen for that contains the answer.  So just a hint, after you write down the answer to a question in your Answer Booklet, read on to the next question in order to give you a “heads up” to listen for the content that contains the answer to the next question.

Merely write the correct letter on the corresponding blank line in your answer booklet. Each answer is only used once. Keep in mind there is nothing tricky or hard about these questions.  They are merely intended to verify the playing of this CD.

For the purpose of brevity, most generally, I will use the term “therapists” or “mental health professional.”  However, don’t let these terms deter you from applying the concepts to your situations.  When you hear the word “therapists,” if your job title is social worker, psychologist, marriage and family therapist, mental health counselor, professional counselor, resident director, program assistant, etc. merely substitute the appropriate term that is the most meaningful to you. In short, don’t let my use of the term “therapists” cognitively set you off track from hearing the content because your job title is school counselor, for example.  I will also use the term “client” for the purposes of brevity.  However, if you deal with patients, residents, students, consumers, etc., transpose “client” for the term that is the most meaningful to you in your work setting. 

On this CD set we will discuss such topics as: understanding motivation, reducing motivators, managing ambition, picking up housework, overcoming resistance to change, factors of stress, how the body copes with stress, male stress, the responsibility factor, type A personalities, and How to be a Type B personality.

So  let’s get started

On this track we will discuss identifying what is important.  The purpose of this track is to provide a basis for beginning therapy with a workaholic client and to provide you with a technique for Identifying Priorities.

For many clients, work-demands are always more compelling than those of their home lives.  I find that client arguments for favoring work life over home life are often specific: “I need the paycheck.” “I need the raise.” “I need the promo­tion.” “I have responsibilities at work.”  All this is probably true.  However, I find it helpful to ask clients like Jim about what else he needs that he can’t get out of work.  Jim, age 42, worked between 72 and 80 hours each week.  Jim, like most clients, responded, “I guess I need a good home and a family.”  Do you find that your workaholic clients truly value aspects of life outside of work?  Of course.  Loving relationships, a home, and the time to focus on the physical and spiritual self is important to even the most determined workaholic clients.

But how do clients like Jim convince themselves that it’s all right to turn down a work request in order to spend more time on your home life?  Jim found that one key is to have a very clear picture of his personal priorities, those that mattered to him as much as his work.  Your client’s, like Jim’s, work priorities are probably clear to you already.  When your client is at work, there tends to be reinforcement as to why the job is important and what goals must be accomplished.  Jim already had a sense of what career success looked like.  Therefore, I asked Jim, “But what is success for you in your home life?  What do you want to achieve?  What in your home life is important to you?”

Would you agree that confining the defini­tion of success to the marketplace overshadows the value of success in the rest of a client’s life?  I stated to Jim, “Assume for a moment that you will achieve whatever level of career success you want in your life. What else do you want to accomplish before you die? How do you want to be remembered and by whom? Just what kind of a person do you want to be?”

But how do workaholic clients like Jim identify priorities, whether they’re related to home or to work?  The following exercise can give clients like Jim the opportunity to identify Personal Priorities.

Technique:  Identifying Priorities
For the ‘Identifying Priorities’ technique, I explained to Jim that the technique was more productive if he implemented it in a setting where he could concentrate for ten to fifteen minutes.   I stated, “You will need a pencil or pen and about fifteen to twenty index cards (you can also use the back of business cards, small pieces of notepaper), or a post-note pad.  Having quiet music in the background is helpful, too.  Set aside your immediate concerns for a while and be pre­pared to think about yourself and what you want from your life.”

I asked Jim to take a look at a list of phrases.  You can find a similar list in the manual that accompanied this course.  After Jim reviewed the list of phrases, I asked, “Which ones are important to you, in either your home or your work life?”  Jim stated, “I think the most important ones are ‘having a close family,’ ‘parenting wisely,’ and ‘connecting, caring, relating to others.’” 

Clearly, as Jim saw phrases that appealed to him, he began to copy each down indi­vidually on a card or small piece of paper.  I stated to Jim, “Now sort through those and create a pile limited to the five that are most impor­tant to you.  That’s right, choose only five.”  If your client has trouble limiting him, he can stretch the rules and create subcate­gories.  For example, a client might choose “Having a close family” as the main category and include “Parenting wisely” and “Connecting, caring, relating to others” as a part of it.  If your client still has difficulties, perhaps you might suggest focusing on what is most important for the client in the next year or two.

Identifying and limiting the number of Personal Priorities to five may seem arbitrary, but I find that it actually serves a critical purpose.  Clearly, for workaholic clients, time is limited.  Clients like Jim have too much going on already.  By limiting himself to a reasonable number of priorities, Jim was more likely to make each more likely to happen.  And, as you know, as he limited himself to five, he forced himself to make those hard choices about what does matter.  

On this track we discussed identifying what is important.  The purpose of this track was to provide a basis for beginning therapy with a workaholic client and to provide you with a technique for Identifying Priorities.

On the next track we will discuss Reducing Non-Productive Motivators.  This next track will identify some major motivators and provide techniques for reducing money’s influence and reducing the need for work related approval and praise.

QUESTION 1
What is one way of helping a workaholic client identify what is important? To select and enter your answer go to Answer Booklet.