Skills and support groups

This six-week group is designed to create a supportive environment where women scientists can discuss issues that impact their day-to-day work as well as the trajectory of their careers. Through a strengths-based and solution-focused lens we will tackle topics including, but not limited to, stereotype threat, imposter fears, effective communication, unconscious biases, mentoring relationships, networking, advocacy, and community building.

“It can wait” we often tell ourselves. But can it? Procrastination is a common struggle many trainees face. While it can feel like a way of coping, there are consequences to procrastination that are unhelpful and that can exacerbate overwhelm. This skills group will help trainees understand the precipitants of procrastination and offer practical strategies to help manage tendencies to procrastinate.

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable when people of different backgrounds and work styles come together. Conflict can impact lab dynamics and our ability to collaborate and learn. Join us for this 5-week skills group where we will learn and practice skills to better manage the workplace conflict to more effectively communicate, and work through disagreements.

According to Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry, our window of tolerance is our capacity to tolerate and manage stressors in ways that lead to optimal living. Expanding our window of tolerance is ideal but can be challenging without knowing what resources are needed. Through this four-week group we will discuss what it means to expand our window of tolerance by learning and implementing practical skills that support our stress management.

Setting healthy boundaries is an essential skill that strengthens your interpersonal and professional relationships, helps you navigate the workplace, develops leadership skills, and contributes to the long-term successes in your career. This 4-week skills group will help you gain an understanding of your unique relationship with boundaries and help you identify strategies on how to set and maintain healthy boundaries.

The habits that comprise your days and weeks create your overall health. But, making changes to be healthier can feel overwhelming. This skills-based group will make healthy change simple by offering strategies to help you make small shifts in your daily habits including sleep, breathing, eating, and physical activity. We examine the science of how shifts in these daily habits can turn off the stress response and create more energy, enhance productivity, and improve your mood and overall health.

Is your internal narrative negative? These negative messages are called your inner critic and can have a profound influence on how you feel and behave often leading to demoralization and self-sabotage. Come and join this 4-week journey wherein we will interactively explore how to manage the inner critic through strategies that help to enhance personal strengths and motivation that are more aligned with your true self.

Assertive communication allows an individual to express ones’ needs, feelings, opinions, and rights respectfully and effectively. This form of communication can lead to greater work productivity, improved wellbeing, and healthier, more authentic relationships. While of significant benefit, communicating assertively can be difficult. Join other trainees in this 4-week workshop to discover what constitutes assertive communication, build assertive communication skills, and reflect on factors that might be helping and/or hindering you from being assertive.

Many trainees experience worries about standardized tests, presentations, asking for help, and other performance-based anxiety provoking situations that are gateways to career growth. For some of us, no matter what strategies we try, we are left feeling that we are not good enough. This 4-week skills group offers information on what performance-based anxiety is, where it comes from, and wellness strategies to maintain a healthy balance as you tackle these challenges.

Graduate schools present trainees with a unique set of challenges. This group is designed to provide trainees with support relative to graduate school and life stressors including learning new coping tools and building relationships with other graduate trainees. Common topics of discussion address imposter fears, social anxiety, career planning/networking, having a life outside of school, mentoring, and communication/collaboration with advisors.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is broadly defined as a set of skills that help us recognize, understand, and manage our emotions and others. EI skills support us in managing our emotions when stressed, resolve conflicts, coach, motivate others, create a culture of collaboration, and build psychological safety within teams both personally and professionally. This skills group will offer tools to build self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and social skills.

Many of us live with unnecessary fear and anxiety when we are navigating changes and facing uncertainties. Recent scientific research on compassion reveals many ways we can learn to soothe our fears and anxiety so that we can feel more relaxed, calm, and present. In this 4-week skills group, we will be learning strategies to navigate fear and uncertainty more effectively with compassion.

Perfectionism is the armor many of us wear to protect us from the disappointment and fear of potential setbacks. In the field of biomedical research, we sometimes fall into the trap of idealizing perfectionism, convincing ourselves that it’s the reason we’ve made it this far and is critical to us being successful in the future. These behaviors tend to be unsustainable and perpetuate anxiety, unhelpful comparisons, and isolation. This 4-week skills group will explore the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that fuel our perfectionism, and then provide tools that help us move towards letting go of those maladaptive patterns and integrating healthy striving strategies to positively impact our work and well-being.

Cognitive Distortion is another way of saying “Negative or Unhelpful Thinking”. As we navigate the workplace, each of us are faced with different negative or unhelpful thoughts that can impede our productivity and growth. In this 4-week skills group we will explore ways to recognize our cognitive distortions and develop tools to successfully navigate such thoughts.

Self-worth is “the sense of one’s own value or worth as a person.” Brain scan studies have shown that when people have higher self-worth, they are more resilient and experience rejection and failure as less painful. In this 4-week skills group, we will discuss the value of self-worth, what true self-worth looks like, how it can help us in our daily experiences, and practice specific tools to develop our own self-worth.

What values are meaningful to you and guide how you live and work? This four-week group will explore the concept of values-based decision making – that is, aligning your personal and professional life with your values. Trainees will learn how to assess and bring awareness to their values and explore a “heart-heart-body” model to implement values-based decision making in their personal and professional lives.

To be well is to be able to move fluidly through both enjoyable and adverse experiences back to a state of calm, where we feel grounded and safe. Often, we either minimize and push difficult emotions away or we become flooded and overwhelmed by them. We need tangible skills to help us regulate/manage the wide range of emotions that we feel daily. The aim of this 4-week skills group is to help trainees effectively regulate emotions ultimately leading to satisfaction at work, our relationships, and overall well-being.

Effective communication skills are at the core of interpersonal relationships both professionally with supervisors, mentors, and colleagues and personally with family and friends. Developing skills to effectively communicate your work, boundaries, expectations, or feelings is pivotal in fostering healthy interactions and relationships. This skills group will offer tangible ways to promote active listening, increase understanding of how to discern non-verbal cues, and manage anxiety relative to communicating.

Working towards being well and forming healthy habits can be a challenge. As a result, we often do not know where to start or we need resources to help follow through with wellness planning. Research in social science and psychology offers useful tools to overcome many of these struggles. During this 4-week group, participants will discuss the psychological concepts underlying these challenges, learn practical skills to help them better thrive, and apply the skills to their personal lives.

Imposter fears can negatively shape our sense of self and the world around us which can create limitations to our growth and success. This skills group will offer tools to help overcome your imposter fears! The content will help you understand the root of the fears, how to manage cognitive distortions, and effective ways to respond to imposter fears limiting your potential.

Stress is a natural and needed part of our existence; it is a response to changes or challenges in our lives and can serve as a powerful motivator. However, if not managed, our stress can become overwhelming and negatively affect our well-being. In this 4-week skills group, we will discuss and learn specific techniques to help us build our stress tolerance and resilience.

Perfectionism is the armor many of us wear to protect us from the disappointment and fear of potential setbacks. In the field of biomedical research, we sometimes fall into the trap of idealizing perfectionism, convincing ourselves that it’s the reason we’ve made it this far and is critical to us being successful in the future. This 6- week group is a safe space for trainees to explore the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that fuel our perfectionism, and how we can move towards letting go of those maladaptive parts of ourselves. It’s a great space for those who are newly curious about their perfectionism and how it affects their wellbeing as well as trainees who have completed the healthy striving skills group and want to bolster their use of tools and continue to build support.

Many of us have experienced difficult life circumstances, which may impact us currently. Some of these experiences can be categorized as trauma. This group will explore the concept of trauma from neurobiological perspectives. Trainees will be provided with practical ways to assess the impact of trauma and learn holistic approaches to healing and centering the mind, body, and soul.

Research tells us that there are several benefits to practicing mindfulness and meditation including stress reduction, improved sleep, and enhanced self-awareness. During this 4-week mindfulness course, you will build skills to cultivate mindfulness to help train your brain to be present and maintain a sense of presence no matter the stressor. Mediation is the main practice we will learn in this course. All are welcome!

Anxiety is a common emotion that we all experience at some point in life. There are several internal and external stressors that can cause us to feel anxious. We may feel anxiety about our performance, making decisions, having a difficult conversation, or what other’s may think of us. Despite how common anxiety is, it can cause us emotional dysregulation, unhelpful thoughts, or even a physiological response. This 4-week skills group will help you build tools to cope with anxiety so that you are in the driver seat when dealing with anxiety.

As humans, we all experience anger. It can be unsettling to experience anger in the workplace. Anger can negatively impact productivity, hinder workplace relationships, and add stress to a high-pressure job. This 4-week skills group will explore how to emotionally regulate when experiencing anger, ways to effectively communicate frustration and anger, as well as navigating conflict relative to the experience of anger.

Chronic worry creates an internal illusion that we’re doing something about a problem when we’re just spinning our wheels in rumination. It wears us down slowly, showing up stronger in times of uncertainty, and when left unchecked, it can begin to have detrimental impacts on our work, relationships, and health. This 4-week skills group will provide practical tools to interrupt our worry-ridden thought and behavior patterns so we can more effectively take on challenges, cope with setbacks, and face uncertainty.

We all face moments when we don’t achieve or accomplish our goals despite our best effort. We may feed into self-criticisms and experience negative emotions that we’d rather dismiss, and stress and anxiety ensue. In this 4-week workshop, we will learn strategies and skills to acknowledge and manage feelings of disappointment and cultivate our inner resilience to get back on track.

Overthinking is an unhelpful thought pattern in which the negative, internal running commentary analyzes behaviors or words by others and concludes that the intent was negative. This can impact our mood, how we show up at work, and in other areas of our lives. In this 4-week skills group, we will learn to recognize our overthinking patterns and develop strategies to combat overthinking.

Our nervous system receives many signals throughout the day. Some of which indicate danger or stress in the absence of a real threat often triggered by unsettling thoughts and feelings or sensory triggers. Thus, it is important to develop a practice of simple techniques that calm the nervous system. In this workshop, we will practice simple calming strategies to add to your daily routine to help manage stress and promote feelings of well-being.

We can feel overwhelmed with work, which leads to feeling stuck and avoidant behaviors. While the avoidance is a temporary relief of the overwhelm, it’s unhelpful and unsustainable in the long-term. This practical skills group will lead trainees to understand each stage of the overwhelm-stuckness-avoidance cycle; learn holistic strategies to intervene at each part of the cycle and how we can possibly prevent this cycle from happening in the first place.