Date: Tuesday 6th February 2024

Time: 8.30am - 10.30am

Venue: Ron Dearing UTC, Kingston Square, Hull, HU1 3HF

8:30am - 9:00am: Networking breakfast

9:00am - 10:30am: Workshop led by Felicity King, Partner and Head of Development, Edwards & Pearce

Be More Mastiff was all about channeling your inner Mastiff and using their behavioural traits to handle tricky conversations and help yourself be more understood and have more impact. Felicity King of Edwards and Pearce led an interactive session on finding out more about behaviour types in the workplace and in life and how to adapt your communication methods to get the best from other types you will work alongside. 

Felicity gave us tips on how to manage the fear of having difficult conversations and gave us tools to help us be more confident when communicating.

Overall, this was a great session with active participation from all types of people with some useful and actionable takeways. 

Here are some key takeaways from the session: 

• Communicating with impact is not about personality but about behaviour
• Adapting to your audience is key – it’s not about you!
• Be more Mastiff! Key mastiff behavioural traits include being sociable, enthusiastic, and convincing. 

How to grow Your Mastiff Muscle: 

• Believe in yourself – get someone else to tell you your strengths, and really absorb them. Do the same for them. 
• Nurture your own ideas and encourage others to share their ideas. Provide opportunities to nurture ideas.
• Sell the easy stuff first…and, ultimately, make it all simple enough for a five year old to understand!
• Use questions to make connections
• Personalise your approach to people – what do THEY need from YOU?

What is Somatic Awareness?

• Somatic Awareness is noticing how an emotion or a reaction feels in the body
• Ahead of a difficult task, focus on the outcome not the difficulty itself
• Notice uncomfortable feelings and ride them…they can only last 90 seconds!
• Reposition and see excitement and anxiety as one thing. They evoke the same feelings but we label them differently

A huge thank you to Glenn Jensen and the team at Ron Dearing UTC for the use of their event space for the morning and for the breakfast. It was a real privilege to be able to take a look inside this highly regarded school.

Thank you to everyone who shared on social media! 

Sowden & Sowden on Facebook

Matt Mallory on LinkedIn

Laura Hope Botham on LinkedIn

Matt Scarr on LinkedIn

Pete Allison on LinkedIn

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