The Last Chance Oasis
The Last Chance Oasis, “your journey from stress to success,” starts with an eight-week online course about stress management. Each week we will ask you to “spend an hour on the couch,” learning about tools and techniques for stress management.
But the course is only the beginning of your experience. Let me tell you about the rest of what we have in store for you.
Honoring the behavioral tenet, “Behavior extinguishes without support,” we continue our engagement with regular education modules about your personal growth. We’ll provide you with “R and R” (no, not rest and relaxation, rather, rewards and reinforcement) as well as metrics along your journey. This support, initially regular, then intermittent, will carry you through your “two-year stewardship of behavior change.”
As you gain facility with and ownership of the tools and techniques of stress management, you’ll develop a positive attitude about your ability to succeed. Along with that positivity comes a palpable change, a transition from reactive stress management to proactive personal growth.
By six months you’ll feel like a new person, but at the end of your stewardship you’ll be the proud owner of a new identity. Not only impervious to life’s stressors, you’ll find yourself on an exciting trip to lifelong personal growth.
Indeed, the LCO will become “your haven in a stressful world.” It will reveal itself as “your catalyst to an oasis of wonder and joy.”
Oh, the possibilities! Are you ready for better? Let’s get started.
Powerful Oases!!
We introduce you to the concept of having an oasis, a place to find comfort and solace, a location to think and grow. In fact, the concept of having an oasis has grown to become the title of our effort. We never know when our oasis will be our “last chance” at solace and learning. So, let’s take full advantage of our oases.
Behavioral Catalysts
At the LCO we introduce you to the power of behavioral catalysts – key behaviors that speed up your adoption of new behaviors. Catalytic behaviors also promote the development of other desirable behaviors.
How Are You Feeling?
While working with the Montana Department of Corrections, Lennie was introduced to the State Director of Human Resources. A math major in college, she loved statistics and probabilities. When Health Risk Assessments were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s, she found one question to provide the greatest prediction of health risk – “How are you feeling?” If we can access our intuitive knowing and honestly answer “How am I feeling?” we can identify areas of significant health risk.
Where We Are Now ...
Allow us to provide you with a graphical representation of the relationship of stress and performance. In fact, the relationship is expressed as a bell curve with Peak Performance at the top. Most of us find ourselves on the back side of the curve, with decreasing performance, sitting at risk of sliding down into flameout and burnout. Flameout is downright dismal, but it is nothing compared to the disease, depression and death that dwell in burnout.
Where We Want to Be ...
Our desirable target sits on the front side of the curve, what we call Optimal Performance. Optimal Performance grants a high level of performance, but offers a buffer against additional stressors. You can’t beat Optimal Performance over the long run!!
No Time to Waste!
Although the Last Chance Oasis was envisioned and created long before the arrival of Covid-19 and the social unrest attending Black Lives Matter, the LCO deserves great urgency as we are spiraling into exponential divisiveness and depression. We can’t “play ostrich” and hide our heads in the sand. Let’s get busy and get better, individually and as a culture.
