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I f you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of one hundred years, teach the people. - Confucius

SOONVolume 42 - January 2011IR Home

Seriously Optimistic Online NewsletterSeriously Optimistic Online Newsletter

In this volume...

• Conversation builders

• New - Strengths to the Max

• Summer reading

To contribute to SOON email us at:

soon@innovativeresources.org

St. Luke’s

St. Luke’s

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JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE

ST LUKE’S TRAINING CALENDAR 2011St. Luke’s

SaturdaySunday

MondayTuesday

WednesdayThursday

FridaySaturday

SundayMondayTuesday

WednesdayThursday

FridaySaturday

SundayMondayTuesday

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FridaySaturday

SundayMondayTuesday

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STRENGTHS TRAINING SUPERVISION TRAINING TOOLS TRAINING GIRLTOPIA LITERARY THERAPIST USES OF SADNESS

Hover over an event and click thru to the website for more info and

registration forms.

Click onto our training page at: www.innovativeresources.org

LiteraryTherapist

Travelling Toolshed

Strength based Principle and ProcessStrength based Supervision and Practice

Strengths to the MaxBuilding cultures of strengths

Uses of Sadness

Girltopia

Training in 2011 Innovative Resources has begun the new year with gusto, and has planned an array of engaging, inspiring and thought-provoking workshops for the first half of 2011.

SOON will keep you posted with more information about Innovative Resource’s workshops as the year progresses, but for now, you may like to take a quick peek at just some of the workshop highlights we have planned for the next few months.

The Literary Therapist, March 28-30 at Buda Historic House and Garden at Castlemaine, Central Victoria.

The Literary Therapist returns due to popular demand!

This three-day interactive workshop is for all human service workers who are passionate about writing, and those who would like to be more so! Creative writing can help bring alive everyday writing and can be a powerful tool for engaging with clients in counselling and group work, with colleagues in supervision and strategic planning, with communities in teaching and presentations, and with ourselves through our own critical reflection and self-care.

The beautiful and picturesque settting of the Garden Room at Buda in Castlemaine is, in itself, a great catalyst for learning, reflection

and inspiration.

Strengths to the Max, May 16-18 also at Buda Historic House and Garden at Castlemaine, Central Victoria.

This new and highly interactive workshop continues the St Luke’s Anglicare tradition of offering quality conversations to explore the philosophy and implementation of strengths-based practice.

For more than 30 years, St Luke’s Anglicare in Bendigo, Central Victoria, has played a pioneering role in articulating the importance of building cultures of strengths.

In this workshop, the key principles of identifying, mobilising and celebrating strengths are examined through a lense of creative arts. St Luke’s believes that creative arts sit side by side with a strengths-based philosophy simply because people learn, think and change in different ways.

Strengths to the Max represents a fresh and constantly evolving approach to building sustainable, respectful cultures of strengths for clients , communities and organisations.

Also scheduled for the first half of the year are:

Travelling Toolshed, May 2 and 3, at Buda Historic House and Garden.

Girltopia, May 30 and 31 at Spa 11, Bendigo, Victoria.

The Uses of Sadness, June 6 at Spa 11, Bendigo.

For more information about our 2011 seminar series or to register, click on this link TRAINING or phone Nola Tranter, Training Coordinator, at Innovative Resources on 5442 0515 .

At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. - lao tzu

Conversations....Part of Innovative Resources ‘seriously optimistic’ ethos is to encourage respectful conversations among people. Many of Innovative Resources’ therapeutic card sets have been created to help promote conversations which allow people to recognise and build on their strengths.Positive conversations have many benefits for all participants and are powerful tools for encouraging learning, nurturing self-esteem and enhancing emotional literacy – the ability to recognise and name feelings.

Innovative Resources’ many card sets have been created to help provide conversational cues. For example, teachers, counsellors, therapists, social workers and parents can use card sets such as Innovative Resources’ Deep Speak – The World According to You, by Geoff Barker and Michelle Lane Jenner (RRP: $59.95. Catalogue number: 4200) to build conversations with adolescents; Strengths in Teams (RRP: $49.50. Catalogue number: 2300) helps individuals, through conversations, to build on the notion that we all contribute strengths to our teams and we all gain strengths from our teams.

As the year 2011 begins, Innovative Resources has 55 conversation-building card sets in its catalogue! Many more are in production right now, and even more are planned for the future . . .

So what makes conversations such powerful teaching tools?

Conducted in a safe space, respectful conversations

can help people to bring about positive changes in their lives; be they between two adults, a child and parent, an adolescent and parent, two friends, work colleagues or complete strangers chatting as they wait in line at a supermarket, conversations can inspire others.

Conversations allow participants to open up and share what it is in life that is important to them, to tell their unique story. A respectful conversation also has many other purposes including providing us with an opportunity to connect with others and to put a name to our feelings. Considerate conversations may also:

• Provide us with an opportunity to ‘connect’ with others

• Provide an ‘antidote’ to feelings of isolation

• Assist us in learning from others

• Allow us to realise that our experiences may have been shared by others

• Aid us in ‘reframing’ challenges

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense - Buddha

Conversations....• Lead to a sincere exchange of refreshing and

new ideas

• Help us to realise that our ideas and views are valued

• Provide participants with a chance to empathise with, support and truly listen to one another.

Of course, equally as important are the spaces and pauses in conversations which can provide a chance for us to reflect on another person’s ideas, as well as our own.

Feel like talking some more . . .

Well, to browse and explore Innovative Resources’ entire back catalogue of conversation-building card sets, click on the ‘Cards’ link at the top left of our home page at www.innovativeresources.org.

We can send you out a copy of our latest catalogue or our new School resources catalogue ‘Maximise the Strengths in your School’ published in early December 2010 and focussing on resources that would help build conversations with students.

Drop us a line at: info@innovativeresources.org and we can mail you a copy.

Alternatively you can read either of these catalogues, and several of the booklets that

accompany our card sets, online by just clicking on the images in the bookshelf on our home page: www.innovativeresources.org

The Lover’s Companion: Art

and Poetry of Desire

By Charles Sullivan (editor)

NOW $35.00

Word Stamp Kit - Love & Romance

By Magnetic Poetry Create your own

stamped phrases and poems.

NOW $30.00

The Shaggy Gully Times

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a wombat, a sheep

and a dancing kangaroo NOW $24.95

Loving the Machine: The art and science of Japanese robot

By Timothy N. Hornyak and colourfast.

NOW $34.95

DON'T FORGET OUR SPECIALS BUTTONYes, at the top right of our web page we have a little button marked Specials' with some value

packs, backlist stock and end of run items like:

No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. - Aesop

Meet: Max, Maxine and Maximillian (The Third)!OK, fellow space travellers, strap yourselves into your capsule and let’s get ready for lift-off. Max, Maxine and Maximillian (The Third)!—or ‘MandMandM’ as they are known—will be touching down early in 2011 in a brand new ‘space ship’ (card set) called Strengths to the Max: Exploring a Universe of Hidden Strengths.

The 52 cards in Strengths to the Max invite individuals, families, organisations and groups to think about their strengths and the strengths of others in different and exciting ways.

Innovative Resources has a whole range of cards sets and books whose titles bow to the power of strengths—Strength Cards, Strengths in Teams, Baby Strengths, Our Scrapbook of Strengths, The Strengths Approach to name but a few. And soon we will be adding to the collection with Strengths to the Max.

Everyone has strengths. We all use our strengths constantly to get through the tasks and challenges that everyday life throws at us. Our strengths are perhaps our greatest

assets for navigating challenges and keeping hope alive within us.

Sometimes, especially when we are confronted by life’s bigger issues, it can be easy to forget the strengths we have, or how we might use them to tackle the problem we are facing. No matter how many strengths we ourselves have, we can always gain other strengths from those around us—our family, our friends, our workmates, our pets and our neighbours.

Many strengths can be readily recognised for what

they are, but sometimes they can also be hidden or disguised. For example, stubborn, feisty, dreamy, noisy or angry may seem to name traits to be avoided. Yet there are times when each of these may be of vital importance to get us through a sticky situation.

The three stars of Strengths to the Max—Max, Maxine and Maximillian (The Third)—not only demonstrate that our strengths can be enhanced when we work cooperatively with others, but that we need to look for strengths in some unexpected places.

May Your Strengths Be With You!

AVAILABLE in April 2011 - $59.50

ORDER NOWConcept and booklet: Russell Deal

Illustrator and designer: Mat Jones

COMING SOON from IR

For many Australians, scorching summer temperatures at this time of year often provide a wonderful opportunity to escape to a cool, quiet place, relax and lose ourselves in the pages of a good book, as we take pleasure in reading someone else’s story.But sometimes, finding just the right book can be tricky.

With this in mind, we’ve perused the shelves of our ‘seriously optimistic’ bookshop at Innovative Resources and compiled a list of ‘top 10 summer reads’.

Included on the list, in no particular order, are books for younger readers, older readers and all those in between.

Each of our thought-provoking summer reads is available online at www.innovativeresources.org

Enjoy!

1. It’s a Book, by Lane Smith. We love this delightful . . . book! Can it Text? Blog? Scoll? Wi-Fi? Tweet? No . . . It’s a book. No matter how many electronic devices are available these days, you can’t deny the simple appeal of a good book. Monkey is reading a book, but his friend wants to know what the book can do. This delightful picture book

has been a hit with staff at Innovative Resources! Walker Books, 2010, hardcover, 30 pages. RRP: $27.95. Code: 6022.

2. Post Secret, compiled by Frank Warren. For the past three years, Frank Warren has been asking people to anonymously send him a secret on a postcard - a secret they have never told anyone! To date he has received more than 10,000 responses. Collected here are several hundred of them. This work provides a fascinating public airing of private thoughts. HaperCollins, 2005, hardcover, 278 pages. RRP: WAS $65, NOW $55. Code: S8842.

3. The Economical Environmentalist –My Attempt to Live a Low Carbon Life, by Prashant Vaze. Saving the planet doesn’t have to cost the world, nor do tough economic times need to relegate concerns for the planet to the back burner. In this book, Prashant Vaze, an environmental economist, distils

and builds on his experience of trying to live a low carbon life in London. In doing so he helps navigate the choices that confront us all when making decisions about what to eat, how to travel and how to keep warm in the era of climate change. Earthscan, 2009, softcover, 350 pages. RRP: $39.95. Code: 9578.

4. A Life at Work, by Thomas Moore. Astonishingly, most of us will spend longer each day in our respective workplace than we will at home. We all want to enjoy our professional lives, but many people feel dissatisfied at work and ask, ‘Why am I doing what I’m doing?’ Moore’s book blends spirituality and psychology and is for anyone questioning the path they have chosen. A Life at Work is a poignant and practical meditation which encourages the journey towards answers. Broadway Books, 2008, softcover, 300 pages. RRP: $35. Code: 9065.

5. Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore. In this book, Moore claims

Don’t save anything for a special occasion. Being alive, is a special occasion.

Summer reading....

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu

that a loss of soul lies behind the restlessness, addiction, insecurity, and frustration of so many contemporary men and women. In a direct challenge to the idea that happiness can be bought, Moore, a psychotherapist, describes the book as ‘a program for bringing soul back to life’. Published by Harper Perennial, 1994, softcover, 310 pages. RRP: $32.95. Code: 9144.

6. Wisdom, by Michael McQueen. Okay, technically this ‘book’ is a journal, however Wisdom is so beautifully crafted it deserves to be on our list. Wisdom is a journal containing more than 180 questions designed to help you record and pass on your wisdom to the next generation. Wisdom offers an opportunity to share the lessons you have learned in the classroom of life. Media 21 Publishing, 2010, hardcover, 192 pages. RRP: $34.99. Code: 9630.

7. The Gift of the Gob, by Kate Burridge. Professor of Lingusitics, Kate Burridge, explores our

language and the everlasting tug-of-love that exists between ‘proper’ English and its wayward relation, slang. Burridge investigates the place where all that is ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ or ‘sloppy’ slips into everyday use, before becoming ‘proper’ in its turn. The Gift of the Gob takes the reader on a fascinating journey through English language history as Kate unearths the spectacular changes that have shaped the linguistic shenanigans of our language. ABC Books, 2010, softcover, 308 pages. RRP: $28. Code: 9563.

8. Not Quite What I Was Planning, by Smith Magazine. One Life. Six Words. What’s Yours? When Hemingway famously wrote, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine ‘SMITH’ asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. Smith Magazine, HarperCollins, 2008, softcover, 228 pages. RRP: $22.99. Code: 9070.

9. Messy Thrilling Life, by Sabrina Ward Harrison. Ward Harrison is a journaller with heart - making stories, making plans, making lists, making love - these are her obsessions. Laugh, weep and grow along with her in Messy Thrilling Life. Random House, 2004, softcover, 160 pages. RRP: $44.95. Code: 8762.

10. Steven King on Writing – A Memoir of the Craft, by Steven King. An incredible book about the craft of writing. Part biography, part tips for aspiring writers, this book highlights King’s great wit, his storytelling genius, and love of writing. The postscript to the book, in which King describes his horrific road accident in 1999 and his subsequent recovery, makes for riveting reading. nel, 2000, softcover, 367 pages. RRP: $29.99. Code: 8286.