Anne Barab
Anne Barab, The Resilience Expert, speaks to people and organizations about how to balance attitude, reality, and behavior to craft lives of resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity and reach out to live an enriched life. In the last forty years in hundreds of research studies, resilient people have proven to be better problem-solvers, more persistent, produce greater output and rise to leadership positions faster and more successfully than their non-resilient peers.
Resilience is not an inborn character trait. It is a skill that can be learned. Anne’s Resilience Matters! programs teach people to understand and practice the mindset of resilient thinking. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies to help their people overcome resistance to change, reduce stress and improve leadership. Resilience is a mind-set that enables people to achieve at the highest levels at work, to have fulfilling, loving relationships, and to raise healthy, happy children. It allows people to achieve balance between the needs of work while still having time and energy for home.
With the omnipresent personal accountability for bottom-line results and a persistent threat of down-sizing, workers suffer from the most stressful corporate environment in recent history. Employees feel compelled to spend longer hours in the workplace in a vain attempt to keep pace, with consequent difficulty balancing responsibilities at work and home. Resilience determines how well people do in life. Whether the goal is to overcome depression, sell more insurance or strengthen relationships, resilience is the key.
A resilient attitude is a mindset that creates joyful, purposeful living. Resilient people are:
- More adaptable,
- More resourceful,
- More confident, and
- More positive.
Anne’s programs blend timely and provocative knowledge and research in the field of resilience with just the right amount of humor and motivation. In fact, she's rumored to be the lost love child of Mark Twain and Lucille Ball for her common sense, wit, and wisdom.
Anne's Resilience Matters! programs help people know how to:
- Balance work, home, and relationships;
- Thrive in times of change;
- Put stress in the past tense;
- Think like a leader.
Anne has energized and enlightened audiences in the banking, insurance, education, technology, health care, human resource and food service industries, as well as the government sector for more than ten years. She has contributed to two books, The Leadership Path and Humor Us.
She began her career in the telecommunications industry, then moved into insurance, banking and financial services. She shattered the glass ceiling when she became the first female Chief Operating Officer of a $1 billion mortgage bank.
Anne served three terms as an elected board member of a large, very diverse school district in Dallas, Texas. Her district was named one of the Top 100 school districts in the nation in a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal. She earned the Master Trustee designation from the Texas Association of School Boards Leadership program and has completed over 450 hours of board training.
Anne became a student of Human Resilience after overcoming adversity in these public and private sector leadership positions. Mastering resilience in facing her own adversities not only changed her life, but in many ways, saved it. Her sought after programs are based on current resilience research and sprinkled with real life examples. She is passionate about helping other people apply resilience skills to improve their lives.
Anne walks her resilience talk. She’s been married for thirty-six long years to the same adorable engineer, raised three happy, healthy, successful children who are not currently in jail, and was voted Best Smelling Mom by her son’s first grade.
MOST REQUESTED PROGRAMS:
LEADERSHIP
Help! My Leadership Reality Check Bounced!
How to Think Like a Leader
Resilient people are better leaders. They solve more problems, persist when the going gets tough, and connect and inspire their colleagues more effectively than their non-resilient peers. Decades of research link resilient leaders to higher retention, improved job satisfaction, more productive work teams and increased bottom line results. In this program participants learn:
- How to change their thinking style to improve problem solving
- How to control their fear of change and become more adaptable
- How to have the courage to brave reasonable risks
- How to think and behave like a leader
CHANGE
You Can't Make Me Change Anything but My Underwear!
How to Lead Difficult People Through Change
Resilient people see change as opportunity; non-resilient people see change as danger. In order to implement change, leaders must help their people understand their fears and resistance so they can minimize negative behaviors. This requires ingenuity and an understanding of resilient thinking styles. Resilience skills can transform attitudes about change from hardship to challenge, failure to success, and helplessness to power. In this program participants learn:
- How to make radical changes in small steps
- How to improve their thinking style
- How negative thinking leads to predictable negative behaviors
- How to turn negative behavior into positive outcomes
STRESS
Even Bald Guys Can have a Bad Hair Day
How to Put Stress in the Past Tense
We all experience adversities. Resilient people are able to derive meaning from failure. By learning and using resilience skills, people can teach themselves to stay motivated, productive, engaged and happy even when facing stress at work or home. Resilience teaches people to believe that they can master their environment and effectively solve problems as they arise. In this program participants learn:
- How to understand what they are thinking about adversities as they happen
- What predictable behaviors will result from different thinking styles
- How to control and improve the quality of their thinking style
- How to create lasting personal change
RESILIENCE
I Had a Life Plan, but the Magnet Fell off the Fridge
How to Balance Work, Home, and Relationships
Resilient people are proactive in finding balance between work and play. Resilience skills teach people how to increase what is right in life and how to fix what is wrong. They provide people the inner resources to deal with chronic stress from the endless whitewater of life. Unrealistic expectations and inaccurate core beliefs produce negative and unproductive behaviors when adversity occurs. In this program participants learn:
- How to identify and question their expectations and core beliefs
- How to dispute inaccurate beliefs and replace them with accurate expectations
- How to cultivate a positive, productive mindset
- How to balance work and play
COMMUNICATION
Listen with your Heart
How to Communicate More Effectively
Resilient people possess empathy and the ability to build strong relationships. In order to inspire and motivate teams, leaders must resolve conflicts and navigate the fallout from any kind of crisis. Resilient people are good leaders because they understand how to influence and coach their followers to excellence. In this program participants learn:
- Conversational and management listen skills
- How to identify a speaker’s greatest need
- How to ask quality questions that guide the speaker’s personal growth
- The difference between advising and coaching
- How to present ideas with clarity
LIFE BALANCE
The Key to Happiness is Stuck in Your Lock
How to Craft Lives of Resilience
Realistic optimism is the ability to maintain a positive outlook without denying reality and actively appreciating the positive aspects of a situation without ignoring the negative aspects. Happiness is a byproduct of resilient, grateful, wide-awake living. Inaccurate beliefs lead to negative attitudes which foster ineffective and unhappy behaviors. In this program participants learn:
- How to develop realistic optimism
- How to replace negative attitudes and behaviors with positives
- Skills for improving personal and professional excellence
PRESENTATION SKILLS
So You Want to be Funny?
How to Create and Present Professional Humor
Can you learn to be funny? Maybe... Comics tell jokes, professional presenters use situational humor. Laughter in a presentation makes the speaker more approachable and likable. Humor in the workplace helps people accept change more willingly. Plus, laughing about the tough stuff is a key resilience skill. In this program participants learn:
- The rules, tools and techniques of creating business humor
- How to use humor to improve customer service and employee satisfaction
- How to incorporate appropriate humor into daily conversations
- How to deliver humorous remarks
ALL THESE PROGRAMS ARE AVAILABLE AS CUSTOMIZED KEYNOTES, SEMINARS OR WORKSHOPS.
PROGRAMS FOR EDUCATORS
Approximately 50% of Anne’s business comes from the education industry. Because of her nine years serving on the high-impact school board of a large urban school district in the Dallas metropolitan area, she is passionate about helping educators create extraordinary learning communities.
During Anne’s tenure on the board she helped lead her district and community out of racially-based turbulence to become an exciting learning community. Recently the Texas Commissioner of Education cited her district, Richardson Independent School District, as being the largest, most diverse and highest performing school district in the entire state two years in a row even though passing rate requirements went up and the state test difficulty and rigor increased. RISD educates 34,000 students, of which 49% are economically disadvantaged, 20% are English as a second Language, and 93 languages are spoken.
Anne’s programs target education leaders – school boards, superintendents, central office staff, and principals – the people responsible for allocating resources to schools, teachers, and students. She also speaks to teachers at back-to-school convocations and in-service training to encourage and appreciate their enormous influence and help them laugh about the craziness of students, parents and maybe the whole goofy system.
Her message addresses the key work of school leaders, namely creating invigorating learning communities where everyone – students, teachers, principals, superintendents, and yes even board members – are actively engaged in learning. Because she’s been in the leadership trenches transforming her district with extraordinary results, she understands the challenges and frustrations of this daunting task.
RISD was only the second district in the nation to adopt the National Staff Development Council Standards for Staff Development. These standards are grounded in research that documents the connection between staff development and student learning. Staff development is the term educators use for teaching teachers how to teach. It was the implementation of these standards that transformed her district into the recognized learning machine it has become, where that ALL students are learning.
Anne customizes her programs to include the student achievement results of the client. Her programs contain practical, thoroughly tested guidance for successful governance and leadership work. She challenges educators to focus, focus, focus on WHAT teachers are teaching and HOW teachers are teaching. She then provides a roadmap of specific tools and strategies for immediate implementation.
Anne’s knowledge, experience and insight uniquely equip her to address educators.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Winning the Game of Education
How to Improve Student Achievement
The key work of education leaders is to create and nurture learning communities where ALL students achieve. The No Child Left Behind law assigns a win/lose grade to every school and district based upon the standardized test scores of their lowest-performing students. In order to win in this high-stakes game, leaders must focus on WHAT and HOW teachers are teaching. The research-based National Staff Development Council Standards provide educators with specific strategies for creating the right mix of resources and quality professional development to make Adequate Yearly Progress in student achievement.
- Understanding what job embedded staff development is
- How to implement it at the district and school level
- How to create and support data-driven decisions
- How to get started on the road to creating a dynamic learning community
GOVERNANCE
Fueling the Flux Capacitor of Your Learning Community
How to Focus on the Key Work of School Boards
High performance school boards provide inspiring leadership on all fronts – student achievement, parental involvement, financial stability and strong public support. In order to transform their organization into a dynamic learning community, leaders must examine their vision, core beliefs, management strategies and allocation of resources. Frequently, this means the arduous task of re-inventing the entire organization. Fractured, non-resilient teams cannot accomplish this monumental task. In this program participants learn:
- How to make data-driven decisions
- How to identify and correct weaknesses in the current system
- How to reallocate system resources to adequately support quality staff development
- How to focus management strategies on WHAT and HOW teachers are teaching
- How to get started transforming their district into an extraordinary learning community
CHANGE
You Can't Make Me Change Anything but my Underwear!
How to Lead Teachers through Change
Accountability legislation, standardized testing, disaggregated test scores and Adequate Yearly Progress are making education professionals across the country feel angry and overwhelmed. Resilient people see change as opportunity; non-resilient people see change as danger. In order to implement change, leaders must help teachers understand their fears and resistance so they can minimize negative behaviors. Then they must provide them with adequate resources. This program focuses on helping teachers open their classroom doors to collaborate and help each other learn to teach better. It is the perfect program to begin implementation of change initiatives and new methods of staff development. In this program participants learn:
- How to make radical changes in small steps
- How to improve their thinking style toward collaboration
- How to control negative behaviors during collaboration
- How to focus on positive student outcomes
LEADERSHIP
Leading from the Back of the Bus
How to Think Like a Leader in a NCLB World
No Child Left Behind is a frightening and punitive law. Its student achievement goals seem impossible to achieve for all districts serving hard-to-teach student populations. Resilient people respond to such a challenge with data-driven problem solving, inspired teamwork and a fair amount of courage. Non-resilient peers whimper about the unfairness of the system. Never has the need for resilient leadership throughout the system been greater. In this program participants learn:
- How to change their thinking style to improve problem solving
- How to control their fear of change and become more adaptable
- How to have the courage to brave reasonable risks
- How to think and behave like a leader regardless of their position or title
ALL THESE PROGRAMS ARE AVAILABLE AS CUSTOMIZED KEYNOTES, SEMINARS OR WORKSHOPS
