Thrive at Work Workshop

Assemble the Toolkit of the 21st Century Professional

One manager we worked with who was considering quitting because she didn’t believe her job could be done sustainably reported this:

“I am still feeling incredibly grateful for the coaching you provided earlier this year. I’m happy to report that since we started working together ~6 (7?) months ago, that there have only been 2 weeks that I’ve worked over 45 hours and I’ve never worked more than 50 hours. It is feeling awesome. Thank you!!”

Another person we worked with who was burnt out and working 70 hours per week reported:

“I got promoted this week! Life is good. Had a week that felt busy but still not cracking 50 hours a week. I am happy!”

In this workshop, we teach you skills that you never learned in school and that most companies try to work around by giving you access to a meditation app. We’ll teach you evidence-based tools for how to manage your time, workload, energy, stress, and other people. We’ll show you how to prioritize with practical tactics that go beyond handing you the Eisenhower Matrix and hoping that the simple framework will solve all the challenges that come with an overwhelming workload.

We’ll show you (gently) where your mindsets and beliefs about work have been based on faulty traditions and help you develop accurate beliefs about how to approach work that are rooted in science.

4+ hours of video lessons you can watch whenever you want
3.8 hours of live sessions focused on group problem-solving and personalized trouble-shooting

8 extensive workbooks that walk you through experience-changing exercises
Lifetime access to an online community where you can find answers

30 min 1-on-1 coaching session with Zarvana CEO Matt
Unlimited email support from Matt for full length of the program

Workshop Curriculum

Foundations:

The Goal of Thriving at Work: Why work-life balance and work-life integration are the wrong goals and what is the right goal.
Thriving Goals: How to develop the goals few professionals have and all need.
Tracking Progress: How to create a “check engine light” so that you know how you’re doing before you begin experiencing negative symptoms.

Pathway 1: Work Less & Higher Impact

How to Reduce Your Hours: Overview of key strategies for cutting your work hours while increasing your impact and a process for implementing them.
Cut Email Management Time in Half: Evidence-based strategies for managing your email based on our Harvard Business Review article that can save you over an hour per day.
Dealing with Interruptions Effectively & Respectfully: Interruptions threaten the quality of your work, while slowing you down and exhausting you, but responding to them can sustain and build relationships with others. Here’s how to eliminate the consequences while deriving the benefits.
Make Your Meetings Shorter and More Effective: Too many spend their best hours in meetings, forced to do their hardest work at night or on the weekend. Here’s how to cut back meeting time and make it more effective.
Defining Success in 2 Different Prioritization Modes: There are 2 different prioritization modes, which depend on how busy you are, that require different definitions of success. Most never make the mindset transition required for mode 2.
How to Spend More Time on Your Most Important Work: We teach you a simple framework to get clear on what work you should do and what work you shouldn’t – and then teach you several strategies for offloading work you shouldn’t do.
How to Realize the Benefits of the 80/20 Rule: The 80/20 Rule promises enormous benefits, but there is very little practical guidance on how to realize its promises. That’s what we’ll teach you.

Pathway 2: Make Work Less Strenuous

Do the Right Work at the Right Time: We’ll teach you the science of chronotypes and a scheduling technique that matches each time of day to the work you should do during that time of the day.
The Most Effective Breaks: We’ll share the science of what makes breaks most refueling and help you figure out how often to have them.
Reducing Decision-Making Fatigue: Making decisions depletes your cognitive energy. We’ll walk through several repeatable strategies for either eliminating decisions or making them less draining to make.

Pathway 3: Manage Stress More Effectively

The Power of Positive Reappraisal: How to see even the hardest situations in a different way and how that reduces your stress.
Developing an Internal Gyroscope: A gyroscope tells you if you’re out of balance. When you’ve developed an internal gyroscope, you know right away when stress is affecting you and then you can rapidly process it before it creates more issues and further depletes you.
Automated Stress Responses: Rather than cope with stress the way you instinctively do (which may be unhealthy) or uniquely each time, develop healthy stress responses you can use each time certain stressors arise.

Pathway 4: Increase Refueling Outside of Work

Recovery Cycles: Understand how your internal resources fluctuate over the course of a typical week so that you know how to change your management of resources to optimize these cycles.
Recovery Experiences: Sure, relaxation is refueling, but there are 2 other important recovery experiences that science shows are often more effective. Find out what they are and where to insert them into your calendar.

Pathway 5: Influencing People

Changing from a People-Pleaser to a People-Person: A people-pleaser says “yes” even when it goes against their interests. A people-person knows how to move from people-pleaser to people-person without damaging relationships.
Polite Conversation Strategies for Saying ‘No’: It’s hard to say ‘no’ because you worry about offending others. These 5 strategies make it easy because they help the other person realize their error without saying ‘no.’
How to Influence People: Most people use 1 strategy to influence others: direct and overt. When it doesn’t work, they give up or keep trying with bad results. There are 3 other strategies you need to know.

Pathway 6: Make Work More Exciting

2 Different Types of Motivation & 3 Threats to Motivation: Understand these and you’ll know how to stay motivated even when work doesn’t go exactly the way you would like.
Building an Agency-Enhancing Mindset: How to see your ability to choose in every situation and the implications of that mindset for work and life.

Bringing It All Together

Personal Sustainability Plan: We share a template for a comprehensive plan that pulls together everything we’ve covered in the workshop and helps you prioritize and create a roadmap for pursuing sustainability independently.

Here are some of the things past attendees say:

“If you are struggling to get beyond survival and really thrive at work, then the Burnout Recovery Retreat could be a real help. It is a community-based, collaborative experience that leverages helpful insights, practical tips and real life experience. And the best part is that I could learn on the edges of my work and immediately apply what I was learning. I highly recommend this retreat.”

Director of Product Innovation (International NGO)

“Definitely worth your investment if you are suffering from or are close to burnout. Illuminating insights and practical activities packaged in a time-efficient manner.”

Partner, Head of Innovation & Learning (Consulting Firm)

“As a younger professional trying to balance pursuing interesting stretch projects at work with my core workload, this retreat was incredibly valuable in providing me with concrete strategies to rest and recharge. I’ve been able to use what I learned in this retreat to advocate for myself and communicate my needs to various project teams, which has helped me become even more effective in my work. I highly recommend this retreat, especially for anyone who is trying to figure out how to reach ambitious goals without burning themselves out in the process.”

Associate Advisor (Financial Advising Firm)

“The Burnout Retreat provides many well thought out and helpful tools of how to navigate working during this time of quarantine. The reflection times were valuable as they helped provide a space to create concrete plans to avoid burnout as well as a starting point for future accountability. I highly recommend this retreat for anyone who wants to be a better employee or boss, regardless if you work from home or not. The themes that are discussed are applicable across disciplines.”

Emergency Room Nurse (Hospital)

“The retreat provided real tools and evidence-based explanations for burnout recovery that will improve my performance at work and ability to work with teams more effectively.”

Head of Learning and Development (Insurance Company)

“This was such an important and transformative time commitment. From identifying what burnout looks like to learning concrete steps and tools to change reverse it, it was an exponential return on the investment of time and expense.”

Associate Director of Communications (International NGO)

“I finally have implementable tools to manage my workload and burnout.”

Program Director (Health Care Training Company)

Each session follows roughly the same structure:

On-Demand Video Lessons: Matt will teach you how to use science-based insights, tools, and mindsets. You can watch them when you want and at the pace you want, as long as you complete them before the upcoming session.
Practice & application: You’ll have the opportunity to work with the tools, reflecting on your personal experience, and get input from Matt and the other participants. You’ll work through a wide range of battle-tested exercises.
Goal-sharing & problem-solving in small groups: You’ll meet with a few other people, share how you’re doing on your sustainability goal, and share challenges threatening your sustainability. The other people in your group will share ideas and push your thinking. You’ll do the same for them. Matt will listen in on the small groups, providing coaching when applicable, and bringing common challenges back for the last segment of the session.
Coaching & solution-sharing: Based on what Matt hears in the small groups, Matt will offer advice, guidance, and solutions. You’ll also get a chance to ask questions.

Additional Support Beyond the Sessions

In addition to the 4+ hours of videos and almost 4 hours of live session time, you’ll get access to these additional supports:

Online community where you can converse with your fellow participants at any time, posting questions, and getting advice when you need it. When the workshop ends, you get to stay in this group and enjoy the community and support it offers.
Real-time messaging support from Matt: Through the online community, you can ask Matt questions at any time and he’ll get back to you in short order with advice and timely guidance.
1-on-1 coaching call: You’ll get access to one 30-min coaching session with Matt at any point during the 3 weeks or month after.

When I started my job as a consultant, I saw many of my peers burn out and leave after 2 years. But I didn’t want to leave. I loved what I did.

I thought to myself: there has to be another way. Well, in a year’s time, I had found another way. I figured out how to work less and uphold boundaries such that I was working under 40 hours/week while the average was 50-55.

– Matt Plummer (Facilitator of the Program & CEO of Zarvana)

JOIN FOR $200

Money-Back Guarantee

We want you to get results. At the end of the day, that’s actually all we care about.

Zarvana’s mission is to help ambitious professionals excel in work and life at the same time. We don’t think people should have to choose between having a high-impact, demanding career and a healthy and fulfilling personal life.

Yet, we know that the challenge of managing work and life priorities is significant and in this unprecedented time, ever-increasing. Even before the pandemic, about one in four people said they felt frequent or constant burnout at work.

FAQs

When will this happen?

The workshop will take place on the following dates at the following times:

Thu, Mar 25: 9-9:45am PST
Fri, Mar 26: 9-9:45am PST
Mon, Mar 29: 9-9:45am PST
Fri, Apr 2: 9-9:45am PST
Fri, Apr 16: 9-9:45am PST

The 30-minute coaching sessions can be scheduled at any time during the Workshop or in the month following the Workshop.

We will be offering the Workshop again in the future, so if these dates don’t work for you, don’t worry. Join our waiting list and we’ll let you know when we open the Workshop again. If you need more urgent help, send us a note or schedule a 30-min free consultation with Matt and you can explore other options, including 1-on-1 coaching.

Do I need to attend all sessions?

We expect those who sign up to do their best to attend all sessions, watch all the video lessons, and complete all the workbooks. Part of the magic of the Workshop is the interaction attendees have with each other and the accountability provided by consistent connection. If you miss sessions, you diminish the experience for others.

We’re purposefully letting you know the dates several weeks in advance so that you can book and hold the times. If you think you’ll need to miss more than 1-2 sessions, please consider joining the Workshop at a later date (you can sign up for our waiting list here).

Where will sessions be held?

The sessions will be conducted via Zoom video-conferencing technology. The online community will convene in Slack.

Who will be facilitating the Program and doing the coaching sessions?

Zarvana CEO Matt Plummer will be leading the program and meeting with each attendee. Matt founded Zarvana after figuring out how to reduce the hours he was working at a premier strategy and management consulting firm by 15-20% and ultimately, managing 3-4 projects in the time most others managed 2. Matt writes articles on research-based, sustainable ways to boost professionals’ performance on Zarvana, Harvard Business Review, and Inc.

If you have any additional questions, send us a note or schedule a short call.

Do More Than Get By

Assemble the Toolkit of the 21st Century Professional