Dr. Beth Erickson - Speaking Programs Dr. Beth Erickson is the Meeting Planner's partner. She speaks throughout the United States on the topics of business, motivation, and psychology. She is a compassionate, highly skilled and inspiring speaker who shares the keys to success - both in business and in life. Her presentations are motivational, entertaining and often touching - her audiences leave with practical tools and strategies to empower themselves to make a difference in their work and in their lives. To see comments from Meeting Planners, click here. To see comments from audience members, click here. Dr. Beth’s Hot Business Topics There’s a Jerk In Every Workplace; Don’t Let It Be You The number one reason people quit their job isn’t because of the job. It’s because one person makes them sick, sometimes literally. How can managers create a positive culture?  What can managers and teammates do to neutralize a negative culture? Dr. Beth will offer strategies for meeting this challenge, empowerment to dilute toxic work cultures, and tactics for dealing with these energy vampires. Putting the Science of Positive Psychology To Work For You This speech stands at the intersection of science and faith. With positive thinking just a synonym for faith, what is the science behind the power of positive thinking? Empirical evidence finds a clear neurophysiologic connection between thought and individuals’ health, wealth, and happiness. Dr. Beth will help you free yourself from negative thinking, recognize your inborn positive traits, and energize them. Minimize Negative Thoughts, Maximize Your Success You thoughts are the steering wheel of your life. They take you where you will go, whether you consciously intend to go there of not.  Dr. Beth will discuss how belief ignites enthusiasm, releases creative potential, and boosts self-confidence and productivity. It’s not what you have, but how you think about what you have that counts. The Emotionally Intelligent Manager Just as parents set the tone and take the lead in families, so it is with managers in the workplace. Those with lower Emotional Quotients (E.Q.) tend to place artificial ceilings on employees’ performance, stifle the creativity of those with higher E.Q.s, and frustrate themselves. Dr. Beth will describe the skills and attitudes of an emotionally intelligent manager. Share strategies for increasing the E.Q. of those in charge, and discuss how to boost supervisees’ productivity. Emotional Intelligence and the Bottom Line More than anything, human factors impact the bottom line. Businesses with a positive culture outperform those with negative cultures every time, with negativity costing American corporations $300 billion a year.  Dr. Beth will define emotional intelligence, discuss how it trumps I.Q. every time, and share strategies for increasing employees’ E.Q. while boosting their self-confidence and productivity.   Dr. Beth’s Hot Topics For Legal & Other Helping Professionals Marital Minefields:  Why Some Couples Can’t Stand To Be Together Or Apart  High conflict couples feel they are in a fight for their psychological lives. In their conflict, they have found a riveting connection while at the same time, keeping them safely emotionally apart. Lawyers and mental health professionals who too strongly advocate for their client often find themselves embroiled in another variation of the couple’s typical pattern: let’s you and him fight. Dr. Beth will show how to exercise your fiduciary responsibility to everyone without becoming embroiled in and exacerbating the couple’s fight. Children As Spoils In High Conflict Divorces  Children in high conflict divorces are double bound and hapless.  Either they are high jacked by one parent who pits them against the other by insisting they take their side. But then at least they have one parent.  Otherwise, they end up emotional orphans, stuck in a no man’s land while their parents lob emotional hand grenades at each other over their heads. Statistically according to Johnston, 67% of children of high conflict divorces are  children without siblings.  These children have no one.  Dr. Beth will discuss the damage that to these unfortunate children, suggest strategies for avoiding these tragic situations, and offer options for mopping up the messes created by adversarial approaches to divorce. Longing For Dad:  Father Loss and Its Impact  Far from being disposable and optional as some believe, knowledge of and contact with their birth father is essential for children’s healthy development.  Yet, far too many children experience a dad who is not there even when he is home. Worse yet, others’ information about who their father is distorted in the midst of divorce wars.  Dr. Beth will discuss the ways that relationships with both father and mother are essential to the development of a child’s self-image and what happens when that knowledge is missing. When Dick and Jane Grow Up:  Fathers, Sons, and Daughters  Boys get anointed  man enough by their fathers, and girls get a safe place to practice being a woman. What happens in adulthood when children are deprived of a healthy relationship with their birth father?  That loss often sits like a lost Atlantis sunken in their entrails.  The relationships they create usually are highly conflictual. Their parenting often goes from one extreme of smothering to the other of emotional neglect.  Dr. Beth will discuss emotional sequellae of father loss and suggest strategies for its prevention. Dr. Beth’s Hot Inspirational Topics Tragedy and Transformation Dr. Beth has lived through a personal holocaust. Her father died at fifty of a heart attack when she was nine years old, and because of her family’s conspiracy of silence, she was left on her own to cope. It wasn’t until her sister died suddenly twenty-four years later that Dr. Beth was forced – and gifted – to relive and finally resolve her father’s death as though it had happened yesterday. Then, within two years, two more of her closest family members were dead. From triumphing over tragedy, Dr. Beth can show your audiences how to finally find in the midst of winter, there is indeed in them an invincible summer. Health:  Living On Purpose, Not Just the Absence of Disease Eight thousand baby boomers turn sixty every day. They must choose whether to spend the rest of their lives living or dying, even if they are not consciously aware of this dilemma. It is up to each individual to choose to have a health span commensurate with this extended life span. Dr. Beth provides tools to help audiences choose to connect with their inner fountain of youth, claim their wisdom, transmit their legacy, and age without fear. Aging Isn’t For Sissies:  Overcoming the Psychological and Spiritual Challenges To Vital Aging The urgency of existential questions is especially compelling for Americans who are living longer and retiring earlier.  Questions such as “Who am I now?” and “What gets me up in the morning?” and “How do I want to be remembered?” take on great urgency in the fifth decade of life and beyond. Dr. Beth will show how look inside to answer these questions, maximize their remaining years, and mine the promise in these bonus decades.  Ten Tools For Tapping Your Inner Fountain of Youth One hundred years ago, life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years, compared to 77.6 years in 2005. Skills not usually developed in earlier decades are needed now to thrive and age vitally in these bonus decades. What is more, the depth of questions is different now, centering around surveying accomplishments, reshaping one’s purpose, leaving a legacy, and facing death. Dr. Beth will teach the ten most important tools to maximize and thrive in these unprecedented years.   Additional Topics  Positive Psychology:  The Intersection of Science and Faith  Are You Cause, or Effect In Your Life?  When Dick and Jane Grow Up:  Fathers, Sons, and Daughters When other topics are identified by meeting planners, Dr. Erickson is happy to develop any other topics that fall within her area of expertise.