Stuart Ablon Keynote Speaker

• Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Can Help Anyone Change at Home, at School, and at Work

"Why won't you change?" It's the battle cry of anyone who's ever tried to help a troubled teen, an undisciplined colleague, a stubborn spouse...and anyone who's ever tried to curb bad habits and behavior in him or herself.

Why is it so hard to change unwanted behavior? This paradigm-shifting book presents an evidence-based approach that actually works. Rather than judging, blaming, harsher punishment, or a call for more willpower, a more effective response to problem behavior is recognizing there's a lack of skill, not a lack of will.

Based on his more than twenty-five years of clinical work with some of the most challenging populations (juvenile offenders, convicted criminals, and other institutionalized individuals) as well as training teachers, police officers, and other professionals, Dr. Stuart Ablon presents a new way of thinking about solving our most vexing behavioral problems--and practical advice to put the ideas into practice.

Forget tough love, zero tolerance, and other outdated ways to try to eliminate bad behavior. Instead, look for what's missing--the ability to tolerate frustration and change, for example--and work together to find a solution that will actually stick.

• Leading with Plan B: The Collaborative Problem Solving Approach to Business

Dr. Stuart Ablon has spent the last 30 years helping organizations in some of the most challenging settings around the world improve outcomes using a ground-breaking approach that combines neuroscience, common sense and compassion. Dr. Ablon helps leaders, managers and supervisors understand why conventional approaches to management that emphasize motivating staff to perform miss the mark and often make matters worse. Recognizing that behavior and performance is determined by skill, not will, is the paradigm shift at the heart of Dr. Ablon’s work and why Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Dan Pink and Susan Cain hand-picked his latest book, Changeable, for their Next Big Idea Club. Dr. Ablon’s evidence-based approach, Collaborative Problem Solving, combines this shift in thinking with actionable strategies proven to improve outcomes by building skills, decreasing stress, improving relationships – all the factors that lead to fostering sustained intrinsic drive in ourselves and our colleagues.

An award-winning psychologist, Dr. Ablon is Associate Professor and the Thomas G. Stemberg Endowed Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Founder and Director of Think:Kids in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the world’s top-rated thought-leaders and keynote speakers, Dr. Ablon teaches educators, parents, clinicians, managers, and leaders a very different approach to understanding and addressing behavior of all types and in all people. Dr. Ablon has helped hundreds of organizations throughout the world implement the Collaborative Problem Solving approach.

• Parenting, Teaching and Treating Kids with Challenging Behavior: The Collaborative Problem Solving Approach

Behaviorally challenging kids can exhibit intense temper outbursts, oppositionality, and verbal and physical aggression. Behavioral difficulties like these strain family relationships and are the leading cause of teacher stress and burnout as well as the primary reason for departures from teaching the academic curriculum. Yet, traditional disciplinary strategies tend not to work with the youth to whom they are most applied and are often associated with significantly increasing risk for things like school dropout and juvenile justice involvement.

Dr. Stuart Ablon provides an alternative conceptualization of the difficulties of these kids; namely, that they lack skill, not will – skills in areas like domains of flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. Based on this conceptualization, he will introduce an approach to transform discipline called Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). CPS provides replicable guideposts for adults to build helping relationships with children while fostering a relational process that develops flexibility, problem solving, and emotion regulation skills. The CPS model has helped adults teach these lagging cognitive skills while reducing the frequency and intensity of challenging behavior in diverse settings, including families, schools, group homes, and inpatient and juvenile detention facilities.

• Parenting The Challenging Child: The Collaborative Problem Solving Approach

Parent-child power struggles leave both parties feeling miserable with the parent scratching his/her head, wondering how it could have gone differently. If these show-downs happen regularly, the whole family ends up feeling desperate. Dr. Stuart Ablon offers a new way to understand and help all kids, but especially those with social, emotional and behavioral challenges. Neuroscience research shows that these children lack the skill, not the will, to behave. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach flows from this research and runs counter to the conventional wisdom of relying on rewards and punishment and instead offers a revolutionary model that repairs relationships, decreases challenging behavior and parent stress, and helps kids build the skills they need to succeed.