Speaking Topics

Dr. Jim Taylor offers a variety of keynote addresses, lectures, and workshops for businesspeople, parents, educators, students, athletes, and coaches. His presentations are engaging, informative, practical, and interactive. Dr. Taylor customizes his presentations to the unique needs of each audience. He can create a presentation from any topic of interest to an organization. Some popular speaking topics are described below.

BUSINESSPEOPLE

Prime Business: Maximizing Individual Performance

Dr. Taylor explores how to maximize individual performance in the business world. He presents his Prime Business model that describe the most important psychological influences on corporate performance. Topics include self-knowledge, motivation, confidence, stress, focus, emotions, and ego. This workshop provides you with a framework in which to explore and impact individual performance. The goal of this workshop is to equip you with the tools to enhance your own and your team's individual performance, productivity, and profitability.

Prime Team: Maximizing Company Performance

One of the most significant challenges that companies face is taking a group of individuals with diverse skills, experiences, and goals, and molding them into a cohesive and high-functioning team. This workshop examines fundamental psychological and interpersonal influences on team performance. Issues that are considered include leadership, culture, communication, decision making, inspiration, and ego. Attendees will learn practical skills they can use to create and strengthen their corporate teams.

Raise the Bar!: How to Take Your Peformance Culture to the Next Level

Your company's performance culture (defined as the values, attitudes, and norms about acceptable levels of performance, productivity, and profitability) impacts your expectations and goals, and the commitment, energy, and effort directed towards them. This workshop will help you identify what your company's performance culture is and whether it sets the bar high enough to meet the demands of today's highly competitive global marketplace. Dr. Taylor will discuss how to raise the bar from "reasonable" to "unreasonable" growth. He will describe the obstacles to changing your company's performance culture, as well as, the foundation and process for changing your performance culture. The goal of this workshop is to provide you with the insights and tools necessary to take your company's performance culture to a new level and achieve "spectacular success."

What Does the E in CEO Stand For?: How Ego Can Make You Great and Good

Ego is an essential part of achieving success in both your personal and professional lives. But ego is a double-edged sword. When most people think of ego, they think of people like Donald Trump, but few people really understand what ego is and what causes some people to develop bad ego and others to develop good ego. Ego can either be a tool for positive leadership and relationships, team harmony and productivity or a weapon for negative leadership and relationships, discord, poor decision making, and destructive behavior. This workshop examines the complex world of ego: what it is, how it affects individuals and relationships, and how you can nurture good ego and minimize bad ego.

Decision Making in Action: The U.S. Military Academy Crew Conundrum

This interactive and thought-provoking workshop, moderated by Dr. Taylor, presents a decision-making conundrum published in the Harvard Business Review, in which the U. S. Military Academy crew coach is faced with the challenge of selecting his varsity crew for the National Championships near the end of a turbulent competitive season. During breakout sessions in the workshop, small groups of attendees examine the situation with which the coach was confronted, delve into the process of how the decision might be made, and what the optimal decision should be. The breakout groups then share their decisions with the entire group. The workshop concludes with Dr. Taylor exploring the key issues in the decision-making process and what the coach ultimately decided. The workshop provides powerful takeaway for attendees on the assumptions they make and the process they go through in making decisions in their companies.

Change!: How to Inspire, Inform, and Transform

This workshop will consider what it takes to change. Everyone has some aspects of their lives that they are not happy with and want to change, yet few people try to change, much less ever actually make those changes. Additionally, companies often need to change to stay competitive in the global marketplace. Dr. Taylor delves into why people and companies want to change, what prevents them from changing, and how people and companies can engage the process that leads to meaningful and long-lasting change. Attendees will leave with the inspiration to change, the information to change, and the tools necessary to produce real change in themselves and their companies.

[top]

PARENTS

Positive Pushing: How to Raise a Successful and Happy Child

Based on his first parenting book, Dr. Taylor introduces parents to the use of positive pushing that is very different from the kind of pushing with which they may be familiar. He demonstrates how to push, when to push, and, importantly, when to back off. Dr. Taylor shows parents the Three Pillars of Successful Achievers: self-esteem, ownership, and emotional mastery, and their essential role in raising successful and happy children. In this workshop, Dr. Taylor presents “red flags” in both parents and children that help parents identify when they are pushing their children the wrong way (“Oh my gosh, that’s me!”). He offers practical advice on how to provide children with a positive, caring and motivating impetus to seek out success and happiness. Issues that are addressed include parental overinvestment in their children’s activities, expectations, perfectionism, defining success and failure, and emotional coaching. Parents will leave this workshop with new insights and practical tools they can use to encourage their children to achieve both success and happiness.

Your Children are Under Attack: How Popular Culture is Destroying Your Kids' Values, and How You Can Protect Them

Many parents aren’t aware of the harm that popular culture is doing to their children. Whether movies, television, video games, music, magazines, or even youth sports, these conduits of popular culture most influence children at their most basic level, the values that they adopt and use to guide their lives. Though values are an issue that is bandied about with regularity, there is still a lack of clarity among many parents about what values are and how they affect children and families. Popular culture teaches children the most awful values, including selfishness, entitlement, greed, and indifference to others, just to name a few. This workshop, based on Dr. Taylor’s latest book, looks at the unhealthy influence that popular culture has on children. It focuses on six essential values that are most under attack by popular culture: respect, responsibility, success, happiness, family, and compassion, and how parents can nurture these values in their children. Most importantly, this workshop will show parents how they can create a healthy family value culture that counters popular culture to instill positive values and help their children to live meaningful and fulfilling lives.

[top]

YOUNG PEOPLE

Resisting Popular Culture

Aimed at young people 5th grade and up, this entertaining and interactive workshop helps children understand the unhealthy influence that popular culture has on them. Topics that are addressed include respect, responsibility, happiness, family, and compassion. Students are challenged to think about how popular culture affects them and are given tools to help them resist its influence.

Becoming a Successful and Happy Adult

For young achievers, this workshop looks at young people as achievers and achievers as young people. The first part of this workshop focuses on issues that influence how young people become successful. Topics that are addressed include being gifted vs. hard working, definitions of success and failure, finding a passion, perfectionism, perspective on failure and mistakes, and responding to frustration. The second part of this workshop discusses the importance of decision making in becoming a successful and happy person. Issues that are talked about include why young people do stupid things, consequences and responsibility, making good choices, and young people doing what is best for themselves.

Mental Skills for Successful Achievers

Directed toward young achievers, Dr. Taylor shows them the essential mental skills they must learn to reach their achievement goals. He introduces the Prime Achievement Pyramid which consists of the five most important mental factors that influence achievement in education, sports, the performing arts, and other areas: motivation, confidence, intensity, focus, and emotions. Young achievers will learn how to develop these five areas so they can perform their best consistently.

[top]

EDUCATORS

The Role of Educators in Raising Successful Achievers

Aimed at educators, this workshop discusses the essential role they play in developing successful and happy children. Topics that are addressed include expectations, praise, combating unhealthy messages from our popular culture, guiding children in the development of positive values, attitudes, and skills, and helping children make good decisions.

Positive Pushing: How to Educate a Successful and Happy Child

Based on his first parenting book, Dr. Taylor introduces educators to the use of positive pushing. He demonstrates how to push, when to push, and, importantly, when to back off. Dr. Taylor shows educators the Three Pillars of Successful Achievers: self-esteem, ownership, and emotional mastery, and their essential role in educate successful and happy children. In this workshop, Dr. Taylor presents “red flags” that educators can look for in both sutdents adn their parents that can help them identify when a problem might be arising. He offers practical advice on how to provide children with a positive, caring and motivating impetus to seek out success and happiness. Issues that are addressed include educator and parent overinvestment in children’s activities, expectations, perfectionism, defining success and failure, and emotional coaching. Educators will leave this workshop with new insights and practical tools they can use to encourage their students to achieve both success and happiness.

Your Students' are Under Attack: How Popular Culture is Destroying Their Values, and How You Can Protect Them

Most educators are aware of the harm that popular culture is doing to their students, but feel helpless to protect them. Whether movies, television, video games, music, magazines, or even youth sports, these conduits of popular culture most influence children at their most basic level, the values that they adopt and use to guide their lives. Though values are an issue that is bandied about with regularity, there is still often a lack of clarity about what values are and how they affect children. Popular culture teaches children the most awful values, including selfishness, entitlement, greed, and indifference to others, just to name a few. This workshop, based on Dr. Taylor’s latest parenting book, looks at the unhealthy influence that popular culture has on children. It focuses on six essential values that are most under attack by popular culture: respect, responsibility, success, happiness, family, and compassion, and how educators can nurture these values in their students. Most importantly, this workshop will show educators how they can create a healthy school value culture that counters popular culture and instills positive values in their students.

[top]

ATHLETES AND COACHES

Prime Sport: Triumph of the Athletic Mind

Drawing on his own elite athletic experience and more than 22 years of consulting with professional, Olympic, and junior-elite athletes, Dr. Taylor will show attendees the importance of mental preparation for sports performance, regardless of the age or ability level of the athlete or the sport being played. This workshop, based on his book, Prime Sport: Triumph of the Athlete Mind, will focus on five mental factors that most influence performance: motivation, confidence, intensity, focus, and emotions. Dr. Taylor will describe the essential role these factors play in both training and competition. He will then describe simple and practical mental skills that athletes can use to strengthen these areas, including goal setting, positive self-talk, progressive relaxation, and keywords, and how they can be incorporated directly into their practice sessions and competitive preparations.

Two Essential Mental Skills

Though all world-class and professional athletes have different ways of preparing for training and competition, there are two mental skills that they all use: mental imagery and routines. This workshop will show athletes and coaches the power of these two techniques to ensure total preparation for training and competitions. Dr. Taylor will describe how to maximize the value of imagery and routines, and how to incorporate them into athletes' training and competitive efforts.

Prime Practice: It's All About Quality

This workshop addresses the essential, yet often neglected, issue of quality practice. Many athletes believe that practice isn't that important because it doesn't count. Yet, practice is actually fundamentally important because whatever athletes do in practice is what they will do in competition. The goal of prime practice is to ingrain skills and habits that will help athletes achieve their goals. Dr. Taylor will introduce practical tools that athletes can use to improve the quality of their training including practice goals, practice purpose, focus, and intensity. He will also describe the Ten Laws of Prime Preparation that highlight the importance of quality practice. When athletes and coaches leave this workshop, they will have the ability to elevate the quality of their practice sessions and gain the most out of their practice efforts.

Psychology of Injury Rehabilitation

This workshop, based on Dr. Taylor's two books on sports injury, offers sports medicine professionals, such as orthopaedists, physical therapists, and athletic trainers, useful information and practical strategies to help their patients overcome the psychological obstacles. Dr. Taylor will discuss issues relevant to patients at every stage of the recovery process including goal setting, setbacks, pain, and return-to-sport.

[top]