How to Prioritize the Important Things in Life

The president of Health Mate, Inc., in Southeast Michigan, Dr. Sandra Schiff serves as a business development coach, consultant, and Certified Peoplemap™ trainer. Moreover, Dr. Sandra Schiff has worked with the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit’s I Rise Family Empowerment Program, where she presented a Family Forum session on how to prioritize the most important things in life. Since prioritization is a challenge with which many struggle, here are some useful tips for practicing it.

1. After creating a list of the challenges you want to overcome, think about what is most important to you. Order the list on that basis.

2. Instead of spreading yourself thin, focus on your top priorities, as this ensures that those tasks will be completed quickly and you develop as a person.

3. Understand the purpose behind everything you do and ensure that the challenges you confront all serve that purpose. Doing so helps you to cut out the tasks that don’t actually move you forward.

4. Leave yourself some room to take time away from your work and life so you can enjoy the things that make you happy, such as hobbies or time with friends. This time will prove invaluable as it helps you to recharge and approach your challenges with renewed vigor.

What the Now What?(R) Program Offers to Prospective Facilitators

A professional coach and consultant who serves as the president of Health Mate, Inc., Sandra Schiff focuses on the techniques that can be used to rewire the brain so people can make the changes they want or need. Further, Sandra Schiff is an Authorized Facilitator of the Now What?(R) program.

Created by public speaker and life coach Laura Berman Fortgang, the program provides life transition coaches with the tools they need to help others make headway in their efforts to move into new careers.

In addition to receiving training in how to implement the 90-day program, which helps coaches with everything from communicating the Now What?(R) message through to offering a blueprint for the successful implementation of its core concepts, the program also provides Authorized Facilitators with access to support from a marketing perspective and a trusted brand that can be relied upon to produce results.

Further, Authorized Facilitators gain access to logos and brochures featuring this branding and are offered the opportunity to supplement their learning with over 30 additional training modules.

The PeopleMap™ Personality Questionnaire - The Four Personality Types

Sandra Schiff serves as the president of Health Mate, Inc., a leadership, transition, and parenting consultancy. A multifaceted consultant and coach, Sandra Schiff is also a certified PeopleMap™ facilitator.

The PeopleMap™ System, created by E. Michael Lillibridge, PhD, helps people understand different personality types in order to improve communications at work and in daily life. The system hinges on the PeopleMap™ Personality Questionnaire, a seven-question personality test that boasts a predictive accuracy rate of 95 percent.

The PeopleMap™ Personality Questionnaire places people into one of four personality groups:

1. Leader types are results oriented and driven to accomplish large-scale tasks. They tend to thrive on competition and often find themselves in leadership roles.

2. People types are relationship oriented and care most about the people in their lives. 

3. Free-spirit types do not care for convention or policy, and they generally value freedom in all aspects of their lives. They pursue projects that speak to their interests and seek varied experiences.

4. Task types are hard workers and tend to be extremely organized. They pay attention to details and feel a sense of reward when they complete tasks.

Historical Fiction Novels about World War II

An experienced leadership coach and business consultant, Sandra Schiff is the president of Health Mate, Inc., in Michigan. For recreation, Sandra Schiff enjoys reading and is especially fond of historical fiction novels. 

One of the most celebrated books in this category is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, the story of a girl who becomes obsessed with books and repeatedly steals new ones to share with her neighbors and the Jewish man hiding in her basement in Germany during World War II. 

Another book, Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally, looks at World War II from a completely different point of view, focusing on the prisoners of war. The novel looks at Japanese prisoners held in a camp in Australia and introduces readers to a protagonist working with an Italian prisoner because her own husband is in a prison camp in Europe. 

A third book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, explores the relationship between a German boy and a blind French girl who cross paths in occupied France. The novel is a story of the basic goodness of people even during times of war.

Wayne State Professor Joins Rutgers Violence Against Women Consortium

 


Sandra Schiff serves as the president of Health Mate, Inc., in southeast Michigan. In addition to her work with the consulting and coaching service, Sandra Schiff teaches at the Wayne State University School of Social Work.

The Wayne State University School of Social Work, which recently celebrated its 81st anniversary, prepares students for a career in social work. The school is also a nationally recognized leader in research related to social work.

Debra Patterson, an associate professor at the Wayne State University School of Social Work, was recently selected to participate in the Rutgers Violence Against Women Consortium. This team of experts will seek to improve services for victims of violence through research. In particular, its research efforts will focus on existing gaps in knowledge. The team will study teen dating violence, intimate-partner violence, stalking, and the causes and consequences of these behaviors.

Ms. Patterson will join 13 other interdisciplinary professionals in this research. Her background includes eight years of work with a domestic- and sexual-violence agency, where she researched the barriers victims face when seeking help. Over the next four years, she and her associates hope to improve best practices for victims in a useful way.

An Explanation of Leadership Coaching

The owner of SMS Coaching and Health Mate, Inc., in southeast Michigan, Dr. Sandra Schiff offers leadership and executive coaching as well as personal and transitional support. Dr. Sandra Schiff comes to her role having trained and guided leaders in a variety of fields.

Like an athletic coach, a leadership coach helps his or her client to develop and work toward goals. For the business leader, however, this coaching addresses the skills that he or she needs to achieve professional success. Coaches assist clients with interpersonal communication, personal branding, and business acumen, so as to establish a foundation for comprehensive success.

In a leadership coaching session, the coach works closely with the client as a partner and guide. A skilled coach will listen closely to the client and develop an understanding of potential obstacles to success, while collaborating to determine goals and strategies for reaching them. In drawing on client strengths and offering assistance in improving on weaknesses, a coach optimizes a client’s overall leadership capabilities and, in turn, drives value for his or her organization.

WSU School of Social Work: Transition to Independence Program

Dr. Sandra Schiff provides a variety of training, consulting, and coaching services as president of Health Mate Inc. in Southeast, Michigan.The recipient of a PhD in psychology and geropsychology, Dr. Sandra Schiff also holds a master of social work from Wayne State University (WSU), where she currently serves as an adjunct faculty member.

Wayne State University was founded in 1868, and is a highly recognized research institution with an extensive campus in Midtown Detroit. In 2012, the School of Social work became the third-highest ranked program at the university.

Wayne State University’s School of Social Work runs the Transition to Independence Program (TIP), which was designed to offer young adults in foster care better access to college and improve their graduation rates. One of the program’s services is the dissemination of education-related news that affects this population.

TIP recently undertook an analysis of tuition waiver programs, exploring their prevalence across the country and determining areas for improvement. The analysis presented seven areas of comparison between the programs, which exist in 21 states.

All but one of the programs cover the cost of tuition and school fees. One exception, in Connecticut, offers coverage of books and housing only.

In 17 states (81 percent), the programs specify an age at which children must have been in foster care in order to be eligible for coverage, and eight programs require youth to have been in care for a minimum number of years. The majority of states will consider adopted teens for the program.

Academic standing is taken into consideration by 14 of the 21 programs (67 percent). Applicants are required to uphold a minimum GPA or show satisfactory progress. Only a few states require candidates have extra-curricular involvement, such as community service.plea

Cooking Vegetarian Meals for Everyone to Enjoy

Dr. Sandra Schiff, president of Health Mate, Inc., a company that provides individuals with various consulting, training, and coaching services, believes strongly in the importance of mental and physical health for all the individuals in a community. In addition to walking and biking regularly, Dr. Sandra Schiff loves to cook and maintains a vegetarian diet filled with creative recipes.

Vegetarian recipes can be satisfying and healthy for all types of eaters. Reducing meat in the diet reduces the consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, and vegetarian meals often provide a greater amount of dietary fiber and other important vitamins and minerals. Although it may seem challenging to some, a few helpful guidelines can make vegetarian cooking an easy process for any experienced cook.

Balance is an important detail to take into consideration when cooking vegetarian meals. Creating a meal that combines the right amounts of protein and fiber leads to feeling satisfied without overeating. Combining foods of different flavors and textures in a vegetarian dish excites the palate. Another strategy for cooking savory vegetarian meals is adding chewy or crunchy foods like seared tofu or nuts. Because of the extra chewing involved, the meal feels more filling and can even mimic the chewing of meat.

Slow roasting vegetarian food improves the taste and flavor of meatless meals, as it reduces the amount of water in vegetables, which originally consist of 80 to 95 percent water. A vegetarian lasagna sauce made with slow-roasted tomatoes is a savory choice for those accustomed to ground beef lasagna. The inclusion of so-called umami ingredients, which are high in glutamate, also gives vegetarian meals an appealing taste without the use of meat. These ingredients include asparagus, tomatoes, and seaweed as well as soy foods like tofu and edamame.                            

About the Elizabeth N. Brehler Scholars Program

A PhD graduate of Union Institute and College and a member of the International Coaching Federation, Dr. Sandra Schiff has served as the president of Health Mate, Inc., for over 15 years. Additionally, Dr. Sandra Schiff is a part-time adjunct professor at Wayne State University’s School of Social Work.

One of the country’s top schools in its field, the School of Social Work at Wayne State University was established in 1935. Accredited by the Council on Social Work Education and a member of the National Association of Social Workers, the school offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs that meet the five pillars of the field: education, human behavior, policy, practice methods, and research. To help students who participate in its programs, the Wayne State University School of Social Work provides a variety of financial aid and scholarship opportunities, including the Elizabeth N. Brehler Scholars Program.

Overseen by the Brehler Committee, the Elizabeth N. Brehler Scholars Program was created in 1991 to encourage personal and professional development through social work. Open to students who write a manuscript under the supervision of a faculty mentor, the scholarship requires the submission to incorporate at least two focus areas, ranging from diversity and ethical dilemmas to practice decisions and social policies. In addition to the $3,000 top scholarship, participants who follow the guidelines receive a gift card and a certificate.                            

Social Work a Rapidly Growing Field

Sandra Schiff, PhD, has a long and varied career in helping professions. Head of her own consultancy, which focuses on executive and leadership coaching, Dr. Sandra Schiff is also an adjunct professor of social work at Detroit, Michigan’s Wayne State University, where she earned her master of social work (MSW).

According to the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), social workers are highly trained and experienced professionals who have earned social work degrees at the bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral levels and completed a minimum number of hours in supervised fieldwork. US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics projections indicate that social work is among the fastest-growing careers in the United States.

NASW loosely defines social work as psychosocial services and advocacy. Social workers help people restore or enhance their capacity for social functioning, NASW says, as well as help them overcome such challenges as poverty, discrimination, abuse, addiction, illness, divorce, disability, and unemployment.

The Benefits of Friendship in Adulthood

As the president of Health Mate, Inc., and the head of SMS Coaching, Sandra Schiff provides coaching services in areas ranging from parenting to career transition. Specializing on the needs of older adults, Sandra Schiff understands the interpersonal connections that enhance life enjoyment and aging with dignity.

According to recent research, approximately 25 percent of American adults claim to have no one with whom they can share their concerns and triumphs. Those without a close confidant among their immediate family members seem to have no confidants at all. Data shows that this lack of intimate friendship not only reduces one's quality of life but can also impact overall health and longevity.

A study at Flinders University of Australia followed close to 1,500 older adults and found that a strong network of friends led to a 22 percent increase in longevity. Close relationships with family had no such effect. Strong social networks have also proven effective at improving cancer treatment outcomes, lowering blood pressure levels, and reducing the risk of both depression and dementia. Research has even shown that the presence of a friend can make a task appear less daunting, thus suggesting that the certainty of support in a friendship improves outlook and minimizes stress.

The PeopleMap System - Test, Facilitators, and Results

Dr. Sandra Schiff is the president of Health Mate, Inc., a Michigan-based organization that helps individuals through life coaching, training, and consulting services. In that role, Dr. Sandra Schiff capitalizes on her expertise in organizational effectiveness as a certified PeopleMap facilitator.

Licensed psychologist Michael Lillibridge, Ph.D, developed the PeopleMap System, which consists of a personality questionnaire and corresponding programs that focus on effective communication, leadership styles, and achieving optimal productivity and performance. The personality test only consists of seven questions, but it yields a 95 percent accuracy rate. Like Myers-Briggs and similar questionnaires, the PeopleMap test organizes individuals into four different personality types. Facilitators guide participants through the test and a standard training program called “Understanding Yourself and Others.” Additional developmental programs are available that build on the initial course.

A survey of 525 participants concluded that individuals experience significant positive progress in categories like conflict resolution, productivity, and communication after completing PeopleMap training.

Farber Soul Center Opening in 2016

As president of Health Mate, Inc., Dr. Sandra Schiff offers coaching, training, and consulting services on both personal and professional levels. In her personal life, Dr. Sandra Schiff gives back to the community by being a part of the Farber Soul Center Committee.

Established in 1994, Friendship Circle, the organization behind the Farber Soul Center, focuses on helping children with special needs become involved in a variety of developmental and artistic programs. The new center represents Friendship Circle’s efforts to extend these types of programs to adults with special needs. The location includes an art studio, gallery, and a state-of-the-art kosher cafe that offers participants an opportunity to learn culinary skills and relevant on-the-job training. The art studio fosters the creativity, confidence, and vocational skills of members through visual and digital art programs, and the gallery hosts the artwork to show off the skills and creativity of the participants.

The Farber Soul Center plans to officially open to the community in early 2016.                            

Continuing Education for Social Workers at Wayne State University

In addition to acting as president of Health Mate, Inc., Dr. Sandra Schiff serves as a part-time faculty member at Wayne State University School of Social Work. Dr. Sandra Schiff is one of the many distinguished faculty at Wayne State, a nationally respected university with a main campus in Detroit, Michigan, and six extension centers in the southeast part of the state.

Part of the mission of the Wayne State School of Social Work is to advance the social work profession. One way that the school does this is to offer continuing education programs for practicing social workers.

Continuing education through the Wayne State University School of Social Work is notable in a number of ways. Wayne State works closely with many social service agencies in the Greater Detroit area to make education opportunities available within actual workplaces. Instructors are highly experienced; in fact, some have been practicing social workers for over 30 years. Both workshops and longer, ongoing educational opportunities are offered, and topics reflect the latest trends, developments, and research within the social work profession.

These classes and workshops give practicing social workers a chance to interact with their peers, learn new skills, and get new perspectives on their profession. All continuing education through the School of Social Work at Wayne State is part of the larger commitment of the department to serving the Detroit metropolitan area.

Being Present for Your Grandchildren

Trained through the Institute for Life Coaching, Dr. Sandra Schiff advises and guides individuals and organizations in her coaching practice throughout southeast Michigan as well as nationally.

Dr. Sandra Schiff recently wrote an article on the subject of having grandchildren. She advocates being present for grandchildren at all times so that they feel heard and understood.

She notes that being present can be a difficult task in the face of the many digital distractions that exist in the form of smartphones and other ways to access the Internet. This interferes with one-to-one, face-to-face interactions.

She gives examples of the many ways to be available in the here-and-now with children. Playing outdoors, exploring nature, maintaining eye contact, and even engaging in a card game all are creative suggestions. She also suggests shutting off the phones.

Dr. Schiff concludes that parents and grandparents should take advantage of both older and newer means of communication and recreation. She believes that research will show advantages of both ways.

How a Life Transitions Coach Helps a Person Overcome Challenges

The president of Health Mate, Inc., Sandra Schiff, PhD, offers consulting and training services in Southeastern Michigan. In addition, Dr. Sandra Schiff possesses substantial experience in coaching individuals through life transitions.

From changing careers to getting a divorce, a person will face many challenges throughout his or her lifetime. However, such transitions can often be life altering and less devastating with proper coaching. A life transitions coach helps people carry out a more purposeful life by teaching methods for coping with and adapting to change. He or she analyzes a client’s passions, interests, strengths, and beliefs to develop solutions that move them closer toward achieving his or her goals.

In order for coaching to be effective, a person must commit to change and take deliberate steps toward improving his or her situation. This is part of the co-creative process of coaching which includes acknowledging personal patterns and obstacles that have potentially sabotaged growth over time. In addition, a client has to be willing to make decisions outside of his or her comfort zone, knowing that change can be positive. This not only aids in handling current life transitions but also prepares a person to tackle future scenarios with greater preparation.

The YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit’s I Rise Family Empowerment Program

For more than 15 years, Dr. Sandra Schiff has leveraged her experience as a consultant and life coach in her role as president of Health Mate, Inc. Dr. Sandra Schiff concurrently holds a part-time position as a life and career coach for the I Rise Family Empowerment Program (I Rise) with the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit.

Established in partnership with the United Way of Southeastern Michigan, the YMCA’s I Rise program supports employed parents by giving them the tools they need to accomplish their personal goals. Participating parents receive child care services while attending the YMCA’s numerous forums and life coaching sessions.

At the start of the program, personal and career coaches conduct an initial phone call with participants to identify their overall objectives. The coaches then follow up with bi-weekly phone calls to monitor each person’s progress. Complementing these sessions, the YMCA offers monthly forums that cover informational and inspirational topics such as resume building and career growth. I Rise also provides needs-based child care subsidies to help parents move closer to their goals

Tips for Active Listening

Sandra Schiff, PhD, has extensive experience in career, leadership, and life-transition coaching, helping clients to reach their personal and professional goals. Among the skills Dr. Sandra Schiff emphasizes is active listening.

With so many distractions and responsibilities, many people have trouble staying involved and in the present moment. For instance, leaders in business settings might find it difficult to give a co-worker’s viewpoint their full and undivided attention. As a result, misunderstandings can take place and leaders’ effectiveness decreases. However, by implementing several techniques, individuals can improve their active-listening skills.

For instance, when in conversation, the listener should look interested in what the speaker is saying. Some ways to do this include making eye contact and turning one’s body toward the speaker. The listener should set cell phones, reports, and other distractions aside so as to better focus on the speaker’s message.

Another key part of active listening is to focus on the speaker’s ideas without leaping to judgment or allowing one’s biases to get in the way. A person’s feelings toward a topic often act as distractions, to the point where listeners can miss ideas the speaker wants to communicate. Similarly, the listener should avoid interrupting, instead allowing the speaker to continue while saving relevant questions for pauses in the conversation.