I attended the October 24, 2011 workshop on "Staying safe in a changing work environment" presented by Rosanne Torpey at the LaVale Library. She gave an incredible amount of information to the attendees but the 3 hour workshop passed quickly because of her sense of humor and background stories. Some of the things that impressed me the most from the workshop included the idea that we all need to look at other perspectives on the same problem to help re-frame it into an opportunity by finding another angle - "don't stop at the first "right" answer". It was also eye opening to have the 5 stages of the aggressive cycle explained, from the triggering stage where you have an opportunity to defuse the situation through the crisis stage where you cannot talk/reason with the individual all the way to the post-crisis stage where the individual is calm and can again be reasoned with. Rosanne also emphasized how important nonverbal cues are in de-escalating or defusing possible unsafe confrontations from the way you stand to the look on your face.