We’ve gone through a number of key concepts already, so this lesson will give you a quick summary of what we’ve covered so far and an idea of what’s next in the course and our approach going forwards.
As we have already mentioned, this course shows you how your thinking can go wrong, how your thinking can be improved, and how, by improving your thinking, we can help you to make better decisions in your life.
Most of the decisions you make, you can even make without realising you are making them, you do most of your decision-making automatically, and this process is commonly affected by what is known as ‘Cognitive Biases’.
In the lessons to come, we’re going to alert you to many of these biases, and it’s also the common approach we will use in our other courses too. As well as your errors, we will also show you much better ways to think, and we call these better ways to think ‘Success Heuristics’.
We hope that with a better mindset, you can do two things; the first is to make better decisions, and the second is to make fewer bad decisions, and we see this as one of the keys to self-improvement.
So our approach to helping you improve your life is to help you see and correct some of your mental hang-ups and thinking errors whilst also showing you how to think better in given situations.
Specifically, in the Foundation Course, we will help you build a more flexible mindset and a stronger mental base that you can build on to be able to bring real change into your life.
Each lesson will discuss better ways of thinking and will build on the lesson before; these better ways of thinking will be highlighted often by talking about real problems that real people face in their lives and where poor thinking has got them stuck.
Our aim is to get your thinking and possibly your life unstuck by helping you to fix some of the issues that could be holding you back.
To get our message across, we will use a coaching methodology throughout the course simply because coaching is a great way to structure the process of moving you from where you are now to where you want to get to. Coaching also helps you play to your strengths and perform at your best, and a good coach can help you to unlock your true potential.
For years I’ve used coaching techniques to encourage behaviour change in my patients to help them change their lives. One of the important things that a coach knows is that often it’s not enough to tell someone what they need to do; instead, a good coach will instead ask a person the right questions so that they can search inside themselves and come up with their own answers.
Throughout this course, I will be asking you some tough questions just like the ones you’d be asked if you had your own personal coach sitting right next to you. So to get the most from the lessons, you really will need to take the time to answer these questions before you move on to the next lesson.
We also suggest keeping a journal of your answers as you progress through the course; by doing this, the course can help you to get focused on what you need to change in your life and act as a small reminder of what it is you need to keep doing too.
In addition to our coaching methodology, our lessons often use some counselling and therapeutic techniques because we know self-development is not just about direction and moving forward, there are also things that you will need to leave behind before you can really move on, and this is where a bit of counselling can help.
Whilst you often see therapists dragging people back into their past when all they really need is some coaching to move forward, you also see coaches try in vain to move a person forward when they are not ready and what they really need is a little bit of therapy to let go of something in their past that’s holding them back.
This is why we use a combination of coaching and therapeutic methods in our courses. We’re not limited by any particular field of coaching or type of counselling, we’re just going to help you problem by problem, taking a mixture of the best techniques out there to get you the best results.
I don’t really know what you need to work on specifically (unless you’ve booked some of our one-to-one sessions). I’ve probably never met you; I just know what most people need to work on, what commonly holds people back, and also what has worked really well for others with problems similar to yours.
If a lesson seems far too obvious, then fair enough, move on to the next lesson, but I’ll guarantee that if you do invest that time, you’ll learn some important stuff too.
A lot of what I’m going to tell you is just common sense, but it’s just that when your mind gets stuck when your thinking goes wrong, you don’t always see common sense and the way out of some of life’s common problems.
Apply our lessons, and you’ll change mentally, and lesson by lesson, step by step, you may well get your life unstuck along the way.
Our cognitive debiasing and success heuristic technology can be easily mapped across to some of the original elements of CBT and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The difference is that we also use a problem-based approach picked up from over 50,000 hours of talking to real people about real problems in their lives. Each of these lessons gives you a better and much more practical way of thinking about a specific problem so that you can change your thinking one easy step at a time.
This course, the Foundation Course, is designed to help you bring and accept change in your life.
Past these introductory lessons, the course is structured so that you first start to look at yourself, then those around you, and then at the society we live in today. Then the remainder of the course starts to look at some of the specific mindset changes that need to happen for you to be ready for the changes you need to make in your life.
You’ve learned about our approach and the way we do things; in the lessons to come, you are going to move on to actually learning what you need to learn.
Too many times, people read about how something works but never actually apply that knowledge in real life.
I really want you to commit to applying what you learn in the lessons to come and to really imprint that knowledge in your thinking patterns you can do this by doing the coaching questions that come with each lesson.