About the Course
These courses follow five themes:
- realizing that you control more than you think you do – through the choices you make every day
- your adherence to the important principle of character
- showing emotional intelligence as you move through the maturity continuum from dependence to successful interdependence
- diligently pursuing the right habits, be they moral, personal, professional or social habits.
- this course is about you and focuses on the need to have a growth mentality and ensure that you work on your own development, balance and self-renewal
The course takes you through a logic flow starting with self-mastery, moving onto the art and science of habit formation and ending with building relationships, all the while finding personal balance and renewal. The following chapters are common to all the courses:
1. Environmental Challenges
How your response to environmental challenges will offer a more refreshing personal and professional perspective – you control your response
2. Paradigms & Principles
Ensure that your frame of reference on life (paradigms) and your role in it (self-paradigms) is progressive, e.g. you are in control of more than you think you do, you can improve and there is enough to go around. Linked to this is the foundation of the course, which is the principle of character and the values and traits that define us and our behaviour
3. Proactive
We have to be proactive to better take responsibility for our lives and control our destiny
4. Vision
We first need to embrace all the roles we have as an individual, know where we want to go in each of these roles, and formalise the path to get there by setting goals and actions
5. Priorities
Having established a series of goals, we must learn to prioritise those things that are important to us to be effective. This chapter will cover a number of tools that will assist this process
6. Science of Habits
Appreciating the science of habits in identifying the cues, contextualising the cravings, programming the response (thought or act) and monitoring the reward to ensure that good habits are repeated and bad habits are thwarted.
7. Sustaining & Compounding Habits
Ensuring that targeted habit improvement is incremental and can be compounded to have the most long lasting effect. The necessary repetition of habits is based on developing a grittiness in your approach to them – perseverance, deliberate practice, self-control, effort and stamina.
8. Meditation
The habit of uncluttering the mind through meditation – an appreciation of the ego, the importance of self-awareness (being) and the power of the here and now.
9. Win-Win and Creative Collaboration
To illustrate to you that 9 times out of 10, a win-win solution is the most satisfying and effective – this is not a technique, it is a total philosophy of human interaction. Once embraced, to use diversity to create effective unity and the optimal solution in any relationship.
10. Communication
The importance of communication and the art of empathetic listening before effectively influencing others – first seek to understand, then be understood
11. Balance - Self Renewal
Recognising that you are the most important asset, requires you to ensure that you are on a journey of continual personal development, and that you endeavour to find that elusive balance in life and the means to protect and preserve yourself.
12. Ethical and Effective Leadership
This additional chapter is a final step from personal improvement towards the excellence that is needed as a leader. The whole course is founded on the principle of values and the conclusion is that being ethical and effective are not mutually exclusive.
The course is a synthesis of some of the best thinking in this field, constructed in a coherent and all-embracing path to personal development. If this sounds interesting, I look forward to welcoming you to one of the Personal Effectiveness courses, with a combination of lectures and additional online material.
