The Personal Development Mega Course (19 Courses In 1)

The goal of this course is to give you a greater understanding of how your mind works and thus become a stronger, healthier, happier person. We discuss what resilience is, what makes an adaptive mindset, and the possibility of increasing resilience levels. Resilience is not a trait, it is a mentality.

Download the Resilience and the Adaptive Mind worksheet.

This lecture covers personality traits and your brain, resilience as a neuroplastic process, and increasing your brain's resiliency. It discusses the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Resilience is a neuroplastic process, treat it like learning a new skill.

Download the Your Brain and Resilience worksheet.

This lecture is a self-diagnostic test. Compare resilience to a rubber band pulled taught versus left totally slack. The qualities of low resilience include irritability, persistent illness, becoming isolated or clingy, overreaction to normal stress, trouble sleeping, and poor memory. The biggest negative impact of low resilience is not being fully present at work. High resilience people know their boundaries, keep good company, cultivate self-awareness, practice acceptance, are willing to sit in silence, do not expect to have all the answers, have self-care habits, ask their teams for help, consider possibilities, and are out of their own heads. As a result, they are adaptive in the workplace and are more attractive job candidates.

Download the Low Resilience Versus High Resilience worksheet.

This lecture identifies obstacles that keep people from being highly resilient. The common obstacles are social training, stress perception, external loci of control, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. Social training that defers obedience and codependence discourages us from finding peace within ourselves. We must defend ourselves from toxic stress and strain. We must reject the idea that we have no control over our circumstances. Lastly, in the absence of mental wellness, we tend to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. By recognising these obstacles, we are one step closer to overcoming them.

Download the Identifying Your Barriers worksheet.

This lecture is a self-directed guide to increase your level of resilience. It defines self-directed learning, outlines resilience skills to learn, and goes over some reading recommendations. The goal of self-directed learning is to help you accept the responsibilities that fall on you. It outlines eleven different resilience skills and discusses how to prioritise your goals. Lastly, it offers some self-help books to study.

Download the Self-Directed Learning worksheet.

This lecture looks at models of philosophical resilience from five groups of ancient philosophers: the Stoics, Epicureans, Pythagoreans, Plutarchans and Aristotelians. Each philosophy takes a different approach towards living a better, more fulfilling life. Any of them can be incorporated by any individual.

Download the Ancient Philosophy and Resilience worksheet.

This lecture goes over the differences between pessimism and optimism, the benefits of optimism, and outlines an ABC method of adopting optimism and eliminating negative self-talk. In short, pessimists allow events to reflect negatively on their self-worth while optimists accept events as short-term setbacks. Being an optimist means you have a stronger immune system, encounter fewer perceived negative life events, and maintain relationships. By eliminating negative self-talk, you can start your journey to being an optimist too.

Download the Learned Optimism worksheet.

In this conciliatory lecture, we review what the last nine lectures were and outline some exercises for resilience. The first exercise is to review experiences that made you irritated, upset or distressed. By reviewing them, you can create a plan to avoid negative experiences and create positive ones. The second exercise is a rating scale for different examples of resilience. After completing the resilience exercises you have completed the course. Good job!

Download the Resilience Exercises worksheet.

Welcome to the course on goal setting for personal development! This introductory lecture outlines the topics coming up in the course and details the skills you'll gain from completing it.

In this section, we take a look at the science and psychology of purpose. This lecture serves as an introduction to the idea of "purpose" and highlights the health and social benefits and cognitive advantages of knowing your purpose.

In this lecture, you will be given seven key indicators that could suggest you're are not in line with your purpose.

Download the Purpose Awareness Worksheet, which will prepare you for the next secion.

This section deep dives into self-awareness. Having discovered the importance of having a purpose in the previous section, this lecture will be an introduction to explore areas of yourself and your life to uncover and/or create your own purpose.

Download the Core Values and Purpose Discovery Worksheet.

In this lecture, you will critically evaluate your own assumptions about success. Firstly, you will list your ideas about what success is. Secondly, you will examine whether your list is influenced by culture, peers and your upbringing, before working out what is truly aligned with your purpose. Lastly, you will divide your list into internal vs external metrics.

In this lecture, you will analyse and evaluate your energy levels across various time periods. You will look at a variety of factors that can influence these energy levels. By having a realistic picture of your energy levels, you can then set realistic goals. You will be encouraged to continue this energy-level tracking as a regular habit, even after goal-setting has been completed.

Download the Energy Levels Worksheet.

This section looks at the science and psychology of goal setting. In this lecture, you will discover how goal setting creates changes in the brain and in one's behaviour, based on psychological and neuroscientific studies.

In this lecture, you will be exposed to scientific studies illustrating the ways in which goal setting has a positive effect on outcomes and success rates.

This lecture will ensure that you have the information you need to make goals that are important to fulfilling your purpose. It gives practical tips on finding inspiration for goals that are meaningful to you across different areas of your life.

Download the Identifying Goals Worksheet.

Here, you will learn how to complete a personal SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) matrix, in order to have realistic data upon which you can build your goal setting. You'll then be encouraged to write a list of considerations to take into account based on your goals, and/or filter your goals through your findings to make sure you are not setting yourself up for failure.

Download the SWOT Matrix Worksheet.

The purpose of this lecture is to ensure that you learn how best to organise your goals in the most efficient way. It breaks down various aspects of this process, including creating a timeline and breaking goals into manageable steps.

In the last of this section, you will learn how to devise a plan and integrate it into your daily life using positive habits and actions, as well as tools and software to stay organised and motivated.

In this section, we take a look at how to review, optimise and stick to your plan. This lecture provides helpful tips for you to stay motivated and avoid distractions when working towards your goals.

In this lecture, you will gain a greater understanding of how to track your goals, measure success and hold yourself accountable using various techniques.

In this lecture, you will learn the importance of evaluating failure, and how to embrace a Growth Mindset before evaluating weaknesses and failures. You will then be taken through a Failure Analysis process to help work out why the goal broke down. Finally, you will use this data to reactivate the goal under new conditions for greater success.

In this lecture, you will look at the importance of giving extra attention to areas of strength and explore why this is important. You will then be guided into thinking about how you can create new goals to capitalise on your areas of success.

This lecture covers long-term change and how it can affect the goal-setting process. You will learn how to evaluate your changing feelings about the goals you originally set and how to take action from there, in order to create new goals or to develop an environment conducive to attaining your original goals.

A warm welcome from your instructor, Jane Sparrow, who sets the scene for what’s to come. This course is packed with practical ways that you can build on your emotional awareness and really learn how to take ownership of your emotions and your impact on those of others. It’s full of practical advice, stories, tips and plans to help you become even more effective in your own work, and in how you lead and/or manage others.

Emotions - problems for us to deal with, or opportunities for us to be more effective in the way we use them? For years they have been pushed aside in business, but now they are seen as the distinguishing factor for success. Find out why, and how!

Explore our social reluctance to share our emotions and think about what we and others are really feeling – with a great tool to help people open up.

Explore our social reluctance to share our emotions and think about what we and others are really feeling – with a great tool to help people open up.

Emotions are the most powerful things that control our lives - they make us love, hate, fight or flee. But in a modern business context, what is their role, and how do we understand and develop them.

In this podcast-style module, Chris Preston shares a short intro to this area, with football as the starting point. What can we learn from the game... well, from one player, it would seem a great deal.

He also outlines the major components of emotional intelligence and the route we need to take to improve and grow our capability.

Download the 'Additional Resources' supporting document for some additional resources.

Understanding how our emotions impact our well-being is a key part of building emotional intelligence. This module covers the 'red and black' concept of paying in and out of your 'bank account' and will help you understand your own emotional status.

Step 1: These tips are for you to use in conjunction with an emotional snapshot spreadsheet to try and help you address any hot-spots where you are more ‘in the red’ than ‘in the black’. Once you’ve completed the spreadsheet, take a look at the tips below and pick the one you feel will have the biggest impact.

Step 2: A short selection of really practical tips that we have seen implemented to great effect and know work. Choose one and try it for yourself.

Step 3: Download the 'Additional Resources' supporting document.

Understanding your relationship with strong stimuli - how it moves you emotionally - builds on our capacity to manage those emotions. This module gives you ideas for spotting the 'source' and recognising the triggers for emotions.

Step 1: As this module is about better understanding our emotions, we’ve provided a downloadable PDF to help stimulate, identify and record some different emotions for you to work with. Download the 'Identifying Emotions - Your Spotters Guide' supporting document.

The worksheet has an ‘emoji challenge’, areas to capture emotions stimulated by videos and music, and a question about the emotions you feel when you’re performing at your best. You can use it as a printed resource, or download it to your computer, save it and type directly into it.

Step 2: The next supporting document is a list of different videos that we find elicit a wide range of emotions in us. As a reminder, you do not have to watch them all, pick a few different ones and notice what you feel while you’re watching them, makes some notes of those emotions on the PDF provided.

Step 3: The next supporting document is a list of music that we love, whatever emotions they bring out in us - this time we’ve asked our team members to write what the tracks made us feel to give you more of an insight.

As a reminder, you do not have to watch them all, pick a few different ones, or simply bring up your own music, and notice what you feel while you’re watching/listening to them, make some notes of those emotions on the PDF provided.

When do we do our best work? When do we recover and recharge our batteries? When do we grieve or suffer failure? This module shares the emotional scale - a powerful way of looking at how our emotions drive our actions and outputs.

Step 1: Download and use this sheet to work through the emotional scale with us.

Step 2: Capture your own notes on the emotional scale - record what feels important to you, what resonates, the areas you want to remember. We’ve put some placeholders in to help, but you can use the space as you see fit.

Step 3: Download the Additional Resources supporting document.

Working with the resources in the Our Emotions section, this final module gives you a practical path to start developing your own emotional capacity - awareness, understanding and impact.

Download the 'Your 14 Day Challenge' supporting document.

In daily interactions, emotions are the make or break factor, but, when things are tough and stress is high, they have the potential for an explosive impact. This short module gives you some practical thinking around emotions when things are tough.

Raise your awareness of where you, and other people around you, are during tough times – how we are all more volatile and likely to be constantly shifting around the emotional scale.

In this lecture, Jane unpacks more around our 'Emotional Scales', looking at where you tend to spend your time, why, and what the impact is.

Then she moves on to look at the practical things you can do to prevent yourself from getting emotionally hi-jacked, to notice when it happens and to shift yourself back to a positive place when it has happened.

If you’re interested in finding out more about emotions, here’s a selection of additional sources you can look at, including articles, videos, podcasts and books.

This lecture is all about how we recognise, acknowledge and manage emotions in others for success and performance – around change, and reactions to things in broader life – in order for them to reach their potential and to maximise our positive working relationships.

We’ll utilise different tools and approaches in order to understand and empathise with other people’s preferences and the situations they are facing, navigating the emotional landscape along the way.

We can't (and shouldn't) control the emotions of others, but we can help them find better ways of managing them. Importantly, we can adapt what we do to ensure we are not impacting on the emotions of others - key themes for this lecture.

Workbook

To accompany our section, we’ve designed the 'Managing Emotions in Others' workbook to help you apply the content. Download the Appreciation Starters supporting document too and use the questions to capture your thoughts and actions.

Appreciation Starters

Sometimes it can be hard to find the right words to properly appreciate someone, especially if we’re trying to make it meaningful. This is a simple set of starter sentences to help you think about how you appreciate different people, and what you appreciate them for.

How to use it:

• Think them through and see what comes up that you should appreciate in someone else.

• Make a list of people that matter to you at work and at home, what do you appreciate in them/about them/about what they do that you haven’t properly thanked them for or don’t thank them for enough?

• When you’re about to say ‘thanks’, use one of these instead to prompt you to go into more detail.

• Proactively plan to use one of the above each day for a week and reflect on what happens (for you and others).

Further Resources

If you’re interested in finding out more about emotions, here’s a selection of additional sources you can look at, including articles, videos, podcasts and books.

Stress is pervasive in society with so many negative physical and psychological effects. The recent pandemic has not helped matters. The good news is, we can take many actions to understand stress, reduce it, and manage our time more effectively. Stress can cause mental health issues, financial concerns, and decline productivity. However, eustress is a positive form of stress that helps us stay motivated, work toward goals, and feel good about life. Chronic stress can cause neuroendocrine dysfunction.

Download the Stress and the Brain worksheet to start your journey to a stress-free life!

Cognitive bias is when we filter information to support an idea we already believe. While they may seem like they are always negative, they can help us see patterns, form connections, and find easier methods of doing things. However, they are not rational, they are assumptions. Cognitive traps or distortions are problematic, exaggerated forms of cognitive bias that have a negative impact. They trap us from seeing the big picture. Cognitive traps are situations where we assume only negative outcomes, we assume someone is thinking negatively of us, we consider emotions to be evidence of truth, and we view everything as black and white.

Download the Cognitive Biases worksheet.

Heuristics help explain human inconsistencies concerning judgment and decision making. They are mental shortcuts that enable quick judgments about the likelihood of unknown events. Biases can be identified in multiple ways. They can be group-specific, they can impact decision making, alter judgments, impact memory, and reflect motivation. Many biases are self-serving or self-directed. Age affects cognitive bias. Younger adults tend to have more cognitive flexibility.

Download the Biases and Heuristics worksheet.

Cognitive shortcuts are automatic cognitive patterns that people use for efficient decision-making. However, they can also be misused, resulting in biased decision-making. In this lecture, we will discuss how these shortcuts can be helpful, but also how they can be harmful. We will also go over information bias. We will also talk about how stress plays into this and give you coping mechanisms for combating stress. Remember to be mindful of your cognitive distortions.

Download the Stress and Habits worksheet.

In this lecture, we will talk about the Fogg Behavioural Model, factors in motivation, and factors that are sabotaging your efforts. This will help you to become more aware of how to hack your own mind for more efficiency. There is a lot to go over in this lecture, so if you need to go back and repeat it, feel free to do so.

Download the Designing Change Part 1 worksheet and search for The Behaviour Wizard online, which BJ Fogg and his team built to assist you in exploring the many forms of behaviour modification.

In this lecture, we will study methods to improve your abilities, identify your own biases, and use simplicity as a tool for organisational behaviour. Knowing how to actively develop talent is a skill in itself, and learning how to learn is an invaluable meta-skill that you can apply to anything.

Download the Designing Change Part 2 worksheet, which is the perfect way to get started.

Here, we will visit the Fogg Behaviour Model and learn about the prompts in more detail. We will also look at some real-life examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of implementing these prompts. Change is about programming yourself to do what you want.

Download the Prompting Change worksheet, which will help you design prompts for the changes you want to make.

Throughout the previous lectures, we discussed how stress affects the human brain in ways such as impacting overall health and changing how the brain forms memories. We looked at how cognitive biases and traps can distort thinking in ways that cause stress. We also looked at how you can save time and mental fatigue from decision-making by using heuristics, how to overcome bad habits, how to apply minimalism, how to use Fogg's behavioural model. We hope you enjoyed learning about all the tools and techniques you can use to tackle the above problems so you can enjoy a future of wellbeing, in both mind and body.

Cara takes us through some shocking statistics on how our stress levels are rising due to smart phone and social media usage.

Cara shares an example of how reducing blue light can improve your life.

Cara shares a funny story to highlight why you need to take breaks from your 'best friend' and set boundaries and helps you identify where your stressors lie.

Cara shares some practical tools to help you with stress and anxiety.

From too many emails to social media notifications, Cara explains what 'information overload' can do to your brain and shares 5 effective ways to declutter your online life.

Cara shares some important messages about 'Digital Minimalism', how to practice the the 'Meaningful Scroll' and 5 ways to gently detox from your smartphone. Download the 'Tech Detox Planner'.

Cara talks about setting boundaries around tech and shares a story about a 'fake' recharge. Learn an exercise to help you find your 'real' recharges.

Cara advises on how you can plan daily joy and gratitude to minimise stress. Download the 'Joy Planner'.

Cara recaps on managing stress in the digital age and shares some extra tips.

Cara defines burnout, takes us through some key statistics and identifies the warning signs to look out for. She shares her own experience of burnout and why she is passionate about helping others avoid a similar experience.

Cara explains what chronic stress does to our bodies and how we can manage overwhelm (using the overwhelm emergency checklist).