Learn to create and experience your work as a joyful and meaningful activity - for yourself and others. This course draws upon positive psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and philosophy to guide participants in proactively crafting their own work experience. It weaves inputs from these various fields into a series of lectures and experiential exercises.
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This course is for anyone who wants to reinvent the way they currently approach and experience their work and their career. It takes an inside-out approach to create change. The focus is on working on one’s own mental models and beliefs with regard to work, career, success, failure, and identity.
Participants will benefit on three levels.
At an intellectual level, they will learn how the brain functions, the way emotions influence the functioning of the brain, and the way the brain receives, processes and makes sense of information. Participants will understand how sensemaking in the brain directly and indirectly translates into behavior; thereby influencing a person’s subjective as well as objective experience at work.
At an experiential level, participants will get to participate in reflective exercises that will allow them to gain a richer and deeper awareness of their own past experiences. They will be able to see and understand the role that their own choices, attitudes and beliefs played in the way their life has unfolded so far. They will also be able to realize the role that other people and society have played in the shaping of their beliefs and attitudes.
At a practical level, participants will learn tried and tested tools that will help them create the change they desire and craft their own future work experience with greater levels of confidence and effectiveness. These include emotional tools from the field of positive psychology, psychological tools that are used in coaching, and established behavioral tools from the field of organizational behavior.
The course is practical, engaging, and potent in its design with a unique mix of lectures, stories, and reflective exercises. These reflective exercises have been shown to create deep and lasting change for the participants. They have been derived over a span of eight years from the instructor’s own experiences teaching this material to MBA students and corporate executives.
What you'll learn
- How beliefs, thoughts, and emotions influence behavior and experience
- Ways to assess your own mental models and attitudes and recognize how they have shaped your experiences so far
- Practical tools to leverage your own mental models and emotions to craft your future work experience
Syllabus
Week 1: Crafting Realities
- How we make sense of the world around us and our experience in it?
- The role of our mental models in the way we process information from the world
- Distinguishing between objective and subjective reality
- Understanding how confirmation bias can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy
Week 2: Demystifying Success
- How we define success for ourselves?
- The role played by society in shaping our definition of success
- Creating an awareness of our personal values to help us navigate this complexity
- Decoupling our own dreams from the expectations of other stakeholders in our lives
Week 3: Accepting Failure
- Understanding the label of failure and the effects it has on us
- Exploring the attributes of perfectionism and how to overcome them
- Understanding resilience and tools to help us become more resilient
- Cultivating a healthy and realistic attitude to failure
Week 4: Redefining Work
- Nature and utility of work in everyday life
- Introduction to the flow state and its benefits
- Crafting a more empowering inner definition of work
- Consciously cultivating meaning and purpose in work
Week 5: Leveraging Emotions
- The connection between happiness and productivity
- Overcoming our innate bias towards the negative and dealing with negative emotions
- Shifting our happiness baseline and choosing to play to our strengths
- Cultivating emotional intelligence and using mirror neurons to our advantage
Week 6: Continuing the Journey
- Creating and sustaining change
- Cultivating an innovation mindset and avoiding generalized conclusions
- Digging deeper with Integrative thinking
- Savoring the journey and managing personal energy
