We believe we see the world as it actually is. We do not. What we see, feel, think and remember is created entirely by chemical reactions in our brains which generate all sorts of mental errors. Each brain manufactures and lives by its own version of reality. If you are to manage or lead people effectively, you must understand what makes them – and you – tick. How the mind works determines our successes and failures, personally as well as professionally. But our hard-working neurons don’t always function to our advantage. The brain protects us, deceives us and glorifies us. It provides us with unrealistic optimism, excuse-making, wishful thinking, excitement, anxiety and depression. All of which distorts the truth, saves us from the ego-destroying effects of mistakes and prevents us from making good decisions. Our brains can make us smart, logical and open-minded but also vain, immoral, unscrupulous, unreliable and bigoted. Liberating the former way of thinking and restraining the latter requires an understanding of what constitutes “the human condition.”
This course is about the role our biases, beliefs, self-deceptions and thinking traps play in our working lives – how they complicate it, influence our choices, drive irrational behaviors and get us into trouble. It explains how we deal with uncertainty and emotional turmoil, why we lie (to ourselves and others), how our memories really work, why we believe what we want to be true (even when it’s not), why we don’t change course when we know we should, why we persevere in the face of lost causes, how we make sense of who we are, why we think others are at fault but we’re blameless, how we deal with uncertainty, why we rebel against rules and regulations, are reluctant to change, prefer to live by our own double standards and, among other fascinating questions, why we’re all so darn gullible. These malfunctions in our mental software inevitably lead to sub-optimal decisions, dumb behaviours and unintended, often dire, consequences.
Our brains are incredibly efficient, highly emotional and very lazy – the latter self-preservation mechanism keeps us alive. Without this ineptitude, we would perish. No one is immune from its deleterious effects and we can’t completely eradicate them. We are all lousy when it comes to self-awareness. While you can’t prevent biases, you can use your enhanced knowledge of their power to become more effective as a manager. There is a path to overcoming these mental flaws, maladies and distortions. Provided we’re willing to learn how to recognize them, reconcile them with our ego-enhancing preferences, mitigate and better manage them. This course will give you the antidotes. When you’re able to apply them, you’ll discover how to live a fuller, freer and richer existence – for yourself as well as those you lead or manage.
Topics include:
❏ What exactly is “the human condition”?
❏ Open or closed: Is self-awareness possible?
❏ Neurology 101: Understanding the hardware
❏ Mind traps: The tricks our brains play on us
❏ How to overwrite bad habits & thought distortions
❏ Prejudice: In-group and out-group conformity
❏ Why we believe others are at fault but we’re not
❏ When our conduct falls short of our intentions
❏ Why we lie to ourselves and others all the time
❏ The granddaddy of all our biases: The big lie
❏ Why a healthy brain is also a delusional brain
❏ An abridged dictionary of our cognitive biases
❏ The things we believe that simply aren’t true
❏ Our top 25 biases: Simplified and explained
❏ How our memory works and why it doesn’t
❏ Beliefs that distort our managerial effectiveness
❏ Why we ignore warnings & persist with lost causes
❏ Why we think differently when we’re in groups
❏ The antidotes to countering & mitigating our biases
❏ What makes one a great high-performance manager
Includes a 29-page Pre-course Workbook of readings and tasks.