The more complicated and technical our world becomes, the more vital are our human capabilities. AI can organize, analyze and summarize but it can’t coach, build consensus, negotiate or inspire trust. Nor can managers who don’t understand how the human condition drives behaviour at work. This leadership skill is a force multiplier in the modern workplace. When people make choices, they fall into unconscious patterns of performance that are entirely predictable. Because everything we do in life is a consequence of how the brain works. So, to manage or lead people effectively, you must understand what makes them – and you – tick. If you don’t, your career aspirations will not be realized.
We think we see the world as it is. In fact, we don’t. What we see, feel, understand and remember is created entirely by neurological reactions which generate all sorts of mental errors. The brain lives in its own self-constructed version of reality. It protects, deceives and glorifies. It provides us with unrealistic optimism, excuse-making, wishful thinking, excitement and anxiety. All of which distorts the truth, saves us from the ego-destroying effects of our 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 while restraining the latter requires an understanding of why we do what we do.
This life-altering course is about the role your biases, beliefs, self-deceptions and thinking traps play in your working life – how they complicate it, influence your choices, drive irrational behaviors and get you 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 (when it’s not), why we persevere in the face of lost causes, why we think others are at fault but we’re blameless, how we deal with uncertainty, why we rebel against common-sense rules, prefer to live by our double standards and, among other fascinating questions, why we’re so darn gullible. These malfunctions in our mental software inevitably lead to sub-optimal decisions, dumb behaviours and unintended, sometimes dire, consequences.
Without this ingrained ineptitude in our thinking and consequent behaviours, we would perish. No one is immune from their deleterious effects and we can’t completely eradicate them. While you can’t prevent bias, you can use your enhanced knowledge of its power and pervasiveness to reduce its corrosive influence in your life and become more effective, likeable and trustworthy. There is a path to overcoming these mental flaws and distortions. This course will give you the antidotes to do precisely that. When you’re ready and able to apply them, you will discover how to live a freer and richer existence – for yourself as well as those whom 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.