Course Overview

Format: 

This course will be delivered via video, released weekly and accessible anytime after release, via the Teachable platform. There will be 4 live Q and As for direct access to the instructors, also available anytime after recording.

Learning Objectives:

Knowledge:

1. Learn the fundamentals of how the brain is wired and how it applies to coaching and enhancing coaching presence
2. Learn strategies on how to introduce neuroscience concepts to your clients 

Application:

1. Discover how you use brain science to build a growth mindset in your clients
2. Understand the brain biology behind challenge, the importance of challenging your clients, and how it influences appropriate goal-setting
3. Help clients build skills of stress management, resiliency, and self-awareness by learning how the brain processes threat and stress
4. Empower clients to understand that their attentional resources are limited and to build their focus and to prioritize time for deep work
5. Help clients have more “aha moments” 
6. Inspire clients to be more creative and to take risks
7. Improve relationships by learning how the brain “mirrors” the emotions and actions of others

SYLLABUS

Session 1: Understanding Brain Plasticity and the Mindset of Change

Neuroplasticity means the brain is incredibly, endlessly changeable. This doesn’t happen of course without focused and strategic effort. In this session, we will learn the fundamentals of the science of deliberate practice. We will then apply this to coaching by discussing designing alliances with our clients that involve a mindset of change and growth, thus helping push them to change their brain!

Session 2:  Why Your Client’s Brain Needs To Fail To Succeed 

The art of goal setting is one that coaches must master to be effective in creating sustainable progress for the client. From experience, coaches know that goals must lead a client to stretch while also being attainable (not too difficult or easy). For the brain to feel the most rewarded, the chance of success must not be certain, meaning that some level of failure is required for optimum motivation. This session will help coaches apply the neuroscience of challenge to well-designed actions while holding a safe and supportive space. Those coaching actions will include some risk in addition to being positive, specific and measurable.

Session 3: Find Your Client’s Why 

When clients learn how to leverage their beliefs and values by tuning into what’s important to them, they will have sustained passion, drive and fulfillment, also known as intrinsic motivation. Learning to listen and identify our emotions is critical to developing this intrinsic motivation because evolutionarily they were tied to our survival. By using methods like “Values in Action”, coaches can not only leverage the neuroscience of positive emotions, coaches can help clients tie their personal values to their goals and examine the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in their lives.

Session 4:  Break the Lizard Brain Cycle Of Negative Beliefs 

Our brain has a mostly unconscious and instinctual system that has allowed for human survival by protecting us from harm. This “flight or fight” response is sometimes called our “Lizard Brain”. In most modern life situations, our lizard brain is more active than necessary leading to negativity and limiting assumptions. In this session, we will use the Assumption Chart to confront the lizard brain to remove limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering beliefs.

Session 5:  Brain Strategies For Healthy Emotions

Emotions serve powerful roles in our decision-making, but they are also easily triggered into overactivity. When clients are in an over-reactive mode it can handicap their cognitive resources. In this session, we will build an awareness of how managing a healthier reactivity can become automatic, leading to emotional intelligence. We will discuss the neuroscience rationale for helping your client’s include gratitude and mindfulness practice into their lives.

Session 6:  The Science Of Attention: Distraction-Free Work 

Even when we feel like we’re doing it well and being productive, humans are terrible at multitasking. This session will help you understand the brain science of attention and how to better use and train our attentional systems. It will also help clients understand why very shallow measures of productivity (busy work) are dangerous to meaningful long-term goals. We will incorporate neuroscience into the Pomodoro technique, the use of priority buckets, MindMaps and cataloging our distractions.

Session 7:  How Every Brain Is Fundamentally Wired To Be Creative 

Every human brain can learn and is infinitely creative. There are no exceptions to this rule, although, as with all skills, in order to become more innovative, we must believe we can be creative and we must practice. Understanding this innate capacity can help your clients, especially those in more stereotypically analytical fields, curate the mindset of creative problem-solving. Next time one of your clients hits a “problem-solving wall” and believes that they’re not creative, you will be able to engage a reflective, neuroscience based approach to move them past this limiting assumption.

Session 8:  Give Your Clients More A-ha Moments 

Today’s modern world undervalues time for reflection, but our brains depend upon periods of nothing to thoroughly process and digest complex ideas. These periods of getting lost in our thoughts, so to speak, are necessary for us to reach creative insights, sometimes called “a-ha” moments, and to enhance empathy and perspective-taking. In coaching, though we are supporting our clients in all three centers of expression (action, feeling, and thinking), feeling and thinking can go underutilized in our fast-paced, highly stimulating world. Help your clients build more meaning and purpose into their personal and work lives by slowing down to speed up.

Session 9:  Using The Social Brain To Build Powerful Relationships

The human brain is wired to mimic the actions and emotions of others. These circuits in our brains are said to be mirroring, and their activity helps us understand the perceptions and intentions of others. They can be activated to create better alignment with your clients, enhancing your ability to support and guide them effectively and improve their relationships with others. By using exercises that build empathy, coaches can increase clients’ awareness of their current empathy level and how to activate the mirror networks more effectively.

Session 10:  The Science Behind Powerful Questions 

The self-reflective mindset, induced by the use of powerful questions is one that coaches have long known can lead to personal growth. Neuroscientists also have evidence that engaging the more sophisticated “human” part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, can allow for more self-awareness. When clients understand that using this part of the brain regularly through powerful questions will build it up like a muscle, they readily embrace a mindset of openness.

***Live Q&As will be offered at a minimum every 2 weeks. You may attend as many Q & As as you’d like however you must attend at least 3 to receive the CCE units.***