Mental Fitness Masterclass
There is a Glaring Gap in Our Society
In American society, when we hear the word “fitness” we tend to think of physical fitness. Many of us count the calories we consume, the steps we take, and the hours we sleep. Yet as much as we focus on these things, we tend to be miserable. What is going on here? Well this is only half of the picture. At the core of this is our Mental Fitness. We let the 60,000 thoughts we have each day go unchecked.
We were taught the importance of physical fitness when it comes to health and longevity. What about our Mental Fitness?
Have you learned to master your emotions, to build amazing relationships, or how to find your life’s purpose? Probably not? Our schools aren’t teaching these things and the deaths of despair reflect this oversight.
Filling the Gap
Mental Fitness Masterclass
The Mental Fitness Masterclass is the comprehensive one stop shop for all the education and skills you need to master your thinking.
Master Your Life
The Seven Deadly Phrases: Detoxifying Your Mind
Mastering Your Emotions: Seven Steps to Master Your Emotions
Stress: Negative Threat or Positive Challenge?
Master Your Relationships
Removing Judgement: We’re All Human
Crucial Conversations: Bringing Out the Best in Others
Relationships: It’s All About “We”
Achieve Your Dreams
Mental Mantras: A Slogan a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Finding Inspiration: Defining Your Life’s Purpose
Achieving Your Dreams: The Ten Principles of Goal Setting
The Mindset of Leadership: Be the Change
Mental Fitness Masterclass Curriculum
What is Mental Fitness?
In American society, when we hear the word “fitness” we tend to think of physical fitness. Many of us count the calories we consume, the steps we take, and the hours we sleep. We purchase gym memberships, smart watches, and meal plans. Yet, despite all of these efforts, most of us fall short of our physical fitness goals. Why is this?
The answer is simple: our Mental Fitness falls short. Even with all of the time, effort, and money we spend on physical fitness, we’re not taught how to develop our Mental Fitness, and as a result, we all-too-often fail to reach our goals.
Mental Fitness plays a primary role in everything we do – from mastering our emotions, to building relationships, to achieving our life’s purpose.
In this training module, we’ll be conducting an overview of “What is Mental Fitness?” including a review of all of the components of Mental Fitness, our average positive to negative thought ratio and how to be more aware of it, and a personal (pre) self-assessment of our current Mental Fitness and achieving our full potential.
The Seven Deadly Phrases
Negative thinking weighing you down? Perhaps a mental detox may just be the cure!
Just like a garden can’t optimally grow until you remove the weeds, your mind also can’t reach optimal Mental Fitness with toxic thinking weighing it down. In this training, we will identify seven deadly phrases that are toxic to Mental Fitness and learn how best to replace them.
- I can’t
- I need
- Makes me
- Should/shouldn’t
- Always/Never
- Have to
- Happens to me
Seven Steps to Master Your Emotions
IQ isn’t everything. In fact, research suggests it’s only about 20 percent responsible for one’s career success. But if this is the case, where’s the other 80 percent come from? The answer is Emotional Intelligence.
In fact, did you know that individuals with high Emotional Intelligence are perceived more positively by others, have better social relations and higher performance in the workplace, and even better overall psychological well-being than those with lower Emotional Intelligence?
And yet, as important as it is to have a high level of mastery of one’s emotions, whether it’s in grade school or the workplace, we in American society tend to put little focus on the “soft skills” in life.
To make matters worse, our current societal narrative is often to label emotions as “good” or “bad” and then seek to eliminate the “bad” emotions. This attitude completes misses the root of what our emotions are!
Our emotions are not “good” or “bad.” They are our internal GPS guiding us towards consistency between our actions and our values. We just need to start labeling them this way.
In this training, we’ll look at seven steps to master our emotions so they don’t master us!
Using Stress to Your Advantage
Stress is killer. We all know that to be true. But is it?
Recent research has shown that it’s not actually being stressed that’s detrimental, but rather, it’s the belief that stress is bad for us that’s actually what’s harmful.
In this training, the goal isn’t to help people eliminate stress, but rather, to for them to learn how to harness the energy stress creates and use it constructively to one’s advantage. We can do this by changing the way we label stress in our lives and thus experiencing stress in a whole new way.
Indeed, it would be hard for anyone to claim to be truly Mentally Fit if their stress tolerance is wimpy and easily upset. Fortunately, like any other muscle, mental or physical, once one has the skills and techniques to properly train, then the transformation can begin.
We need to change the way we think about stress – from negative threat to positive challenge! Either we learn to tame, harness, and use stress constructively, or it will tame, harness, and use us!
Removing Judgment
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” – Carl Jung
Have you ever mistakenly judged a book by its cover? Ever felt frustrated with someone for not living up to your expectations? Ever felt frustrated with yourself for not living up to your own expectations?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, this training is for you. The goal of this training is for you to ask yourself, “Is my current thinking and world-view of others and myself working optimally for me, and if not, how might I improve it? Is there perhaps a better way I could think about the people and events in my life that may bring me more peace and a deeper understanding?”
In this training, we’ll explore mental strategies to removing judgment on three levels:
- Removing judgement for those we barely know
- Removing judgment of those closest to us
- Removing judgement of oneself
Bringing Out the Best in Others
Being an effective communicator is more than just speaking in a way that people understand your message. It’s that they internalize your message and feel moved to action.
It’s a basic human desire to feel heard, important, and appreciated. If you can give this feeling to another, you have a real shot at influencing them for the better. However, this skill takes awareness and practice to master.
In this training, we’ll learn how to…
- Identify the four types of responses and how to respond to them
- Differentiate between being passive, abrasive, and assertive
- Establish and maintain healthy boundaries
- Utilize “The Four Tendencies” of Personality to best reach others
- Implement strategies to build trust and rapport
- Develop skills to be a better listener
- Create more meaningful connections
Simply said, the goal of this training to teach you, the participant, all the essential skills necessary to “avoid the monologue.” Not just be able to speak without losing your listener, but to be able to speak in a way that changes the entire energy of the room and makes everyone in your presence better for it.
Improving Relationships
According to research from relationship expert, John Gottman, only 3/10 people who enter into marriage will end up in satisfying, fulfilling marriages. Yikes!
“Why is that” you may ask. Well, number one: we don’t teach how to have successful relationships in high school (perhaps we should!). Number two: relationships aren’t easy! They take work, maintenance, and repair. They take time and effort. They’re complex, complicated, and messy.
Luckily for us, in the field of relationship research and counseling, there are two very smart psychologists who can help get us started: Gary Chapman, author of “The Five Love Languages,” and John Gottman, author of “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.” In addition to a review of their work, I provide seven tips of my own in the training as well.
The fact is, most of us work very hard at our professional careers: Years of schooling, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year… and though we often say our relationships are just as, if not more important than our careers, think about just how much better our relationships could they be if we put in just a bit more work there as well!
Mental Mantras
If given the choice, would you prefer to passive let the world train your thinking for you, or, would you prefer to take control of your own thinking and train your brain for yourself?
If you’re in the camp, “I want to take control of my thinking for myself,” this training is perfect for you! Indeed, the only thing that you’re 100% in control of in any given situation in life is your attitude.
A Mental Mantra is a go-to phrase or slogan that can help fuel and boost one’s mood and spirit when times are tough. They can assist us in staying motivated, focused, and positive. They also help us and others build character, stay determined, and stay inspired.
The challenge is, do you have you a big enough bag of personal mental mantras to pull the right one out when you need it? As a therapist or coach, you can’t too many relatable stories and sayings, you can only have too few.
In my mind, it’s not only an apple a day that keep the doctor away, but also a positive mental mantra a day keeps the psychiatrist away!
Discovering Meaning and Purpose in Your Life
There’s a reason the training is titled, Discovering Meaning and Purpose, not Discovering Inspiration and Motivation. You see, inspiration and motivation are fleeting and temporary. They can be hot or cold. They can come and they can go.
Meaning and purpose, on the other hand, have a lasting effect in one’s life. We all have it within us. The question is, how do we discover it in ourselves and help others find it as well?
The goals then for this training are two-fold. The first step is to help you assess your top ten most meaningful values. Next, we want to reverse engineer those values into a purposeful life.
The fact is, I cannot tell you what your values should be. That’s not how life works. What I can do, however, is tell you about two very specific events in my life that I have now incorporated into my life’s purpose. In doing so, I hope that you can use these examples to explore your own significant life events and consider for yourself how you can create meaning out of them.
It’s not what happens to us in life, but how we respond to it that matters most.
The 10 Principles of Goal Setting
“Most people spend more time planning their summer vacation than planning their lives.”
When many of us hear the term “goal setting,” we immediately cringe and think of the most popular time for setting goals – New Year’s Resolutions. Yet, despite our genuine desires for change, the sad fact is – even for those brave enough to try – the vast majority of New Year’s goals fail.
“Eat better, exercise more, quit smoking.” They’re either too vague or too all-or-nothing. For example, what does it really mean to “eat better” or “exercise more?” It’s not very specific. And “quit smoking,” well, what happens when a relapse occurs? In most cases, people go right back to the default, pack-a-day, behavior.
Let’s be honest, there are a lot of reasons people are afraid to set goals; sometimes its fear of failure or someone’s else judgment, sometimes its just not knowing where or how to start…
The aim of this training is to show people how to add depth to their goals and turn their dreams into reality. My promise is this: I guarantee if you apply all of the following 10 principles to whatever it is that you want to achieve, your odds of success will go up drastically!
Healthy Living
Buckets and boundaries, priorities and sacrifices… Healthy living isn’t an easy thing to achieve. The fact is, our lives are never perfectly balanced, and that’s okay. They’re not supposed to be!
Proper sleep, nutrition and exercise are essential to perform at one’s optimal level, but oftentimes before we even get to address those areas, some form of life interfere takes hold and our primary areas of health stay at a chronic state of neglect.
As a husband, father of two young children, entrepreneur, and dog owner, I get how hard it can be to balance all of life’s priorities, and yet, there are strategies that can help.
In this training, in addition to a review of healthy living practices with sleep, eating, and exercise, we’ll also explore how to keep life as balanced as possible based on your own unique values and self-assessments.
It’s time to make self-care a part of your health care!
Leadership and Inspiration
Gandhi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” Combine them both and you get…
Be the light.
Despite any darkness around us, true leaders continue to be the light that inspire us all. And the best way to inspire others is to be that positive model yourself.
In this training, we’ll review the Four Types of Thought (Dreamers, Doers, Doubters, and Haters), The 10 Strategies to Becoming a Leader, and “Everyday Heroes” who continually light the candle to inspire others.
Included in the Masterclass
- Guided lessons with instructional design
- Video lectures
- Workbook
- Knowledge Checks
- Quizzes
- PowerPoints
- Textbook in E-Format