Level Up
Your Skills
Goal Setting
Identify your values, goals, and address issues of mental health.
Cognitive Skills
Replace ineffective thinking patterns, increase clarity, and rebalance thinking and feeling.
Emotional Skills
Decrease suffering, increase resilience to stress, and build a life of joy.
Behavioral Skills
Replace ineffective behavior patterns, decrease avoidance, and increase efficiency.
Interpersonal Skills
Refine social skills, build effective relationships, and end ineffective relationships.
Skillset:
Goal Setting
Identify Values
The road to wisdom starts with an understanding of what is most important in life. Know thyself: to know who you are, what you want, and where you are going you must identify and prioritize your values.
Identify Professional Goals
Where are you now, where do you want to be, and how quickly do you want to get there? Professional goals include advancement, skill building, addressing weak areas, and finding one’s niche.
Identify Personal Goals
A well rounded life-worth-living requires developing oneself across multiple domains. Family & friends, hobbies & outlets for creativity, health & fitness. What have you been neglecting?
Address Mental Health
Throughout this process, we assess for mental health disorder diagnoses, symptoms, and features, and integrate treatment throughout.
Skillset:
Cognitive Skills
Identify and Replace Ineffective Thinking Patterns
The human mind uses shortcuts. 95% of the time, these work well. Sometimes, they get us into trouble. We jump to conclusion, fail to accurately assess risk and reward, and all into groupthink. Up your cognitive game by identify and replacing ineffective thinking patterns.
Increase Clarity and Mental Flexibility
We predict the future based upon previous experience. When situations are novel (or our previous experiences were unusual or intense), we can fail to see reality accurately and get locked into faulty conclusions. Learn techniques to prevent stay flexible.
Rebalance Thinking and Feeling to Increase Creativity, Creative Problem Solving, and Interpersonal Skills
The human brain is a marvel. Why do we spend so much time only using half of it? Creativity, intuition, empathy, visualization- all spring from the right hemisphere. Level up to access your underutilized right-brain.
Skillset:
Emotional Skills
Increase Resiliency to Stressors
Life is demanding, and at times painful. First, one must learn to weather difficult times without making them worse. Eventually, one can learn to transform trials into an opportunity to gain fortitude and resolve.
Decrease Suffering
Reducing suffering requires making changes today that will pay off in the long run. This requires shifting from a short-term, avoidant mindset to a long-term mindset. Restructuring one’s life in this way takes time and work, and pays incredible dividends.
Increase Joy
Joy is not excitement or pleasure, which invariably fade; rather, it is a restful sense of contentment and flourishing. It is not a mood or temporary state, but the result a life lived-well (eudaimonia, εὐδαιμονία, good spirit). Joy is found through pursuit of one’s purpose (ikigai, 生き甲斐, reason for being), in alignment with one’s values and goals.
Skillset:
Behavioral Skills
Identify and Replace Ineffective Behavior Patterns
All behavior serves a function. List out all your problems you want to change. Chances are, most of those problems are being supported directly by your behaviors, serving some function for you but causing unintended consequences. Learn to identify and replace those behaviors that still serve you, without the consequences.
Decrease Avoidance and Procrastination
When something is difficult, painful, or anxiety provoking, our default response is often to avoid. This makes complete sense, and makes things easier, for today. Over time, this pattern causes problems down the road.
Increase Efficiency of Action
We waste a tremendous amount of time with behaviors that either don’t take us closer to our goals (inefficient behaviors) or that take us further from our goals (ineffective behaviors). Identify and replace these with more efficient, effective behaviors.
Skillset:
Interpersonal Skills
Cultivate and Strengthen Relationships
Humans are meant to live in relationship with others, yet for many interpersonal skills are lacking. Many develop some process for navigating relationships that work in some circumstances, but cause problems in others. Develop a more universal, well-rounded set of interpersonal skills.
Identify and End Ineffective Relationships
Goal-frustration is often rooted ineffective or unhealthy relationships. Identifying these relationships on moving on can be difficult- and it is necessary.
Refine Your Social Self
Social success depends on developing a multi-faceted, situation-dependent social-self. Learn to balance honne (本音)- one’s true feelings and thoughts, with tatemae (建前), one’s public face.