The following course in Elements of Change is provided in its entirety by Atlantic International University's "Open Access Initiative " which strives to make knowledge and education readily available to those seeking advancement regardless of their socio-economic situation, location or other previously limiting factors. The University's Open Courses are free and do not require any purchase or registration, they are open to the public.
The course in Basic Processes of Thought and Brain Gym contains the following:
The Administrative Staff may be part of a degree program paying up to three college credits. The lessons of the course can be taken on line Through distance learning. The content and access are open to the public according to the "Open Access" and " Open Access " Atlantic International University initiative. Participants who wish to receive credit and / or term certificate , must register as students.
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the mind has a modular structure similar to that of the body, with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
The adaptationist approach is steadily increasing as an influence in the general field of psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology, but that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology, in the same way it has for biology. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations. The theories and findings of EP have applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.
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John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are typically cited as providing the foundations of modern form of developmental psychology. In the mid-18th century Jean Jacques Rousseau described three stages of childhood: infans (infancy), puer (childhood) and adolescence in ‘Emile: Or, On Education’. Rousseau's ideas were taken up strongly by educators at the time. In the late 19th century, psychologists familiar with the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin began seeking an evolutionary description of psychological development; prominent here was the pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who attempted to correlate ages of childhood with previous ages of mankind. Also, James Mark Baldwin was heavily involved in the theory of developmental psychology. Sigmund Freud, whose concepts were developmental, had a significant impact on public perceptions.
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Lesson 3: WHAT ARE SYSTEMS?
A belief system is a set of mutually supportive beliefs. The beliefs of any such system can be classified as religious, philosophical, ideological, or a combination of these. Philosopher Jonathan Glover says that beliefs are always part of a belief system, and that belief systems are difficult to completely revise. Glover believes that he and other philosophers ought to play some role in starting dialogues between people with deeply held, opposing beliefs, especially if there is risk of violence. Glover also believes that philosophy can offer insights about beliefs that would be relevant to such dialogue.
Glover suggests that beliefs have to be considered holistically, and that no belief exists in isolation in the mind of the believer. It always implicates and relates to other beliefs. Glover provides the example of a patient with an illness who returns to a doctor, but the doctor says that the prescribed medicine is not working. At that point, the patient has a great deal of flexibility in choosing what beliefs to keep or reject. Also, the patient could believe that the doctor is incompetent, that the doctor's assistants made a mistake, that the patient's own body is unique in some unexpected way, that Western medicine is ineffective, or even that Western science is entirely unable to discover truths about ailments.
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Lesson 4: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Personal development includes activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. The concept is not limited to self-help but includes formal and informal activities for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, life coach or mentor. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organizations.
Personal development can also include developing other people. This may take place through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency, such as the skill of certain managers in developing the potential of
employees or a professional service, such as providing training, assessment or coaching.
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Lesson 5: EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPY
Existential psychotherapy is a philosophical method of therapy that operates on the belief that inner conflict within a person is due to that individual's confrontation with the givens of existence. These givens, as noted by Irvin D. Yalom, are: the inevitability of death, freedom and its attendant responsibility, existential isolation (referring to phenomenology), and finally meaninglessness. These four givens, also referred to as ultimate concerns, form the body of existential psychotherapy and compose the framework in which a therapist conceptualizes a client's problem in order to develop a method of treatment. In the British School of Existential therapy, these givens are seen as predictable tensions and paradoxes of the four dimensions of human existence, the physical, social, personal and spiritual realms.
The philosophers who are especially pertinent to the development of existential psychotherapy are those whose work is directly aimed at making sense of human existence. But the philosophical movements that are of most importance and that have been directly responsible for the generation of existential therapy are phenomenology and existential philosophy
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Lesson 6: BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
Behavioral therapy is a form of therapy rooted in the principles of behaviorism. The school of thought known as behaviorism is focused on the idea that we learn from our environment. In behavioral therapy, the goal is to reinforce desirable behaviors and eliminate unwanted or maladaptive ones. The techniques used in this type of treatment are based on the theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. One important thing to note about the various behavioral therapies is that unlike some other types of therapy that are rooted in insight (such as psychoanalytic and humanistic therapies), behavioral therapy is action based. Behavioral therapists are focused on using the same learning strategies that led to the formation of unwanted behaviors as well as other new behaviors. Because of this, behavioral therapy tends to be highly focused. The behavior itself is the problem, and the goal is to teach clients new behaviors to minimize or eliminate the issue. Old learning led to the development of a problem, and so the idea is that new learning can fix it.
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Lesson 7: RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
What is resistance to change in the workplace and how does it manifest itself? Resistance to change is the act of opposing or struggling with modifications or transformations that alter the status quo in the workplace. Managing resistance to change is challenging. Resistance to change can be covert or overt, organized or individual. Employees can realize that they don't like or want a change and resist publicly and verbally. Or, they can just feel uncomfortable and resist, sometimes unknowingly, through the actions they take, the words they use to describe the change, and the stories and conversations they share in the workplace.
However resistance to change happens, it threatens the success of your venture. Resistance affects the speed at which an innovation is adopted. It affects the feelings and opinions of employees at all stages of the adoption process. It affects productivity, quality, and relationships. How do you spot resistance to change? Listen to the gossip and observe the actions of employees. Note whether employees are missing meetings related to the change. Late assignments, forgotten commitments, and absenteeism can all be signs of resistance to change. Something as simple as listening to how employees talk about the change in meetings and hall conversations can reveal a lot about resistance.
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Lesson 8: INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Individual psychology is a term used specifically to refer to the psychological method or science founded by the Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler. According to individual psychology the main motives of human thought and behavior are individual man’s striving for superiority and power, partly in compensation for his feeling of inferiority. Every individual, in this view, is unique, and his personality structure including his unique goal and ways of striving for it finds expression in his style of life, this life-style being the product of his own creativity. Nevertheless, the individual cannot be considered apart from society; all important problems, including problems of general human relations, occupation, and love, are social. This theory led to explanations of psychological normality and abnormality: although the normal person with a well-developed social interest will compensate by striving on the useful side of life (that is, by contributing to the common welfare and thus helping to overcome common feelings of inferiority), the neurotically disposed person is characterized by increased inferiority feelings, underdeveloped social interest, and an exaggerated, uncooperative goal of superiority, these symptoms manifesting themselves as anxiety and more or less open aggression. Accordingly, he solves his problems in a self-centered, private fashion, rather than a task-centered, common-sense fashion, leading to failure. All forms of maladjustment share this constellation.
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Lesson 9: SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY
Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality, concerning people's inherent growth tendencies and their innate psychological needs. It is concerned with the motivation behind the choices that people make without any external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which an individual’s behavior is self-motivated and self-determined.
In the 1970s, research on SDT evolved from studies comparing the intrinsic and extrinsic motives, and from growing understanding of the dominant role intrinsic motivation played in an individual’s behavior but it was not until mid-1980s that SDT was formally introduced and accepted as a sound empirical theory. Research applying SDT to different areas in social psychology has increased considerably since the 2000s.
Key studies that led to emergence of SDT included research on intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation refers to initiating an activity for its own sake because it is interesting and satisfying in itself, as opposed to doing an activity to obtain an external goal (extrinsic motivation). Different types of motivations have been described based on the degree they have been internalized. Internalization refers to the active attempt to transform an extrinsic motive into personally endorsed values and thus assimilate behavioral regulations that were originally external.
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Lesson 10: THEORIES FOR PERSONAL CHANGE
Bandler and Grinder also claim that NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, habit disorder, psychosomatic illnesses, myopia, allergy, common cold and learning disorders, often in a single session. NLP has been adopted by some hypnotherapists and in seminars marketed to business and government Synthesizing some of the most important fields of science in the 1970s, NLP combined neuroscience, linguistics and the logic of software computer programming to create models of how the best therapists helped their clients. The basic idea of finding an example of someone who is an undisputed expert and then learning from that person harkens back the craft tradition of apprenticing under a master. It is a sound approach. It can be fascinating to create user-oriented, practical models of how to use language to build trust and to help bring about change.
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