Executive Education Detail

Curriculum

The Approach to Personal Leadership and Success

One’s inner environment is a key driver of professional and personal success. Leadership is frequently thought of in terms of our ability to understand and direct our outer environment — people, organizations and events. But recent scientific research from a range of disciplines — psychology, neuroscience and psychotherapy — is yielding powerful evidence that success in one’s professional and personal life is substantially influenced by another dimension of leadership, Personal Leadership, consisting of our ability to understand and direct our inner environment—our goals and values, our mindsets and emotions, and our positive and destructive drives.

Personal Leadership and Success takes a rigorous, fact-based approach to helping individuals master their inner environment. The program provides scientifically validated, practical insights and techniques for understanding and mastering one’s inner environment. Until recently, the only way to explore this mastery of the inner environment has been through the teachings of philosophers, prophets or new age self-help “gurus.” These historical and modern sources of wisdom essentially rely on faith: the individual accepts the source as an authority, and the source is then able to provide insight and direction. Personal Leadership and Success replaces this faith-based approach with a distinctive fact-based approach that taps three sources of wisdom:

• Powerful recent findings in psychology, neuroscience and psychotherapy.
• Explorations of the inner lives of great achievers such as Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
• Personal reflections, group discussion, and applications of Personal Leadership techniques by participants in their own situations.

Personal Leadership and Success: General Topics

Directing Our Life. Participants explore such topics as life purpose, values and goals, as well as the idea of authentic leadership. Faculty will address the difference between a goals–driven and values–driven approach to life and the paths taken by great achievers. Also discussed: Did great achievers focus on performance or outcomes?

Managing Our Thoughts and Emotions. Participants learn about the new science of emotions: how emotions are produced in the brain, and how we can gain greater mastery of our moods and emotions through cognitive and behavioral interventions. Faculty discuss the importance of optimism, but also where it can fail us. Other emotions—such as forgiveness, anger and anxiety—are given new context in the business environment.

Progressing Toward our Ideal Self. To what extent it is possible to fundamentally change our personality and temperament? This question and others will be addressed in presentations incorporating the results of scientific studies in such areas as acquiring new skills, forming and breaking habits, improving performance through meditation, and reshaping our social environment for a more positive effect on values, emotions and behavior.