Insight: A Cognitive Behavioral Program for Women
Insight is a Cognitive Behavioral Program for Women that is delivered through a series of 4 courses that address multiple facets of a woman’s life. It is based on research with cognitive-behavioral principles. It facilitates change within you expressed as an improved attitude towards yourself and others, as well as gradual behavioral change. You will also learn problem-solving techniques and explore suggestions about how to make appropriate decisions to help you feel more secure, consistently stable, and in control of your life. The courses that comprise this program are: Now is the Time to Reclaim Your Life, The Path of Self-Discovery, Protecting Your Emotional Balance, and From Powerlessness to Mind-Body Harmony. An opportunity to engage in self-reflection is provided at the end of each course. As a result of going through these learning experiences, women develop a better sense of themselves and the role they occupy in our world. Positive self-esteem, the accepted cornerstone of individual mental health, is hoped to be the product of this intensive program.
Now is the Time to Reclaim Your Life
Goal Setting – A Powerful Process for Thinking
Thinking My Way Out of Feelings
Building Motivation Habits Towards Healthy Self-Esteem
Reflection skills Through Self-Awareness
The Path of Self-Discovery
Relationship to Self - Being Grounded in Loving Energy
My First Social Group - Understanding My Family of Origin
Relationships to Others - My Mirror to My Internal World
Reflection Skills Through Self-Awareness
Protecting Your Emotional Balance
Loss, Grief, Terminations – An Emotional Pattern and Process
Communication and Social Networking
Assertive skills – A Measure of Self-Respect
Conflict Management – Enhancing Positive Outcomes for All
Reflection Skills Through Self-Awareness
From Powerlessness to Mind-Body Harmony
Stress and Crisis
Relaxation, Exercise, Body Image
Nourishing Yourself
Sexuality
Reflection Skills Through Self-Awareness
Happiness No Matter What! Creating a Happier You (Arabic)
Trying to live a happy life is not about denying negative emotions or pretending to feel joyful all the time. We all encounter adversity and as a result we may feel anger, sadness, frustration and other negative emotions. To suggest otherwise would be to deny part of the human condition. However, happiness does matter! The scientific evidence is compelling. The pursuit of happiness is not some luxury that we can do without; it is about helping people to live better lives and creating a society that is more productive, healthy and cohesive. As Aristotle said: “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” Happiness has also been linked to better decision-making and improved creativity. So, rather than success being the key to happiness, research shows that happiness could in fact be the key to success.
This course is designed to give women the understanding, skills, and motivation to design their best life and create the best version of themselves. The central theme of this course is for women to develop an improved understanding of the key concepts and strategies important to living a happier, and a more fulfilling life.
At the end of this course, you will:
Explore where happiness comes from and what makes us happy.
Understand the power of happiness.
Make the connection between happiness and your heart.
Measure your happiness at present.
Acquire the motivation to lead a genuinely happier, more fulfilling life.
Develop your happiness plan including the steps needed towards a more satisfying life.
Happiness Amplified (Arabic)
In our pre-requisite course entitled ‘Happiness No Matter What’, we explored its historical context, definitions, and myths, as well as ways of achieving it. Our objective for that course was to educate women on this topic so as to provide them with necessary tools to living their best possible life. This follow-up course serves to broaden the scope of our research into the concept of ‘happiness’ by delving more deeply into the subject matter.
By the end of this course, you will:
Acquire a more in-depth analysis of the various elements contributing to ‘happiness’.
Establish a framework for women to use as a guide to living a more fulfilled life.
Develop a better knowledge-base of the concept of ‘happiness’.
Acquire more information in the following areas:
Nature vs. Nurture debate
Etiology (study of causes) of ‘Happiness’
Socio-cultural Factors
The value of ‘Happiness’
Happiness around the world
Recommendations for happier living
Emotional Intelligence for women (Arabic)
This course teaches you how to use your natural processes to develop interpersonal and intrapersonal awareness as well as enrich your emotional intelligence in your life and at the work place. It aims at explaining the concept of emotional intelligence and its core competencies. Through carefully structured exercises, it helps individuals understand how EI can be developed and dramatically increased in ways that produce the results they want.
By the end of this course, you will:
Understand the dynamics of emotional intelligence and behavioral
development.
Understand the specific facets of emotional intelligence, which will help the individual better understand oneself and others.
Build emotional intelligence in the individual and in others by demonstrating the general laws that govern growth.
Learn how to effectively relate to a variety of people such as friends, family, customers, and others.
Learn how to be more effective in preparing children for success.
Understand each other as a couple and how to work better as a team.
Evaluate which characteristics are compatible, which cause conflict, and how to solve these conflicts.
Building Your Self-Esteem: A New Way of Looking at Yourself
Self-esteem is a term used in psychology to reflect a person’s overall evaluation of his/her own self. Building self-esteem is the key to your happiness and Well-being. It increases your confidence which will translate into respecting yourself, respecting others, and improving your relationships. Low self-esteem causes depression, unhappiness, insecurity and low confidence. Inner criticism, or that nagging voice of disapproval inside you, causes you to stumble at every challenge and challenges therefore seem impossible.
This course will teach you the building blocks of self-esteem and help you develop a new way of looking at yourself.
By the end of this course, you will:
Learn the meaning of self-esteem and understand the benefits of having high self-esteem.
Understand how to express your self-esteem at school, work, home, and within your culture.
Explore the relationship between your self-esteem and health.
Understand the causes of low self-esteem: family influence and upbringing, early life experiences, and experiences in adulthood.
Explore the impact of low self-esteem on relationships, career, finances and health.
Learn practical steps for yourself, for your children, and for your loved ones.
Confrontation without Guilt or Doubt
This course teaches confrontation skills that apply to all relationships and interactions. It is especially relevant to important situations where you want to be more assertive or more in control of an emotional interaction than you have been in the past. This Progressive Confrontation Model offers skills that can be learned and practiced when you are facing a difficult emotional situation with your boss, co-workers, children, wife or husband, in-laws, friends and family members. It offers many options for the level of assertiveness control, or collaboration needed for communication. It helps you deal with emotional reactions, practice your confrontation, and change behavior. It is especially helpful for people who have the following values:
Want to have control of their lives
Want openness and honesty in relationships
Believe in treating people with respect and compassion
Believe in dealing directly with issues
Believe that people should be accountable
Believe that people are responsible for their own lives.
Understanding Depression and Beyond
Everyone goes through ups and downs. It is normal to feel happy for no apparent reason and equally normal to reach a low point seemingly without cause. However, it is less natural for our moods to swing frequently and quickly between highs and lows and to stay there for a long time. Depression in its more severe forms needs to be examined. Frequent and long states of depression can affect one’s health, erode a marriage, or undermine job performance. This course will help you understand what is the nature of depression, how it expresses itself, and provide you with suggestions to cope with it.
By the end of this course, you will:
Develop awareness of symptoms and identify precipitants of depressed mood.
Identify negative thinking patterns that contribute to depressed mood and educate you on techniques for changing them to more mood-elevating thinking patterns.
Learn about the etiology of depression, the characteristic symptoms, and the different treatment approaches.
Got Knots? Stressed Out? Learn How to Tame it
No matter what you call it; it affects your quality of life. The purpose of this course is to help you understand what this feeling is, what causes it, what perpetuates it, and some basic tools and strategies for overcoming it. This course is intended to help overcome the patterns of discomfort and/or avoidance that undoubtedly interfere with life goals, communication, social situations, relationships, work, and more.
Stress occurs as a consequence of a threat of potential or actual loss of valued resources. The assumption is that people strive to establish, amass, retain, protect, and build resources. Psychological stress occurs when there is a threat of a net loss of these resources; when there is actual loss of resources; or when there is a lack of resource gain following the investment of resources. Resources can be things like money, can be personal characteristics, skills or creativity, relationships, intangibles such as seniority, or psychic states such as self-esteem.
By the end of this course, you will:
Provide education to promote insight into the physiological and psychological effects of stress and its impact on health.
Facilitate the exploration and identification of the nature and extent of individual stressors and the difference between acute vs. chronic stress
Explore factors contributing to stress: personal/work
Explain the General Adaptation Syndrome
Promote the development of individualized effective coping mechanisms such as:
Self-monitoring of dietary and sleeping needs.
Relaxation training and seeking flow/mindfulness
Use of imagery
Group support, relationships and social connections
Food as medicine
Exercise
Got anxiety? Worry? Learn to be a Warrior instead of a Worrier
Anxiety disorders involve an intense fear and avoidance of specific situations, objects, or activities that are recognized as irrational by the individual. Anxiety is often expressed in physical symptoms such as shortness of breath, hyperventilation, palpitations, chest pain, a feeling of choking or suffocating, nausea, stomach pains, diarrhea, faintness, dizziness, blurred vision, headache, sweating, or cold in the extremities. It also may be manifested as a subjective reaction (e.g. self-reported feelings of fright and tension) and/or through overt behavior. Anxiety disorders exhibit themselves in various shapes and forms such as: panic disorder, phobic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
By the end of this course, you will:
Acquire knowledge that promote insight into the physiological, and behavioral aspects of anxiety.
Recognize the type of support you need to decrease the sense of powerlessness to do things related to personal matters.
Have an opportunity to alleviate your sense of self-absorption that interferes with effective solution of real problems.
Receive step by step instructions to address anxiety problems such as relaxation techniques, use of imagery, in vivo desensitization, and group support.
Stress Management: Training that Meets your Needs
Psychological stress occurs when there is a threat of a net loss of personal resources; when there is actual loss of resources; or when there is a lack of resource gain following the investment of resources. Resources can be things like money; can be personal characteristics, skills or creativity, relationships, intangibles such as seniority, or psychic states such as self-esteem.
Almost every system of your body can be damaged by stress. However, as a member of modern society, you have available to you a variety of methods to cope with the negative effects of stress. The goal of stress management training is not merely stress reduction but finding the right types and amounts of stress, given your individual personality, priorities and life situation, so that you can maximize your performance and satisfaction.
By the end of this course, you will:
Integrate the two most common psychological responses to stress: depression and anxiety and physiological response to stress: somatization
Recognize how your body reacts to the stressors in your life.
Learn and practice progressive relaxation technique to alleviate stress.
Learn cognitive mechanisms to refute irrational thoughts and control negative thinking patterns.
Learn goal setting skills and time management techniques to enhance the quality of your life.
Improve your assertiveness skills so that you get what you want without impinging on other people’s needs.
Understand the risks of job burnout, which leads to demoralization and despair.
Plan and maintain a healthy life style that includes an exercise regimen and healthy nutrition.
Mind Over Mood: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Feeling
This course is based on the principles of cognitive therapy, one of today’s most successful forms of psychotherapy. The emphasis is on examining thoughts and beliefs connected to our moods, behaviors, physical experiences, and to the events in our lives. A central idea in cognitive therapy is that our perception of an event or experience powerfully affects our emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses to it.
Mind Over Mood teaches methods that have been shown to be helpful with mood problems such as depression, anxiety, anger, panic, jealousy, guilt, and shame. The strategies taught in this course can also help you solve relationship problems, handle stress better, improve self-esteem, become less fearful and more confident. In short, these strategies provide structure that can help you proceed efficiently and rapidly in making changes in your personal and professional life.
Building a Lasting Marriage
This course is designed for couples that want to strengthen their relationship no matter what its current state. It teaches powerful information and tools for building and maintaining a loving and successful relationship. It helps couples renew intimacy, enhance respect and strengthen their love, commitment, and friendship. If a couple’s marriage is in trouble, this course offers a road map for repair!
By the end of this course, you will:
Understand what makes marriage work
Create and enhance your love maps
Learn the techniques to nurture your fondness and admiration for your partner
Comprehend and practice the law of Turning Toward each other
Acquire the skills needed for a stress-reducing conversation
Be able to distinguish between solvable problems and gridlocked problems
Learn the five secrets for soothing yourself following marital discord
Learn effective techniques for conflict resolution
Change gridlocked problems to perpetual dialogue
Learn how to recover from a fight
Create shared meaning
Maintain gain made in your relationship through five magic hours a week
Negotiations Skills: Changing the Rules of the Game
If you are like most women, you don’t feel completely comfortable negotiating. In fact, young girls are often taught to defer or manipulate rather than negotiate especially in their dealings with men. This course will teach you negotiation skills that will help you control your destiny. Knowing how to negotiate will empower you. You will decide what to agree to and what you are not willing to accept. You will be able to shape situations to ensure that your interests are protected.
By the end of this course, you will:
Understand the three Keys to success
List the 10 most common mistakes women make and how to avoid them
Learn how to convince or change the way others see things
Recognize the need to collaborate or change to a problem-solving approach
Identify the need to create or change the way we negotiate
Explore the prototype of Mars and Venus: Negotiating with men versus negotiating with women
Learn how to get what you want from loved ones
Understand the mechanics of negotiating with your family
Understand the strategies of negotiating in business
Learn how to negotiate when you buy or sell
Learn how negotiate when wou buy real estate
Empower yourself by learning the three-step program for better negotiating
Effective Communication: The Building Block of Healthy Relationships
Once goals are set, people can move into exploring the types of relationships that need to be developed or pursued in order to get to where they want to be in life. Whether it is to fall in love, find a partner, communicate with a spouse or family member, or get a promotion, this course is intended to help you asses and hone your own communication styles.
Building Assertiveness: Stand Up and Be Counted
The key to successful assertiveness is having an awareness of one’s own communication style as it relates to those that you interact with on a regular (and not so regular) basis. Whether it is learning to be assertive within the work environment, home setting, or simply to gain a strong inner voice; assertiveness can be a powerful tool for reaching life goals and potential. This course helps you acquire the skills needed to express yourself with confidence while asserting your needs and wants in a healthy way that is conducive to building strong relationships.
Teaching Your Child Emotional Intelligence and Resilience
This course is designed to equip parents with the knowledge and tools that will aid them in fostering emotional intelligence and resilience in children. The central theme of this course is for you to develop a better understanding of what emotional intelligence and resilience are and acquire the parenting skills that will help your children understand, manage and cope with their emotions effectively.
By the end of this course, you will:
Be able to understand emotional intelligence, its importance, and how it differs from other types of intelligence.
Identify how emotional intelligence manifests itself and develops in children and youth (teenagers).
Acquire an understanding of how children can develop a healthy level of emotional intelligence.
Learn effective ways you can teach children to understand and gain awareness of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Identify the role parents, care takers, and teachers play in fostering emotional intelligence and resilience in children.
Learn specific parenting techniques and skills that promote emotional health and intelligence in children.
Promote a healthy level of social-emotional development in children.
Recognize the ingredients that will help children develop resilience through difficult struggles and experiences.
Gain the tools you need to help children discover their inner strengths and their abilities to regulate and cope with their emotions.
Identify the resources you can utilize to promote a healthy level of emotional intelligence and resilience in your children.
Positive Discipline: Healthy Discipline Strategies that Work
This course will provide you with three steps for effective parenting of children. Each of the three steps is distinct, manageable and extremely important and at the same time mutually interdependent. It involves controlling obnoxious behavior, encouraging good behavior and maintaining healthy relationships with your children between the ages of 2-12.
By the end of this course, you will:
Avoid the two biggest discipline mistakes parents typically make
Get your kids to STOP doing what you do not want them to do (arguing, whining, tantrums, sibling rivalry, etc.)
Encourage your kids to START doing what you want them to do
Avoid the Talk-Persuade-Argue-Yell-Hit Syndrome
Handle with confidence your child’s misbehavior in public
Recognize and address the Six Kinds of Testing and Manipulation
Practice dealing with your child’s more serious offenses
Encourage your child to use 7 Start-Behavior Tactics
Win comfortably daily homework battles and avoid nightly wars
Manage your child’s bedtime and nighttime waking episodes
Practice becoming a benevolent dictator at home
Train on how to get started: The kickoff Conversation.
Understanding Learning Disabilities (LD)
Learning disabilities (LD) are due to genetic and/or neurobiological factors that alter brain functioning in a manner which affects one or more cognitive processes related to learning. These processing problems can interfere with learning basic skills such as reading, writing and/or math. Learning disabilities are problems in processing words or information, causing otherwise bright and capable children to have difficulty learning. The disabilities involve language—reading, writing, speaking, and/or listening. Specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations.
Learning Disability is often compounded by behavioral challenges. When students do not feel a sense of safety or belonging, they are less likely to attend school and are more likely to engage in negative behavior that may increase the risk of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and peer rejection.
By the end of this course, you will:
Acquire an understanding of the full range of Learning Disabilities
Learn the definition, symptoms and associated challenges of different types of Learning Disabilities including Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, Asperger’s) .
Overview a profile of Disabilities world-wide and specifically in GCC countries.
LIFE: Living Independently Functioning Effectively
Our Living Independently Functioning Effectively (LIFE) course represents the first step to overcoming the stigma attached to learning and social disorders. Although there is no cure for such maladies, through education and community involvement and support, a new level of acceptance can be found. Learning the appropriate communication skills, problem solving skills, and relationship building skills needed to interact with a child with special needs is an enlightening process that is sure to bridge the gap and create a successful environment for your child.
This course is designed to provide parents with the knowledge and tools they need to understand learning disabilities and how that may affect the lives of their children. The central theme of this course is for parents to develop an improved awareness and understanding of how to effectively parent a child who has a learning disability, in order to promote their stability, emotional health, and life success.
By the end of this course, you will:
Develop an understanding of what a learning disability is, the signs that indicate a learning disability is present, and the various types of learning disabilities that exist today.
Acquire knowledge on how a learning disability affects your child’s social, personal, and educational life.
Explore the available proper support you need to effectively evaluate your child as well as help him or her live and function while living with his or her learning disability.
Learn how to effectively communicate to your child that he or she has a learning disability
Identify the tools to promote the success of your hild with a learning disability.
Gain a better understanding of how to effectively view and interact with your child who has a learning disability.
Acquire the skills you need to help you effectively cope and manage a life as the parent of a child with learning disabilities.
Recognize how to help your child with a learning disability overcome the challenges that come with transitioning into adolescence.
Acquire the knowledge and tools to help promote your child’s emotional well-being.
Gain insight as to the resources available to you as parents of children with learning disabilities.