Don’t Think Naked! Using Critical Thinking to Empower Your Life
Available as:
- Up to 1-hour keynote speech
- 3-4 hour seminar
- 5-8 hour all-day workshop
Introduction & Overview: (10 minutes)
Part I — The Fundamentals of Who You Are (3-4 hours with activities; 1-2 hours without)
Objective 1: Identifying Your Inner Silhouette
Understanding your mental shape, the values, beliefs, and ethics that shape who you are as a person.
Activity 1: Targeting Your True Ethical Nature.
Objective 2: Balancing the Choices in Your Mental Wardrobe
Understanding how each strength and weakness of your personality relates to the others, such as being shy vs. assertive or emotional vs. logical, to ensure you take a balanced approach when evaluating your options and choosing the best answer for achieving your goals.
Activity 2: Diagnostic Quiz.
Objective 3: Choosing the “Right” Information for Your Ideological Closet
Understanding the “fabric” of your information and ideas, what they are based on, how well they perform and hold up, to better choose those that are best suited for your needs.
Activity 3: Identifying and separating credible, reliable information from bad.
Objective 4: Tailoring Your Options for a Great Fit
Understanding whether or not the ideas and beliefs in your mental wardrobe are a true expression of who you are, if they are “classic” or “trendy,” “off-the-rack” or “tailored” to fit you best.
Activity 4: Targeting the layers of influence that have shaped who you are and separating out the authentic from the imposed.
Part II — Assembling Basic Essentials for Your Mental Wardrobe (1-2 hours)
Just as what you wear is defined by what you have in your clothes closet, the quality of the decisions you make is defined by the information and beliefs you store in your mental closet.
This section highlights the un-sugarcoated truth about how the world works taken from real life experience, not the rose-colored ideals of how we wish life could be, to provide participants with a solid, genuine foundation from which to evaluate their options in each of the 5 main areas of their life.
Topics covered include:
Objective 5: Understanding Your Relationship with Yourself & Others
Examination of universal truths common to how we actually treat ourselves and each other, as opposed to the way we think we do, in an effort to counter the tendency to live in denial when making decisions about what is best for you in your life and relationships.
Objective 6: Understanding the Law & Civil Rights
Revealing the little-known truths about how the law really operates in your daily life, how the police and the court system, both criminal and civil, actually work versus how we idealize it, and the true consequences of asserting your rights as opposed to the fantasy portrayed in books, television, and movies.
Objective 7: Understanding Personal Finances & Accountability
An illustration of the basic realities involved in securing a financially healthy life and the true consequences of relying on others to take care of you.
Objective 8: Understanding Business & the Economy
Exposing the hidden career roadblocks common in all business, government or non-profit employment and the true driving force behind business and the economy that you need to appreciate to successfully navigate your career.
Objective 9: Understanding Politics & Current Events
Cutting through the rhetoric to the heart of what the political system is supposed to be and examining the consequences of handing over too much trust and power to politicians and of not paying attention to current events whose long-term effects could possibly derail your and your family’s future.
Part III — Strategy for Critical Thinking to Get to the Right Choice (1-2 hours)
A guided exercise through the steps of putting it all together to create a custom-fit strategy for always making decisions that are the right choice, using real life scenarios of how you can best select the right choices to achieve your goals.
Objective 10: Creating a Custom-Fit User’s Manual for Your Life
Activity 5: Evaluating What’s Already in Your Mental Closet.
A mental makeover that guides you through the process of inventorying your mind to evaluate what you know, what you may need to learn, and if your ideas are still useful to you or are out-dated and in need of replacement.
Activity 6: Identifying the Issues that Matter.
Drawing parallels between how you think through all the relevant issues involved in picking out the right outfit for a particular purpose or occasion and the process of identifying all the different questions you need to ask yourself before you can pick the right answer for any important decision in your life.
Activity 7: Applying the Fundamentals to Your Choices.
Utilizing common real-life scenarios to illustrate how to use innate critical thinking skills to evaluate every angle of a tough decision and identify all the possible options and consequences, then apply all that you have come to learn about yourself, combined with practical information about how people and the world really work, to examine each option one-by-one, holding it up to your life, and eliminating each option that doesn’t work until you determine the one answer that best “fits” your life.
Wrap Up (10 minutes)
Measuring how well the workshop has met its objectives and addressing any last questions through Q&A with the audience.
Avoiding Seeds of Disruption, Bullying, and a Hostile Workplace Environment
agenda available upon request.