CBT and Positive Psychology: Your Journey to Happiness (Udemy.com)

In this course, I teach you principles, strategies, and skills from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and positive psychology to make better choices and live a happy and successful life. The course will help you stop waiting for others and circumstances to change and empower you to take destiny into your own hands. We'll explore tools from CBT for living from the “inside-out” rather than “outside-in,” empowering you to take personal responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, behavior and the results you create.

The course is based on THREE TRUTHS:

First is that you want to be happy. You want to feel joy, peace and love. You don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “My goal, today, is to see how miserable I can be.” No, if you’re like most people, your greatest desire is to experience positive emotions and live a happy and meaningful life. Your desire to be happy is your natural state, as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing and so many of your day-to-day activities (both what you do and avoid) are your attempts to find joy, meaning and success in your life.

The second truth is that life is hard. You need not look far to encounter hardships or even suffering in this life. You were born into an imperfect world, to imperfect caregivers and have likely had hard experiences, perhaps even beginning at an early age, which have caused you to feel emotional pain, fear, insecurity, inadequacy, and resentment. Although life is easier for some than others, most people experience their share of setbacks, loss, unfulfilled expectations, and just plain hard times. If you’re like most people, you begrudge your hardships, wishing and hoping they would go away, but they keep coming at you in an unending series of challenges.

The third truth is that the facts, circumstances, and events don’t define you. What ultimately defines you and determines your success and fulfillment is your ability to make good, positive, or empowering choices. Cognitive Behavior Therapy teaches that you have the power to choose—your thoughts, attitudes, and actions in the face of any and all circumstances of your life. And by your choices you determine your destiny, the quality, and outcomes of your life.

These three truths make up the rationale of this course. Of course, making new choices is not easy. Hence, this course. As someone who has done a ton of self-improvement work as well as helped thousands of others, I know what it takes and have designed this course to give you breakthrough insights and powerful and practical strategies to live a happy and successful life.

HERE'S WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Strategies from positive psychology and cognitive behavior therapy to live a happy and successful life.

• Tools to quiet yourself and find fulfillment and inner peace.

• The know-how to stop waiting for “out-there” to change and take ownership of your life.

• Knowledge from cognitive behavior therapy to handle negative feelings.

• How to use CBT to choose empowering thoughts, feelings, and behavior in any circumstance.

• How to change negative stories about yourself and your life to empowering, uplifting stories.

This course consists of FOUR SECTIONS

Section one is Claiming Joy.

We're socialized to believe that success has to do with externals--money, possessions, popularity, power, appearance, etc. Nothing wrong with the pursuit of externals. They bring excitement and meaning into our lives. However, we must be careful because the pursuit of externals often puts us on a treadmill of comparing and competing in which whatever we have/achieve is never enough. It sets us up to live from fear and scarcity rather than joy. In this class we'll explore how to create happiness, abundance, and success from the "inside-out" rather than "outside-in". I’m going to teach you principles and strategies from CBT and the science of happiness  to know how to find happiness and joy on the inside.

Section two is Claiming Ownership.

In section two I teach you how to claim ownership of your life. This means that your feelings and the results you get are influenced, but not determined, by circumstances, events, and other people. Using principles from cognitive behavior therapy, you can learn to choose your response to anything that happens to you. You don’t have to sit idly by waiting for others or circumstances to change or feel like a pawn or victim of life. I teach you how to be a victor rather than victim of life, how to take ownership of your life and live proactively from your own intent.

Section three is Claiming Your Power.

In this section of the course, I’ll be teaching you a powerful model, based on principles of cognitive behavior therapy, to change your brain and how you experience setbacks and challenges so you can turn adversity into triumph and know that nothing can happen in your life that you cannot handle and master. I'll introduce you to "key moments," situations and events in which it is easy to be reactive or spiral into a negative pattern of thinking, feeling and acting. Some key moments are mild (a child spilling a glass of milk, traffic on the way to work). Others shake us to the very core (losing a job, the death of a loved one). How we handle our key moments determines the quality of our lives and relationships. By understanding this CBT-based model, you'll learn how to change your brain so you can turn setbacks and challenges into triumph, knowing that nothing can happen in your life that you cannot handle and master.

And section four is Claiming Your Story.

As a child you may have loved climbing onto the lap of a parent or sitting in a circle and listening to a favorite story. Of course, you didn’t stop telling stories because you became an adult. You tell yourself stories (albeit unconsciously) every day about the meaning of the events of your life. In fact, more important than events are the stories you tell about these events. You have the ability to live a happy and successful life if you tell correct, empowering stories about who you are. I’m going to teach you to tell yourself a new story, an empowering story about yourself and your life that will enable you to feel good about who you are and achieve your greatest desires.

Don't forget about the BONUS MATERIALS

The course includes lots of extras. My students love the high quality handouts I offer them so they can review the core principles as they go through their day-to-day lives. 

I also offer you a ton of exercises to make the concepts usable. It’s one thing to understand a concept in your head but the power is in applying it to your life. The exercises help you do so.