TRAININGS

Coming January 2025

The Introduction to Professional Development Training is a 16-week, email-based training designed to introduce you to concepts of critical thinking, creativity, and stress-management and to provide you with the experience of focused journaling.

You can take this training wherever you live and no special computer skills are necessary, only the ability to send and receive emails.

Professional development requires self-awareness, self-direction, and self-coaching. In

other words, professional development for any SYP is a personalized program for an individual. For this reason, this training is intended to be inexpensive for the SYP, so it can be learned and applied economically as an adjunct to an organization’s goal.

The training is designed to ready you to come up with better solution to critical problems in your industry, although further training is advised. The training also has a self-coaching component for individuals who want to explore their own issues and challenges and learn the principles of critical thinking, creativity process, and stress management as they apply it to their own professional life.

Many participants do both, using the training to learn about professional development while at the same time learning how to make advances in their own coaching as current or future leaders in their industry.

Cost: $400

Prerequisites: None

Course Reader: Provided

Time commitment: The average time commitment is 1 – 3 hours a week depending on the amount of research done in addition to writing.

Below are the 16 lessons that we cover in the introduction to professional development training. There is also a reader with many more lessons; however, these are the 16 lessons that we focus on. To successfully complete the training you need to post 13 lesson responses—that is, three “free passes” for vacations and emergencies are built into the training.

Each week I post a lesson and participants reply to that lesson. Participants see what everyone else is saying on that subject and a lot of the richness of the training, in addition to working with clients (if you choose to work with clients), is seeing what your fellow participants have to say. Then, once participants have posted, I identify an area of interest from each participant’s post that I think is important to comment on and share my thoughts with the group.

Week 1. The Relationship Between Critical Thinking, Creativity, and Stress-Management

Week 2.  Getting Started: Clarifying With SEE-I

Week 3. Mastering Creative Stress

Week 4. Your Profession and the Elements of Reasoning, Part I

Week 5. ChatGPT and Scholarly Sources

Week 6. Your Profession and the Elements of Reasoning, Part II

Week 7. The Psyche of the Smart Young Professional

Week 8. The Point of View of Your Profession

Week 9. Fundamental and Powerful Concepts in Your Profession

Week 10. Your Profession and the Elements of Reasoning, Part II

Week 11. Evaluating around the Circle

Week 12. Thinking in Systems

Week 13. Critical Writing

Week 14. Intellectual Traits of a Critical Thinker

Week 15. Conceptualizing Professional Identities

Week 16. Maintaining a Creative Life in Your Profession

(Note: the ebook Thinking Critically About Historical Failures: How Young Professionals Can Expand Their Innovation and Problem-Solving Capacities, which is available at this site, is the reader for this training and is included in the price of the training. You don’t need to purchase it separately unless you want to get a head start on the reading.)