The Decade Year is a practical leadership formation program that helps to strengthen the core habits of a complete leader – inside and out – as to lead with a greater power of meaning.
The Decade Year Program, is a year long group-counselling journey for IT leaders, as to strengthen the seven most important habits required to lead with fulness of meaning.
That is, to develop the essential habits that congruently embody the mission, values and vision of your organization, which form a meaningful leader.
In the same way that a gym works to strengthen one’s physical muscles, the Decade Year Program is a gym where we strengthen our power to lead with meaning. It supports leaders to develop a congruent voice, as practicing the seven great habits (or virtues).
Classical Wisdom Meets Cutting Edge Science
(an integrated method for a four dimensional leadership aim)
The Decade Year Program is here to make practical the wisdom of many of the greatest thinkers over the last 5000 years. That is, to have the philosophical insights and principles, be installed into our habits – via our pioneering methodology of Neuro-TetraDynamics.
Based on research into the “patterns of strength” that the most self-actualized people in history had, in the Decade Year Program we integrate these habits, into our mindset and action.
Because for us, ‘leadership theories’ are not enough. Here, like in a gym, we focus on how to practically integrate into our being, the habits that help us to fulfill our highest destiny or mission.
The Decade Year Program is a one-of-a-kind leadership journey to strengthen your highest qualities of being – so you can live out a fully meaningful life, a life heroic. That is:
– The Virtue of Wisdom (or Prudence)
– The Virtue of Self-Control (or Temperance)
– The Virtue of Courage (or Fortitude)
– The Virtue of Justice
– The Virtue of Hope (or Optimism)
– The Virtue of Faith (or Confidence/ Certainty)
– And the Virtue of Love (or Charity/ Agape)
So if you’re an IT leader who seeks to make a massive difference within the lives of the people you work with, (as well as those you live with) – we will equip you with the time-tested habits of greatness.
Let’s learn and practice the mental, physical and spiritual disciplines that lead to the greatest forms of leadership, today.
Make a booking with us to learn more, and get started with your free prospectus:
Change is wholly dependent on who you habitually are.
When your habits change, everything changes.
We all are where we are today, because of the habits we had yesterday, and we cannot be somewhere better tomorrow, without habituating a better mode of being today… without having embodied ‘good habits’.
And ‘Good Habits’, are also known as
THE VIRTUES.
Like Aristotle was to point out previously, Greatness is the result of habitually doing brave actions, in habitually doing things with self-control, in being habitually mindful of justice… i.e. habitually virtuous.
Which boils down to one simple but profound idea for HOW we come to realize our best life and turn mere ‘potential‘ into ACTUALITY:
Greatness Comes Through the Act of
Forming Within Ourselves, the Great Virtues!
This lies at the heart of the wisdom of the ages for true and lasting happiness.
Just listen to what Saint Paul told his younger colleague and protege, Saint Timothy:
“Train yourself in Virtuousness.
For while bodily training is of some value, virtuousness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for this present life and also for the life to come. This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.”
Note how St. Paul has advised us to take this trustworthy principle without any reservation and to fully accept this…
Why?
Because it is through the process of consciously establishing the very highest virtues, one day at a time, that we come to realize the very best out of life, in every single way.
Much further in importance than ‘physical exercising’ – which was widely known back then too for it’s beneficial aspects – if one would train to form the great virtues first, one would profit in every way possible in life!
But just like with physical health and fitness, this does not ‘just happen’ by reading about it, or by hearing great talks about it, or by merely wishing for it…
Virtuousness is only realized through the process of habitualized sweat and effort.
It is however the greatest training we can ever engage in – for it positively affects all other habits, and all other results we produce in this life: physically, intellectually, creatively, socially, emotionally, financially… and yes, according to St Paul, even beyond this life.
That’s because by cultivating virtue:
- we flourish into the fullness of character that we are destined to be;
- which means in turn, that with a virtuous character we have the power to do the good things that we should be doing;
- which means in turn, that we bring into form the great projects that we have been created to fulfill in our lifetime;
- and thus, in this process we receive our total good.
And that is why we have created this club …
iLifeChange: A Complete System to Habitualize All the Time-Tested Principles of High Achievement and the Character Traits of Great Men and Women – into Your Actions, Mindset and Moral Fibre.
As of right now, you can be part of the most unique and comprehensive educational program for cultivating your best strengths – your virtues – that is available anywhere.
iLifeChange is unlike any other program in the world, because it integrates the wise principles and philosophies behind the greatest souls in our history, with the practical education technologies to permanently habitualize these traits into your behaviours, emotional makeup and cognitive processing.
The whole purpose of this program, is to integrate ‘the DNA’ of the Greats, within.
It is systematically organized, so that step by step, YOU END UP OWNING ALL THE HABITUAL PATTERNS OF THOUGHT, EMOTION AND ACTION of the Greatest people that ever lived also had.
This one-of-a-kind methodology and philosophy we have called:
VIRTUE FORMATION PRAXIS
Which brings up the question, ‘How do we do this?’
“How Can Your Update the Aesthetic O.S., To a Genuinely Ethical View of Life?”
The Four Faculties Framework:
Tetradynamics and How to Make Meaningful Changes
Like featured in ‘The Great Aha!‘ documentary, back in 2009 when out on Ben Lamond mountain, it there dawned on me that…
Ethical happiness is not just a higher mode of being,
but it is a mode of being that’s uniquely available only to humans
and the faculties we uniquely have.
What does this mean? Well, let’s put it this way:
The standard view for how humans and animals process our world, as taught in social science, is through the stimulus-response model.
In brief, it states, that when a stimulus is presented to an animal, this stimulus (or event), produces in an animal a particular response – which in time ‘conditions’ the same tendency in the future.
This is the base mechanism for why we do what we do. The Stimulus-Response model is comprised of four basic animal faculties – the faculties of sensation, perception, emotion and motor powers.
So as the diagram below shows, we first notice a stimulus in our environment with our Sensory Faculty – let’s say in seeing and smelling a ‘hot dog’. This raw sensory data then enters our Perception Faculty, which then interprets what these light patterns and smells represent – in perceiving the data as a whole, as a ‘hot dog’.
The perception of the hot dog then enters our Emotion Faculty, from which we then derive a feeling as to whether this object leads to a feeling of relative pleasure or pain. If pleasurable, the emotion gives us the impetus to move towards the hot dog, or if painful, we get the impetus to move away from it, (or if somewhere in between, in being indifferent…)
From this emotional push, we then precede to act with our body – we engage our Motor Power Faculty – where if a hot dog means pleasure because of its taste or hunger, we stretch out our hands and grab it, if we’re neutral we walk right past it, or if we’re repulsed by it, we may complain to about it.
Furthermore, if this is the very first time in life that you encountered a hot dog, (the ‘x’ sensory object), the way you perceived, felt and responded to this, (the ‘y’ response) – this automatically, without any conscious control, links up in the brain. So that if sensation ‘x’ happens again, you’re more likely to behave in exactly the same way as before, with ‘the y response’ .
With further follow up stimulus-response events of the same kind – the neuron links thicken, and form strong cable-like connections between these two instances, making it less and less likely to respond in any other manner.
This is a a very simplified explanation, of course, but in essence, this is the science and practice of ‘classical conditioning’. The physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated this in action, with an ingenious, simple experiment…
Pavlov set up a test, where several dogs, on a leash, awaited their next meal. The dogs would see and smell the food coming, they would perceive these sensations as food, they then anticipated the pleasure that food would bring about, and so, the dogs’ motor response was to salivate in eager anticipation.
But as these dogs were salivating and engaged in this whole stimulus-response arc, Pavlov also blew a whistle. At the next meal, he blew the whistle again. And so with the meal thereafter…
Once a few experiences like these were repeated, the food was not given at all, and only the whistle blew. And sure enough, the dogs were now fully salivating – even as the ‘whistle’ had nothing to do with a hunger response.
The entire stimulus-response arc got neurologically linked to the whistle, so the same pleasurable response became automatic.
Furthermore, these dogs now had a permanent new disposition to associate pleasure with the sound of a whistle, which they could not change.
As such, because we’re also members of the animal kingdom, and have the same faculties, we can also be conditioned by linked up events/ stimuli that bring us pleasure. 
Think of what advertising does. In essence, it links a product with pleasurable ideas and imagery. And when this advertisement is repeated over and over again, the consumer forms a new stimulus-response-like chain in the mind.
Linking happens through the quality or the number of pleasurable associations, or both. You can create links with very strong pleasurable sensations, or through repeated experiences of pleasure, or strongest of all, to have both things happen – to have strong pleasures, repeated many times.
Thus, someone who’s addicted to drugs for instance – inevitably experienced strong pleasures while intoxicated, and has done this often in the past. The stronger this linking happened at a neurological level, the more this person is compelled or ‘addicted’ to perform that action, over and over again and is unable to stop themselves.
(This can be very troubling, not least of which because it impacts with the other pleasures of life – like the pleasure of having good health, good friends, a good job, and so on.)
At its heart, this is also the reason why our changes efforts are also most often hard to break and why most people fail in their change efforts. For our past conditioning with pleasure, (or the lack of pleasure, through suffering and pain), this can neurologically shape and determine our destiny.
Thus, herein lies the greatest of tragedies of human existence –
we are forced or enslaved to follow the path of our past conditioning,
despite what we would consciously want to do otherwise.
This is also in a nutshell, the mechanism of Aesthetic Happiness as an operating system in action. In this mode of operation, we organize our lives so that we can experience more and more pleasurable connections – whether we elect this consciously, or as most often it happens, is driven unconsciously by our stimulus-response mechanism.
This works out OK at times, and at other times, this leads to uncontrollable compulsions that conflict with other pleasures that we also want. (like with the case of a drug user for instance)
This is also our default or base mode of being. We have this operating system in common with other evolved animals as well. And so, we can just simply live out like animals, and be mere ‘creatures of conditioning’.
Psychologists like B.F Skinner and his behaviorism school made this idea into an entire field of science and practice, for humans and animals alike. In many circles, this is also the dominant theory about human nature, and it’s applied in countless arenas – from therapeutic practice, to education, to politics, to economics, etc.
But what is not commonly known – and what’s sometimes even actively suppressed – is that we as human beings are not ‘mere animals’. Unlike all other animals, the makeup of a human being is solely unique. This stimulus-response model may restrict us, but it does not define us.
Unlike all other animals, we have the power to break free from the bonds of conditioning.
Humans are the only animals on the planet that have the power to consciously change their own stimulus-response mechanisms.
Unlike all other animals, we do not have to live out as our environment programmed us, neurologically. We can form stimulus-response mechanisms of our own design, by choice.
We can direct and create anew, any number of stimulus-response mechanisms we chose, by self-initiated design. We can live ‘above’ the stimulus-response mechanism, so to speak.
Most important, it is through this act of ‘breaking-through’ our conditioning, that we express the very essence of what it really means to be fully human. This potential to move above the Aesthetic Realm is our unique gift or potential. And what makes this possible is…
The Four Faculties Framework
Unique to Humans
We human beings have a further four faculties that no other animal in the world has. We have four faculties that allow us to rip apart the stimulus-response bonds and ‘break-through’ – i.e. through our faculties of:
imagination, awareness, reason, and will.
We can break the bonds of our conditioning with these four faculties because:
1. We can imagine new alternatives in our mind and what we could be doing instead…
2. We can become aware of this stimulus-response mechanism, how it operates, and to stand as if outside of it, as to observe it in a detached way…
3. We are able to reason as to whether this conditioning we made is a good thing or it’s something that detracts us from a higher good…
The Four Faculties of Our Fundamental Freedom
It is with these four faculties that we can break apart stimulus-response links. Thus, we can leverage these four faculties to change how we feel about things, and thus drive new actions that can support us, by design, rather than environmental default. (see diagram below)
These four faculties are in essence,
the four active ingredients behind any and all change efforts.
Whenever a change effort works – whether it’s through counseling or self initiated effort – it’s because one or more of these faculties were leveraged in the process.
This is our higher Four Faculties Framework, which for simplicity I’ve called, our tetradynamics – tetradynamics coming from the Greek words ‘tetra’ meaning four, and ‘dynamos’ meaning power or faculty.
Animals do not have these higher four faculties. As such, whenever the stimulus-response link establishes within an animal, the animal is limited by its conditioning. (like with the ‘whistle-salivate’ response in Pavlov’s experiment). That is, an animal…
– Cannot imagine a different alternative, like enacting something different as a response
– It has no self-awareness that this conditioning process is even happening – two instances like food and whistle form an integrated perception, and the process is not ‘witnessed’
– It cannot reason that this is a ‘conditioned response’ and a very inefficient one at that, because it uses up saliva;
– It cannot will into action a new response, and so it just behaves in line with the conditioning entrained upon it.
Another way to say this is that a dog cannot take ‘responsibility’ for the conditioning it is subject to. Animals are not ‘response-able’. They are not able to change their conditioned links by choice.
By contrast, a human can and often does, because a human being is of a higher order. This is why Shakespeare wrote…
“Oh, what a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god
– the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals ”
Our Ethical Happiness O.S. is built on this Four Faculties Framework, on this Tetradynamic.
For what ultimately these four faculties create for us, are passageways into the ‘transcendentals’ – the properties of our Authentic Being – i.e. goodness, truth, beauty…
And what is ethics but our deep yearning to integrate more goodness, truth and beauty into our lives, and into our world?
These four faculties connect us with the realm of the Ethical, because…
- with our faculty of Imagination, we connect with Beauty;
- with our faculty of Reason, we connect with Truth;
- with our faculty of Will, we connect us with Goodness;
- and with our faculty of Awareness, we connect with our Magnanimity.
It is these four faculties that forms our best virtues. These faculties are the means by which we can become more reasonable, more loving, more creative, more courageous, more self-controlled… etc.
And what else do we even mean by the idea of making ‘life changes’, but other than to become more fully ethical? That is, to change as to move further upwards into our ethical potential in being, so we able to express more beauty, to reason greater truth, to choose the higher good…
These four faculties are so magnificent and unique in the history of the universe, that technically speaking, in the tree of life, these four faculties set the human being in an entirely new order of creation.
The difference between animals and humans is not merely trivial. The fact that we have these four faculties, gives us four more faculties than animals have at their best. This is an order difference as large as the one between plants and animals themselves – a difference as large as the one between a cat and a cactus!
Therefore to treat a human being as merely an animal, to be ‘conditioned’ – whether in politics, in education, in therapy, and so on – this is a grave error and injustice. It’s like the equivalent of treating an animal as if it were a mere plant.
The difference between a human being and other animals is not trivial, as we’ve been misled to believe. We desperately need to update the map that says we’re merely animals, to just be trained with pleasure and pain. For this kind of ‘donkey motivation’ of carrot and stick, has turned so many into ‘asses’. (Think of the story of Pinocchio and his trip to Pleasure Island…)
Perhaps this is why the father of psychology himself, William James lamented that,
“Compared to what we ought to be we are only half awake.
We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far from his limits.
He possesses the power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”
The Great MisEducation of Today
As astonishing as this insight is, these four higher faculties have never really been seriously researched by our social sciences.
Because these higher four faculties connect us with a transcendental order (and thus, what this could imply about human nature), these faculties have often been ignored, or they are only superficially dealt with and distorted, so they fit in with the human-as-mere-animal worldview.
Just consider how much time you have spent in education, to be informed about what makes humans unique and special in our world?
And consider how much time you spent to be ‘educated’ about how much our nature is just like all other animals? Or that humans are worse animals?!
As professor Martin Seligman, (one of the leading thinkers and activists in the field of psychology today who’s advocating for a fundamental change), wrote in his book, ‘Flourish’:
“Originally, I went into psychology to relieve human suffering and to increase human well-being. I thought I was well prepared to do this; but I was actually miseducated to this task.
It took me decades to recover and to work my way out of solving puzzles and into solving problems. (pg. 55) …
I mentally scanned (serially) the tenured faculty in the ten leading psychology departments in the world. Not a single one focused on work, or on love, or on play. They all worked on ‘basic’ processes: cognition, emotion, decision theory, perception. Where were the scholars who would help guide us about what makes life worth living?” (pg. 59)
* * *
Yes, humans walk on the moon, send robots on Mars, smash atoms as to take quantum photographs … or compose and perform Beethoven Symphonies, design and build Vatican buildings, write and produce Lord of the Rings films, and on and on – yet academic ideology still preaches the mythology that humans are really just slightly different than baboons!
From primary school and thereafter, mainstream education has conditioned us to think, that we humans are nothing more than a ‘naked ape’. That we are just an upright walking ape, which just happens to be a bit ‘clueyer’ because of its opposable thumbs, and we just ‘happen’ to speak…
In most corners of the world, this miseducation is the standard, government-approved and enforced teaching. Worse still, with this toxic ideology, this has created a whole new generation of people who secretly (and not so secretly) wish that all humans would perish, so that Earth would be returned to nature instead, (since humans are the ‘worst’ of animals you know).
This is why in most academic circles today, it remains as an unassailable dogma that our sciences ought to help – by just appealing to our lowest faculties, and our animal nature only. This ideology drives the sciences themselves!
And of course, the proof is in the results:
- Since waging war on mental health in the Western World, this war has seen mostly increased mental problems, not less.There are more mental illness classifications, and many more cases of. There are more drug discoveries, and many more drug takers.
- And most tellingly of all, is the fact that those who are on the front lines of mental health and social improvement – in their own lives,they do worse than the statistical average, and not better! (It’s as if we’re happy to get fitness advice from one who sits on a couch all day…)
So coming back from where we started – how can we then not have the problem of mass sedation, as it stands today?
When this is the cultural norm, when this nihilistic view of human nature dominates, why wouldn’t an average person want to tune out this view of life and to get ‘out of the mind’?
Has not this old, nihilistic view of human nature run its course?
Has not this social experiment been done enough, that we can predictably see where it’s going next?
A Leader’s Crabbing Move
Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist behind the classic book, ‘Man Search For Meaning’, had a great lecture where he shared with us this little gem of wisdom:
“I started taking flying lessons recently. And do you know what my flying instructor told me?
If you start here (position A, West), and wish to get here (position B, East), and you have a cross wind from the North, you will drift and then land somewhere in the south.
So you have to do what pilots call, ‘crabbing’. You have to head north of the airfield, above where you’re trying to arrive and fly that way and then you’ll land at the Eastern airfield. But if you aim for East, you will end up South.
This holds also for man I would say. If you take man as he really is, we make him worse.
But if we overestimate him, to be idealist and over rate man – looking at him as being high, above – we promote him to what he really can be. …
And you know who has said this? If we take man as he is we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be?
This was not my flight instructor. This was not me. This was Goethe. And this is why I once said, this is the most apt maxim, and motto for any psychotherapeutic activity.
So if you don’t recognize a young man’s will to meaning, you make him worse – you make him dull, you make him frustrated, you still add and contribute to his frustration.
While if you presuppose in this man – even the so-called criminal or juvenile delinquent or drug abuser and so forth – that there must be a spark of ‘search for meaning’, and then you will elicit it from him. And you will make him become what he in principle is capable of becoming.”
* * *
We as leaders, if we would help people to arrive at where they can potentially be, we need to start here.
Even more so, we need to think of what are the best and most meaningful aspects of ourselves, first and foremost as also being present.
We need to strengthen the highest faculties within ourselves – to navigate towards the highest levels of truth that our faculty of reason is capable, the highest levels of beauty that our imagination can conceive, the highest levels of goodness that our will can enact, the highest levels of magnanimity that our awareness can embody.
For each of these avenues, when genuinely pursued, they can reveal an endless wellspring of meaning.
This has been tried and tested throughout our 5,000 years of written history! The remarkable results and correlative congruence speak for themselves if we would bother to just look…
The cultures that meditated on what is the good, the true, the beautiful – they went on to then build in stone a Notre Dame or a Taj Mahal. The ones that meditated on the corruptible and ill in man, they built in stone the Mayan Temples, as to rip out from flesh, the beating heart of another…
For like Francis Bacon, (the founder of modern science methodology) put it, “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing – for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced.”
Here at the Center for Meaningful Leadership, we’ve made this our primary study – how to make stronger, the highest powers of the human soul. This is our known cause.
Let us then work to strengthen our four highest of faculties. Let us tap into the greatest of powers on Earth – our deep-seated want of meaning.
Let’s start this journey together.
Thank you,
John Angheli