professional certificate
Attention Strategies Skills Course for Presence, Power and Inner Poise in Life and Leadership
Step-by-step instruction to master powerful meditative states for personal deepening, connecting with others, productivity, and leadership skills
Join us for the next Presentation session
Start date: Monday, Feb 5th, 2024. Length of study: 18 weeks, 100% online. Tuition: £1,000
Our 18-week Attention Strategies Skills Course provides step-by-step instruction in innovative new attentional strategies to rapidly uplevel your skills from the inside
Programme overview
- Discover what your attention feels like right here in your body
- Learn how you can use it to create presence, focus, inner ease, and deep states of awareness
- Examine the evidence for a whole body brain
- Find inner quiet by leaving the thinking mind behind
- Feel the sensation of living from your deepest self
- Create greater attunement with your friends, clients, and colleagues
- Develop the ability to “own your space” and show up with presence
Attention Strategies stands out from other approaches to presence- and consciousness-based skills with its ability to provide simple, precise instruction and insightful instructor feedback that you can use to successfully enter these powerful states, and confidently know exactly how to find them again.
These practices also deepen access to your own inner resources such as intuition, creativity, emotional intelligence, and your ability to feel comfortably aligned with yourself.
These skills, developed and scientifically tested by a team led by Dr. Glenn Hartelius, show you exactly how to find and use your embodied experience of attention to shift from ordinary thinking into quietly focused states, soft mindful states, and states of powerful presence, quickly and reliably.
The lectures, exercises, and live sessions will take one-and-a-half to two hours per week—perhaps a little more if you enjoy the practices. Provided readings are optional.
Course Leader
Glenn Hartelius, PhD
Glenn Hartelius is an award-winning scholar and psychology researcher, and a leader in the field of Integral Psychology. Dr. Hartelius is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, the largest and most influential scientific journal in the field of Integral Psychology, and co-author of The Ketamine Papers and The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology.
Curriculum
In this first module, you’ll discover the hidden skills that power extraordinary people. Your most powerful tool for activating these abilities within yourself is a new relationship with your attention. With Attention Strategies, you will leave behind the try-hard notions of attention and unlock a direct and spontaneous way to self-mastery. It is this simple yet powerful shift that opens the door to your own untapped capacities for presence, resilience, effectiveness in relationship, and inner strength. In this module, you’ll discover:
- What makes some people inspiring, resilient, and exceptional
- The inner posture of personal power and effectiveness
- It’s not just what you do, it’s where you do it from
- The new neuroscience of mental focus, and how to apply it in your life
Guided Practices:
- Find your attention’s Inner Handle
- Hone your attention into a razor-sharp tool
Exceptional skills come from exceptional states of consciousness. In the past, learning to use sophisticated inner states often required years of study or apprenticeship, but Attention Strategies has developed a simple map that show you exactly how and where to find these states within yourself, and teaches you how to use them as inner Attention Postures. With this map you can navigate to states that let you cultivate the power of your untapped abilities and use them to accomplish your goals. You’ll discover:
- How states of consciousness are the key to unlocking your untapped potentials
- How to avoid common misunderstandings about focus and meditation
- How to use your body’s map to access the states you want
- A detailed map for how to achieve a Quietly Focused Mind
Guided Practices:
- Strategies for a Quietly Focused Mind
- Finding your focused inner quiet in 60 seconds or less
Building blocks of the brain occur in many places throughout the body, suggesting that the biological basis for your intelligence likely extends well beyond your brain. Seating your attention within your whole body awakens this wider knowing and gives you access to a whole new level of information. These embodied states can open your perception to the dynamics of attention, presence, and subtle qualities that give you rich information about yourself and how others are responding to you.
- The simple neuroscience of your body’s intelligent networks
- How the sensations of attention show you what consciousness feels like
- How to bring attention into your body and avoid common misunderstandings
- How to be gentle with sensitive places in your body’s memory
Guided Practices:
- Finding the Radiant Heart Posture
- Gratitude practices using the Radiant Heart Posture
Being fully present in your body changes your relationships with others and with the world. Presence opens new possibilities because others will experience you differently, often without even realizing it. As others respond to you differently, you have the opportunity to change what you believe about yourself. As you tune into your body’s perceptions of your surroundings, you may discover that your beliefs about reality also begin to shift, because your experience of the world has changed. You’ll discover:
- How new perceptions open when you leave your thoughts behind
- A direct experience of how everything in the world is connected
- How to awaken to movement, creativity, and spontaneity
- What those monks are doing when they look so peaceful
Guided Practices:
- Finding your Be the Belly Breathing Posture
- What it feels like to do deep meditation, effortlessly
Your core is the heart of your whole body brain, connecting your head, your heart, and your belly. Being at core focuses the intelligence of your whole being. This is the posture of personal power, of inspiration, motivation, and focused action. When you are At-Core, you line up with yourself: with your values, and with what you love–others feel this and they respond to you differently. The dynamic energy of this state comes together with a quietness of mind that allows for clarity along with powerful forward movement.
- How whole body focus offers much more than mental focus
- How to “center” yourself by being your core, rather than thinking about your core
- How to use a meditative state in your daily life
- At core is a focused state of the whole body brain
Guided Practices:
- Finding your At-Core Posture
- Experience the difference between ordinary centering and the At-Core Posture
The body ends at your skin, but when you are fully present in your body you may begin to feel into the space around you as if it were part of you. As you feel into the space around you and take ownership of it, you can develop personal boundaries that are not just theoretical, but boundaries that actually impact how you feel in the presence of others and how they treat you. Access to your personal space also opens the ability for you to be “grounded” in a way that feels real and solid.
- How technology shapes and limits models of mind
- How wireless technologies may open the way for new models of mind
- The new science of interpersonal neurobiology
- The simple neuroscience of how minds dance with each other
Guided Practices:
- Feeling the space beyond your skin
- Finding your Anchoring Posture
The practice of bringing full presence to daily life opens new skills and capacities, changes your relationships with your community and the world, and uncovers new levels of information about yourself and others. Showing up with full presence offers a new way of being you. The Attention Postures you have learned in this introductory course are just the beginning of the tools Attention Strategies offers that can unlock new doors and make a lasting difference in your life. In this final module, you’ll discover:
- The new world of Attention Postures and presence skills
- How presence open into powerful perceptions of yourself and others
- The future of your mind: A psychology of the possible
Guided Practices:
- Connecting your At-Core Posture with your Anchoring Posture
- Finding your way to Presence of Mind
- Expanding into a Whole Person Presence Posture
Course Schedule:
Course start date: Monday Feb 5th, 2024.
Course end date: Sunday June 9th, 2024.
Spring break: 1 week (March 25th – 31st)
This comprises 17 active weeks (18 weeks in total).
It’s Not Only a Course, It’s a Community
You’ll be part of an engaged learning group of people throughout your time in the course–people from around the world who are just like you: your Attention Strategies Learning & Support Community.
You’ll interact online with Glenn and your fellow students through a private, social network created exclusively for the participants of this course. You’ll be learning from each other too, and partnering with each other to learn from the collective wisdom we share together. Of course, your personal work will always be held respectfully in this private, virtual space.
What You’ll Receive
Each session will introduce you to a new view of your inner capacities and teach you, step-by-step, the techniques to cultivate high-level attentional skills. Through the sessions you will cultivate high-performance and high-resilience states of consciousness, and find precisely how to use them in your daily life. Glenn will support and guide you in the practices, application, and exploration of this complete skill set.
These videos guide you step-by-step through the practices that guide you as you develop your own inner map, and bring you into direct contact with your hidden resources. They are the distillation of decades of work with thousands of clients, and offer you the most effective strategies available for reaching high-resilience and high-performance states.
Glenn has set aside time each week to answer your questions and provide laser coaching for participants. You will have the opportunity to learn from each other’s questions, experiences, and the answers shared as you develop your high-level skills. These sessions are offered to help you get clearer and more connected to the concepts in the course.
Please note: Recordings of these sessions will be posted each week, so if you can’t make a session live, you will always have access to listen.
These guided exercises by Glenn will allow you to take your practices with you anywhere you go, so whether you have 3 minutes or an hour, you can use the time to deepen your inner capacities.
You will receive a recording of each Live Q&A Session so if you miss the call or wish to listen to it again you can. These recordings can be a wonderful tool to deepen your integration of the teachings.
Frequently asked questions
When we think about consciousness, it seems mysterious because it’s hard to say exactly what it is. But the only way we experience consciousness is in specific inner states such as thinking, daydreaming, mental concentration, flow, and so on. Each one of those states is a particular way of using your attention—and attention is key to moving from one state to another. These strategies are not just about paying attention to one thing instead of another, but rather about learning radically different ways of paying attention. These are the strategies that you can use to access exceptional states that empower, connect, recharge, and deepen.
This is very different than a meditation class because the main focus is on developing high-level consciousness skills that can be applied practically in many areas of life. In the process, it also provides a direct and highly effective approach to meditative states—if those are something you want to access. It is also different in that it teaches you how to use specific body sensations, rather than ideas or metaphors, to guide the process of changing your inner state.
These Attention Strategies are based on scientific data demonstrating an entirely new way to describe and measure states of consciousness. This approach is both more precisely measurable and more effective experientially.
First and foremost, the course is oriented toward guiding you in a step-by-step way to get a direct experience for yourself of each of the states of consciousness that are presented, and how to use them in life. There will be reference to the evidence for those to whom that is important, but it is not necessary for successfully learning the skills that are offered. A recent student wrote this during the second week of the course:
I can only say, it is really awesome! Today, I managed to study efficiently for 10 hours … . The best part is that I didn’t even feel very tired after finishing. If it weren’t for the late hour, I might have thought I could continue [chuckles]. Yes, it surprised even me [chuckles]. Sometimes my focus may scatter, but I quickly manage to refocus and continue studying efficiently.
This work was developed by Dr. Hartelius in collaboration with Michaela Aizer between 1995 and 2000. The first workshops were held in 2000, and in 2002 Dr. Hartelius undertook a PhD in order to develop the evidence for these processes of attention, presence, and consciousness. Along the way he lent his efforts to building and strengthening transpersonal psychology, becoming one of the leaders in this area of psychology.
