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This time-tested approach will provide you with a new perception of emotions, ethics, and happiness. You will discover practical methods for improving character strengths, managing emotions, and harnessing the motivational energy of the passions. These insights will equip you to aid clients in directing themselves to happiness.

In this training program, recorded presentations lay out the fundamentals of this understanding of human nature and explain how to build strength of character through the virtues - those dispositions of the person, built up through repeated action, that make it easy and pleasant to act well. These presentations are supplemented by weekly class discussion in live, online video-meetings, as well as by exercises, to ensure you attain a firm grasp of virtue psychology and virtue counseling methods.

This course gives you all the training necessary to practice as a character strengths coach legally in the United States. A character strengths coach is a type of wellness coach: someone who supports clients in working toward the well-being and flourishing they seek. A person who becomes a character strengths coach likes encouraging and assisting other people--offering them practical strategies and helping them marshal their inner strengths for success in the circumstances they face. Perhaps he or she already works as a counselor, teacher, minister, health coach, or in some similar role. Or perhaps he or she has an interest in the classical or the Christian mental health tradition, or in traditional mental health wisdom generally. No prior experience is necessary.

The field of wellness coaching has been growing steadily for years. "According to some surveys, 60% of Americans want health coaching, but 80% of them have never had it offered to them." (Source: Health Coaching Gains Favor Among Consumers, Insurers, & Employers) This course can help you meet this need, while equipping you to provide a positive vision of psychological well-being, something often missing in the modern world.

Educational Outcomes

• In practical detail, a traditional Western understanding of human nature, the human passions (emotions), and human virtue, including--
  • What it is that makes a person truly, enduringly happy.
  • The role of the various passions (emotions)--love, hatred, anger, sadness, avoidance, desire, etc.--in achieving happiness, and how the passions can undermine happiness as well.
  • Why developing a virtuous character is an essential part of becoming happy.
  • How the virtues interact with and support each other in the formation of character: for example, why one cannot have perfect fortitude without hope or charity without faith, or why temperance helps you achieve justice.
  • How to avoid unhealthy behaviors that can easily feel like virtue, but are not.
• In the context of life, how to assess the numerous passions, discern their causes, and use them effectively: for example, how to determine how much a particular pleasure is conducive to happiness, or determine whether a particular anger is healthy or not and what to do about it.
• Concrete, practical approaches to managing one's passions and strengthening the virtues of a noble character.

By the end of the program you will be able to:

• Educate clients about the traditional Western ideas of human functioning, happiness, and virtue.
• Help clients, on the basis of their own insight into their strengths and weaknesses, to find practical strategies, suited to their lives, for managing their passions, increasing virtue, and directing themselves to happiness.
• Offer these insights into human functioning in a professional setting--either standalone as a character strengths coach, or alongside existing services you provide as a counselor, wellness coach, teacher, spiritual director, etc.

Career Outcomes

• Wellness coaches will learn a time-tested understanding of motivation and success, along with practical strategies, that they can share with clients to help them achieve well-being.
• Teachers will be better able to help students understand their emotions and desires and advance toward virtue.
• Mental health professionals will gain familiarity with a model of human functioning and flourishing, not of mental health pathology alone. They will also gain a detailed understanding of the traditional psychology that has left a mark on Western societies, helping them to better communicate with and aid clients from these cultures.
• Ministers or spiritual directors will learn new skills for advising those who seek their help, according to an ancient Christian understanding of emotional health and moral growth.

Certification & Credentials

Industry Need

"Probably 20% of people in the country have some form of mental health issue at some point in their lives...on a continuum from very little to very severe." (Source: What Mental Health Statistics Can Tell Us)

Health coaching is a particular growth sector: "Market data estimates that the total U.S. health coaching market was worth $6.14 billion in 2017, up 15% from 2014. The total market is forecast to grow at a 5.4% average annual pace, to $7.85 billion by 2022, with 121,000 coaches practicing." "According to some surveys, 60% of Americans want health coaching, but 80% of them have never had it offered to them." (Source: Health Coaching Gains Favor Among Consumers, Insurers, & Employers)

Limitations

Why Study the Virtues?

This thought provoking 2 year course explores history's practical answer to modern mental health and wellness. The program is based on the works of Josef Pieper, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the greatest minds of western civilization.

The virtues were developed by Greek philosophers from antiquity, and provided a model for mental well-being for thousands of years before it was replaced by modern psychology. But has something valuable been lost in modern psychological methods? This course brings the wisdom and insight of a longstanding tradition into the modern era.

Curriculum

Introduction to the Human Person P1,2

Happiness / Unhappiness

Mental Health & the Passions, Appetites, Emotions, and Instincts

• Love (amor)
• Desire (desiderium/concupiscentia)
• Pleasure/joy (delectatio/gaudium/laetitia)
• Hate (odium)
• Avoidance (fuga/abominatio)
• Pain/sadness (dolor/tristitia)
• Hope (spes)
• Desperatio (despair)
• Fear (timor)
• Daring (audacia)
• Anger (ira)

Virtue Theory

• Prudence - Improving goals & means
• Justice - Becoming kind, building relationships
• Fortitude - Growing in strength
• Temperance - Attaining serenity
• Faith - Improving confidence
• Hope - Reaching for greatness
• Love (Charity) - Finding fulfillment

Is There a Link Between Ayurveda & the Virtues?

About the Teacher