EXCEPTIONALLY HIGH PERFORMING TEAMS.
This course explores what makes a team perform at an exceptionally high level, starting from a simple idea: training is only worth it when something changes afterwards. You see how teams work as connected systems, and how trust, clear roles and honest communication help people collaborate and learn from experience. From there, the focus turns to you as an individual: your strengths, your emotions, your stress and the way you use your time. Finally, you put everything into action by choosing one concrete behaviour to practise and a way to keep learning from it.
CONTENTS WE COVERED.
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A simple question opens this module: what makes a team different from a group of people who simply work side by side? You discover that a team exists when people depend on each other to reach a shared goal, and that being busy is not the same as being effective. You look at how work passes from one person to the next, and why the moments when a task is handed over deserve special care. Along the way, you cover the basics of a strong team: a clear purpose, goals everyone understands, well-defined roles, and colleagues who can be counted on. Each part ends with a chance to reflect on your own team.
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Here the focus is on how people work together day to day. You learn the difference between trusting a colleague and feeling safe enough to speak up, and how disagreement can improve decisions when you question the idea and not the person. Communication comes next, as a two-way exchange: giving full attention, asking open questions, showing empathy, avoiding interruptions and giving useful feedback. You also practise listening at different levels. To close, the module looks at how teams coordinate, learn from mistakes and turn what they learn into real changes.
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This module invites you to look at what already works well in you and in the people around you. You explore what positive psychology is and why well-being goes beyond simply feeling happy. The 24 character strengths give you a shared language, and you see why a strength only helps when it is used in the right situation. Then you reflect on your own strengths, the ones you notice in colleagues, and the areas you still want to develop. The module finishes with self-leadership: knowing yourself, making choices within your responsibilities, choosing how you respond, practising on purpose and looking after your energy.
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Emotions take centre stage in this module. You find out that emotions are not automatic reactions: your brain builds them from past experience, so how you interpret a situation shapes how you feel. Emotional intelligence, the difference between acceptance and giving up, and how others see you are all part of the conversation. You also get practical ways to look after your emotions, such as learning more precise words for what you feel, noting positive moments, visualising, mindfulness, keeping an emotional diary and paying attention to your inner voice. The final part looks at what stress is and the signs it leaves on the body and the mind.
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Time is the theme here, starting with how your brain experiences it and why some hours fly while others drag. Attention, mood, energy levels, technology and your surroundings all change that experience, and common thinking traps lead us to plan too optimistically. Then comes the real cost of interruptions, the reasons we put things off, and why doing several things at once slows us down. You also pick up simple methods for deciding what comes first and organising your days and weeks, including what to do when everything feels urgent.
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The final module is where you put everything into practice. It starts from a reminder: training only matters if something changes afterwards. You take stock of the strengths you already bring, choose one specific behaviour to work on, and decide where you can genuinely make a difference. Noticing your emotions before you act and protecting your energy and attention are part of the plan too. The last step is to make a habit of checking your progress, learning from it and adjusting as you go.
COURSE PRESENTATION.
All the content from the sessions is available here: the full presentation with notes for each slide. Use it as a reference when revisiting a concept, preparing a conversation with your team, reflecting on a situation at work, or thinking about how to put the ideas into practice.
ONLINE SESION WITH ME.
These sessions are an optional space to continue the work from the course. If you want to go deeper on a specific concept, think through a real situation you are facing, or need support putting something into practice, this is where that happens. The goal is to help you bring what you learned into your actual work — with more clarity, more confidence, and a clearer sense of how to apply it.
SOME RECOMENDATIONS.
Barrett is one of the most important neuroscientists working today, and her central argument overturns a widely held assumption: emotions are not hardwired reactions that happen to us. They are constructed by the brain — predictions generated from past experience, current context, and the concepts available to make sense of what we are feeling. For this course, her work is particularly relevant in understanding why anxiety about presenting is not fixed or inevitable. As the concepts you have about presenting change, the emotional experience the brain constructs around presenting changes with it.
The Secret Life of the Brain — Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Kahneman spent decades studying how human beings actually make decisions — and his conclusion is that we are far less rational than we believe. The brain operates through two systems: a fast, automatic, intuitive system that makes rapid judgments based on pattern and feeling, and a slow, deliberate, analytical system that requires effort and attention. Most professional presentations are designed entirely for the slow system — logical, sequential, evidence-based. But it is the fast system that decides whether to pay attention, whether to trust the presenter, and whether to act on what was said. Understanding both systems is essential for anyone who wants their message to actually land.
Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman.
Pink challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in workplace psychology: that the right combination of rewards and punishments is what drives performance. Drawing on decades of behavioral science, he argues that beyond a baseline level of fair pay, external incentives actually undermine the kind of motivation that produces real engagement and creative work. His answer is three ingredients that reliably drive genuine motivation: autonomy, the desire to direct our own lives; mastery, the urge to get better at something that matters; and purpose, the sense that our work serves something larger than ourselves. A foundational read for anyone who needs an audience to act, not just comply.
Drive - Daniel H. Pink.
Newport spent years studying why focused, undistracted work has become both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable, even as most workplaces make it harder to achieve. His answer is a clear distinction between deep work — cognitively demanding, distraction-free effort that produces real value — and shallow work, the reactive, fragmented tasks that fill most people's days without moving anything forward. The book lays out concrete rules for protecting time and attention for deep work in an environment built to constantly interrupt it. A practical, well-argued case for anyone whose best work keeps getting crowded out by everything else.
Deep Work - Cal Newport.
Of all Siegel's books, this is the one most directly centered on mindfulness as practice. Starting from neuroscience, it explains why sustained attention produces measurable changes in the brain and introduces his own practical tool — the Wheel of Awareness — for training attention, opening consciousness, and developing more deliberate intention. Unlike many books on mindfulness, it does not stop at technique: it explains the mechanism. A natural continuation for anyone who wants to go deeper into both the science and the practice after the course.
Aware: The Science and Practice of Mindfulness (Daniel Siegel).
How fast does a city move? Levine, a social psychologist, went out and measured it — walking speed on downtown streets, the accuracy of public clocks, how long a postal clerk took to complete a simple transaction — across thirty-one countries. What he found is that pace of life varies enormously, and that cultures differ in something more basic: whether they run on clock time, where the schedule decides when things happen, or event time, where activities finish when they feel finished. Neither is the correct one. The book is a useful reminder that much of what feels like an absolute rule about time is a local convention, and it underpins this course's look at how much of our urgency is learned rather than given.
A Geography of Time - Robert Levine.
This documentary approaches intuition as a form of knowledge grounded in experience, perception, and the rapid integration of information. Through various interviews and examples, it explores how intuition shapes decision-making and how people interpret their surroundings. Its relevance here lies in understanding the relationship between conscious and intuitive thought, and how, under pressure or high demand, the balance between the two can shift.
One of the most counterintuitive findings in behavioral science is that we are poor at predicting what will make us happy. The video covers the five evidence-based paths to sustained wellbeing identified by positive psychology — strengths, gratitude, savoring, flow, and meaning — and closes with mindfulness as the practice that makes all five more accessible. A useful complement to the course for anyone who wants to understand why presence is not just a meditation concept but a condition for a genuinely better life.
