The Flourishing Life Blueprint
This powerful program is a blueprint for embracing and relishing your life, whatever it throws at you. It brings together the insights and practices from the Buddha's wisdom, modern psychology, Lenore's 20 years' experience in leadership development and her own extensive personal growth path.
The Program will guide you through the process of personal growth - at your own pace, working with your actual life challenges. You'll receive a full 12 months access to all of the program's modules and the full Flourish suite of Tools which you can use for the rest of your life.
It's all online, and consists of ten Modules with videos and practical activities that you can do at your own pace, and from the comfort of your own home. Read on if you'd like to know more.
Pop your email address in here, if you'd like to know when we launch (scheduled for October 2024), and join our Facebook Page here.
The Flourishing Life Blueprint program has four parts.
The goal of Part One, is re-orientation. First, we help you un-hook from unhelpful ideas about happiness and a good life, and the dodgy signposts that are all around us, sending us off down blind alleys. Then we re-orient you to a more credible goal than achieving constant happiness - flourishing - and identify the trustworthy signposts to get you there. We finish off this Module by describing what flourishing is, and how we know if we're doing it.
Module 1
The Big Picture
6 sessions
What's wrong? Why am I not happy?
Compared to most people who ever lived, we are safe and 'successful'. So why aren't we happy?
Brace yourself for some disruptive ideas!
This module aims first, to dis-orient you from the very common belief that getting what you want is the ticket to enduring happiness, and then from the idea that a good life is all about happiness. If that isn't controversial enough, we'll also dis-orient you from some super-common mirages that lure us into chasing them to achieve this happiness (think: money, stuff, beauty, fame, romance, leisure), only to find that they don't deliver what they promised.
Module 2
Wiser Wanting
11 sessions
The Nine Elements of Human Flourishing
Here we take a deep dive into the nine experiences that lead human beings to flourish. You'll gain a thorough understanding of each one, brought alive with real life examples. You'll assess your own life as it is, right now, on the Nine Elements. You'll identify where you're well nourished and where you're under-nourished and choose an Element to start working on.
Module 3
An Authentic Vision of Flourishing
9 sessions
The Seven Signs of Personal Growth
If flourishing isn't being happy all the time, then what is it? If we're going to do the work of growing as a human being, rather than running about compulsively trying to get what we want in the belief it will make us happy, where does this lead? We know how to imagine happiness, but what does a vision of flourishing look and feel like?
We'll get to know well the Seven Signs of Personal Growth. These give a credible vision of a good life - they describe what it's like to be flourishing - the reward for doing the work of personal growth. It's not a destination, but a different way of travelling life. And it rocks!
The goal of Part Two is to see and understand your experience more clearly.
In order to travel life differently, we need to make some changes. To do this though, we need to understand how this thing called human experience works. Part two equips you with some key concepts and practices to see your experience clearly as it unfolds, and to understand what you see.
Module 4
The Human Experience
6 sessions
Befriending our body-minds
Our minds are well intended, but only semi-skilled friends. They try to protect us but they don't always know how to best do that. We need to understand them.
If we want a different experience of life, we need to understand how our lived "experience" is created within our body-minds - how every moment comes about. (Mind and body are so intimately connected that we use the term body-mind to refer to both affecting each other.)
Why do I get heated or uptight about things that others can brush off? Why are there certain things that 'hook' me... that trigger reactions in me that I can't seem to let go of? And then there are other things that really energise me and keep me going that other people might not care about at all.
This Module gives you some practical, easy to remember concepts to understand key factors affecting our decisions to act, or in many cases react to the people and situations that arise in our lives.
If we can see the factors at play, they are less likely to drive us blindly. As our minds learn to see more clearly, we can behave more wisely. We begin to have some choice about how we respond rather than making a mess by reacting impulsively.
Module 5
Seeing Clearly
7 sessions
The Power of Clarity
We spend much of our lives on autopilot. We accept ideas that have surrounded us our whole lives as truths because...well....everyone else does.
Strap in for some more disruptive insights here, including some ideas that you might take for granted as true! In this Module we look closely at some common faulty beliefs about the nature of experience that set us up for heartache and stress. These include what we call the Three Tragic Misunderstandings. These are three beliefs we carry around that mis-colour our lens on the world and set us off chasing those mirages. We scramble around in all the wrong places and then wonder why we come up empty handed.
We'll give you a tool to help you look clearly at any experience with as little delusion and embellishment as possible.
Module 6
The Master-tool: Mindfulness
9 sessions
The essentials - insight & serenity
We can't change our patterns of experience if we can't see them. We can't see them if our minds are stirred up like a puddle of water in the dirt. We need to calm them so that we can see clearly the contours of the ground.
This module explores mindfulness and meditation and why they're super-important for personal growth. We'll give you an overview of different types of meditation and how they're useful. You'll get to try them for yourself, letting go of any notions of being a 'bad meditator' or 'not being able to meditate'. You'll begin to build your own mindfulness practice and a toolkit of different ways to meditate, both in dedicated meditation sessions, and in your everyday life.
Part three is chunky! Its goal is to build your skills to be able to flourish. We'll look at the Five Growth Superpowers, all of the Flourish Tools and other practices that will add to your personal growth toolkit.
Module 7
Your Flourishing Super-power: Growth
7 sessions
Essential attitudes for growth: the Five Cs
By this point in the program we know the essential elements of flourishing, and which of them need a boost in our lives at the moment. We then have the challenge of making changes in our lives.
This can be uncomfortable.
Discover the Five Growth Superpowers that help you learn and grow fast and effectively. Assess which ones you currently have well developed, and which ones we need to strengthen to help you on your path.
Module 8
Tools for the journey
9 sessions
Resilience for the mind
The path of personal growth can be a challenging one at times and we need to make sure we're in shape to handle it. Our minds are the most important tool for this journey. They are 'Teflon for the good, and Velcro for the bad' - we need to know how to balance them. This module will equip you with powerful tools to bolster your resilience for the important personal work in the next module. These tools can be used for the rest of your life as you face those 'difficult spaces' - the bumpy bits - to help you dismantle reactivity.
Module 9
Dismantling reactivity
5 sessions
Disempowering our demons
Armed with our tools for awareness and resilience, we learn how to release ourselves from the grip of a situation that is triggering upset - that seems to have its hooks in us.
This module gives us direct, practical experience in undermining real life reactivity that has snared us. Learn how to 'invite your demons in for a tea party' to release stress and stuckness from issues in your life that trigger you into reactivity.
We can be reactive about pleasant things too, so you'll learn how to relish pleasant experiences without them becoming pleasure traps.
This is a powerful module that has the potential to change your life. In fact this is one of the key skills for what the Buddha called awakening - the experience of life free from reactivity!
Module 10
Finding Your Way Forward
6 sessions
Finding your "true north"....and walking your path
In the last Module, we finish where we started - the big picture. With everything you've done to this point, you'll be invited to develop your own personal Vision and Values statement. You'll assess your life again on the Nine Elements of Human Flourishing and we'll hone in on a couple of them that we know are often under-nourished in our modern societies - babies we've thrown out with the bathwater.
Finally, we'll have a look at what's next for you - what's different now compared to when you started, what habits you want to take forward or to start building, and what support and accountability you might need after you finish the program.