Assertiveness is the direct and honest communication of your thoughts and feelings in a way that does not infringe on the personal rights of others. It involves stating your own rights, while acknowledging the rights of others, and working towards a win-win solution.

Assertiveness can help you improve your communication skills, self-esteem, and decision-making ability. It can help you overcome shyness and anger. Feelings and ideas can be expressed in an honest way, allowing relationships to become much more genuine.

The respect you show for other people can lead to others respecting you more. Assertiveness also gives you more control over your environment, reducing anxiety in difficult situations.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (or CBT) is an approach that aims to identify negative emotions, behaviours and thoughts (cognitions) and find ways to transcend them.

CBT treatments have received sound empirical support for a variety of problems, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. It is often brief and time-limited and is used in individual therapy as well as group settings.

In our Managing Negative Thoughts classes, the objective is to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors that are related and accompanied to debilitating negative emotions and to identify those which are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply unhelpful. This is done in an effort to replace or transcend them with more realistic and useful ones.

CBT was primarily developed through a merging of behaviour with cognitive therapy. While rooted in rather different theories, these two traditions found common ground in focusing on the "here and now" and symptom removal.

The particular therapeutic techniques vary, but may include keeping a diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting.

Self-sabotage is a combination of thoughts, feelings, and actions that actually block our success by working against our own self-interests. It involves an over focus on our negative aspects and our failures.

People tend to operate from a set of core beliefs that drive our attitudes and perceptions of ourselves. Some of our core beliefs create and re-create situations and experiences that perpetuate a negative view of ourselves and lower our self-esteem.

The awareness of the irrationality of these thoughts can be frustrating as the individual wishes to stop them but cannot. They may blame themselves for negative events, believe that such events are unavoidable, and let such events affect many aspects of their lives.

Our Preventing Self-Sabotage Classes teach people to identify and change the core beliefs driving them and stop repeating negative outcomes.

Self-sabotage, including self-hatred and self-punishment, can lead to depression and a variety of mental disorders as well as physical illnesses.

Over analysing a situation while trying to make personal decisions can often lead to what is called ‘analysis paralysis’.

When the decision-maker overanalyses the circumstances with which he or she is faced, the sheer volume of analysis is so overwhelming that it weighs him or her down so much that it is impossible to come to a rational conclusion. Such a circumstance is known as ‘cognitive distortion’.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy views cognitive distortions as inaccurate thoughts or ideas that maintain negative thinking and negative emotions. Eliminating these distortions can improve mood and alleviate such mental health disorders as depression and chronic anxiety. This Stop Overanalysing class will teach you how to challenge these negative thoughts, using a process called ‘cognitive restructuring’.

Analysis paralysis can actually occur at any time, regarding any issue in typical conversation, with the over-analysis of a specific issue to the point where that issue can no longer be recognized, and the subject of the conversation is lost.

This can be defined as an individual's relatively consistent inclinations and preferences in relationships, social situations, at work and leisure. It includes your attitudes, way of thinking, feelings, strivings, actions, responses to opportunity and stress and how you interact with others.

 Your style is your organising principle. It propels you on your life path. It is the distinctive pattern of your psychological functioning — the way you think, feel, and behave — hat makes you distinctly you.

It is sometimes hard to understand when your partner is acting or thinking quite differently to you. By discovering your personal style you can value your  strengths and preferences, and find a new way to accept and value difference in others.

 In relationships we discover that our partner has also been influenced by his or her unique family patterns and has different ways of doing things. For instance, you may have come from a family that values a fanatically clean, neat house. Your partner, on the other hand, is very relaxed about clutter.

 There are a million of these differences, many minor, some big. You can and will argue about some of them, insisting that your way is the right way. It helps to pause and be aware of how both of you have been modelled by the past.  Once you become aware of these family patterns you can change them.

Exploring what you learned about life, love, and differences in your family can help you understand how these influence your current relationships – for better and for worse.