Steven Kessler – Understanding Yourself & Understanding Others
Description Of Understanding Yourself & Understanding Others
Create Thriving Relationships and Personal Success with a Powerful New Way to Understand People
A 7-module self-paced video course taught by Steven Kessler, MFT Therapist, Teacher, and Author of The 5 Personality Patterns
Your past is still stuck in your body. It still controls your life.
It’s time to Free Yourself.
Of course, you want your work and your personal relationships to bloom into joy and ease. And you want to make a big contribution to Life.
But things don’t always go that way. Sometimes what other people do and say is hard to understand. Sometimes it even seems like they’re living in a different world. And just understanding your own feelings and needs can be confusing.
The problem is that you’re caught in patterns of automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They started out as ways to feel safer when you were young, but then got so conditioned into your body that now they control everything, from how you perceive to how you feel to how you behave. In fact, they control your life.
And you’re not alone. Everyone’s personality has been shaped by a few childhood safety strategies that gradually became so automatic that now they control their whole life. As we grow up, the strategies that we adopted to keep us safe gradually begin to confine and limit us. What once kept us safe becomes our prison cell.
So we live our lives caught in a prison that we don’t even know is there. We feel caught somehow, but we can’t see what limits us, so we just think “That’s how I am.”
But you don’t have to stay caught in your prison cell. You don’t have to let those unconscious patterns control you for the rest of your life. You can learn about the 5 personality patterns and see which ones are running your life. And you can discover how to get out of your patterns and open up once again to the freedom of being present in the moment.
You will step onto that path when you decide to attend the Understanding Yourself & Understanding Others course. Each module will deepen your understanding of the 5 safety strategies and the personality patterns that grow out of them. You’ll discover which patterns you get caught in and how to know when you’ve gone into pattern. You’ll begin learning the skills you need to get out out of pattern and come back to being present.
And you can immediately apply your new knowledge everywhere in your life. Suddenly, it will seem like you have x-ray vision. You’ll be able to see what’s going on inside those around you — how they change as they become distressed, what safety strategies they employ, and what they need to feel safer. You’ll find yourself able to deal with them more effectively and communicate with them more successfully. Instead of feeling scared or angry or judgmental, you may even find yourself feeling compassion for them.
Others who took this course have reported that it shifted them from self-judgment to self-love. Or saved their marriage. Or led to success in their business or profession.
You can have those benefits, too. You can learn what’s really happening inside yourself and others. You can learn the skills you need to cultivate a stable, grounded presence and develop emotional maturity.
It’s not rocket science. It’s just knowledge and practice. But you need a map that shows you where you are now and how to get to where you want to be. Understanding Yourself & Understanding Others gives you that map and that knowledge.
What You’ll Learn In Understanding Yourself & Understanding Others
During this fun, exciting course, you’ll discover:
- the 5 ways people try to stay safe
- how each of the 5 patterns develops
- which patterns you go into when distressed
- how to recognize the patterns in others
- what different people need and how to help them get it
- how to communicate and work with them successfully
- practices to keep you centered, stable, and strong
“It’s like having x-ray vision!”
During the Course, you’ll explore 7 modules:
Module 1: How Personality Forms
How the 5 Safety Strategies become the 5 Personality Patterns
We will begin by exploring what happens inside people when they get distressed, how they habitually respond to try to feel safer, and how those habits shape their entire experience of life.
In module 1 you’ll discover:
- the 5 main safety strategies people use
- how the safety strategies develop into personality patterns
- how each pattern becomes self-reinforcing
- 2 practices to keep you centered
Module 2: Flee → The Leaving Pattern
“This place scares me. I want to go home.”
The incoming spirit’s first task is to settle into the body and attach to it, a process known as Embodiment. If the spirit doesn’t feel safe here, it keeps bouncing out of the body. This derails the process of Embodiment, which makes it hard to be here in a human body, but easy to leave.
In module 2 you’ll discover:
- the Gifts of this pattern
- the real reason some people are ‘highly sensitive’
- what makes the physical world seem so scary to them
- how they use leaving to protect themselves
- how embodiment is their key to finally feel safe here
- practices to help you ground and embody
Module 3: Connect & Please → The Merging Pattern
“I can never get full. I’m not enough. Love will solve everything.”
After coming into the body, the next task is Taking In food and love from others. If, in childhood, there wasn’t enough, a person can get stuck in this stage, still trying to get everything they need from others.
In module 3 you’ll discover:
- the Gifts of this pattern
- why people who do this pattern are so focused on talking and being close
- how they got to be so good at connecting with people
- why they get stuck in “I can’t! You do it for me.”
- when they shift into “I can” and overdo it
- how core and self-care are their keys to safety and success
- practices to help you develop core, self-care, and healthy boundaries
Module 4: Hunker Down & Hide → the Enduring Pattern
“You can’t make me. Leave me alone.”
After Taking In, our next developmental task is Putting Out, in the form of self-expression and self-action. If we weren’t allowed to say ‘No’ or be different from our parents, we can get stuck here, hunkered down, but unable to express ourselves, take action, or succeed at anything.
In module 4 you’ll discover:
- the Gifts of this pattern
- why they are so deeply grounded and strong
- why people who do this pattern want so much space around them
- how they get stuck in resisting, and then feel heavy and resentful
- how claiming and filling their space is their key to safety and success
- practices to help you claim and fill your space
Module 5: Inflate & Fight → The Aggressive Pattern
“There’s no safety anywhere. It’s a jungle out there.”
Our next developmental task is Trusting Others. If our parents cannot hold us with both love and strength, or if our trust is betrayed and our love is used against us, we may swear off trust and love and turn to power for a sense of safety. If we get stuck there, we lose our sense of connection and belonging, and the world becomes a lonely battlefield.
In module 5 you’ll discover:
the Gifts of this pattern
- why people who do this pattern are so focused on power and dominance
- how they got to be so good at leading, fighting, and getting their own way
- why they get stuck in “I’m alone here” and “I have to do it all”
- the benefits and cost of being highly charged
- how feeling held and contained by something big, strong and good is their path back
- practices to help you retrieve your scattered attention
Module 6: Tighten & Perform → The Rigid Pattern
“I am my Performance. So are You.”
If we are loved only for our performance and correctness, and not for our hearts and our selves, we tend to lose touch with our inner life and focus only on our performance. Outwardly, we become attractive and successful, but we do not develop our inner guidance, our capacity for Trusting Self. Our thinking, feelings, and actions become stiff and rule-bound.
In module 6 you’ll discover:
- the Gifts of this pattern
- why people who do this pattern are so focused on being right, and correct
- how they got to be so good at details, organizing, and performing
- why they get stuck in black and white, right-wrong, and good-bad thinking
- why feelings and spontaneity can scare them
- how learning to feel their way through life is their path back to authenticity
- practices to help you soften that inner contraction and have more fun
Module 7: Putting it All Together
Primary and Secondary Patterns
Getting Out of Pattern & Shifting into Presence
In module 7 you’ll discover:
- that people have both primary and secondary patterns
- how to discern which patterns you do
- practices to keep you centered, stable, and strong
- a 5 second re-centering practice
- the 4 Basic Energy Skills everyone needs to be a healthy adult
- 6 different ways to get yourself out of a pattern and back to presence
About Steven Kessler
Embark on a Life-changing Journey with a Master Guide
Steven Kessler, MFT has been studying people his whole life. For almost 40 years, he’s been a licensed psychotherapist, studying many different healing modalities and maps of personality, including Character Structure, the Enneagram, NLP, energy work, Thought Field Therapy, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), as well as spending 16 years in the Diamond Heart meditation school.
Since 1984, Steven has taught hundreds of groups and workshops in the U.S. and internationally, helping men and women heal their wounds and grow into their full adult selves. For over 15 years, he has been a student of Lynda Caesara, studying Character Structure, the direct perception of energy, and shamanism in the lineage of Grandfather Two Bears and the Southern Seers tradition.
His bestselling book, The 5 Personality Patterns, lays out a simple, clear, true-to-life map of personality that gives you the key to understanding people and relating to them effectively. Stephen M. Johnson, one of the most famous authors in the field, called it “one of the most useful popular psychology books I have ever seen.” Readers email him frequently with stories of how reading it has changed their lives.
When you say “YES” to this healing journey, you’ll discover:
- How to recognize the Patterns in yourself and others
- How to approach each Pattern
- How to speak so they will listen
- How to listen so they will talk
- How to continually re-center yourself
- How to relate successfully to anyone
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