What Education Are We Offering?

1. The Importance of Finding *Acceptance in Life, as a starting point

3. The Importance of Being a Person we Like and Value

*Acceptance: (our definition) non-judgemental awareness and acknowledgement of the facts of a thing in time; the ability to let go of the emotional and intellectual content of a thing in time

As an experienced educator and trainer with these deeply held beliefs, my commitment is to offer an integrated and applied learning approach, and learning community, which will support you to be better able to manage your thoughts and emotions, your work-life balance, and your ideas of Self. It will help you be better able to direct your life towards doing more things you value, as well as being someone you value being more.

I understand the new and different learnings, perspective shifts, attitude changes, and support, that we all need at different junctures in our lives. Learnings and support that move us forward along our respective paths in ways that better suit us. This is where we and our courses come in. For some of you, one of our 10-week Foundation Courses maybe enough to set you on your way for the next decade or two. For others, you will want deeper and longer more detailed investigation and/ or some more specific learning content.

What, in my opinion, makes this learning and life process worthwhile, beyond even calm acceptance, is taking the further step of finding value and enjoyment, even joy, in this process, too. This means learning to value life for what it is in each moment, and for these moments to then be steppingstones to greater value and meaning. This is what we support here at Twenty2Beyond: a process of growing your life now, which sets you up for life going forward, and which continues to do so overtime. In short, our courses and programs will support you to grow and develop greater autonomy, discernment, and *agency, so you are better able to not only survive but to thrive in terms of managing your work-life balance and your self, over the years ahead.

*Agency (our definition): to have the power to grow a life you accept, value, and direct, with hope, kindness, and patience.

We believe that this context calls for greater support for people to shift away from focusing on material satisfaction, forms of success, and rewards sought and valued externally. And a need to move more towards an emphasis on, one, being better able to just deal with life. Two, being better able to define success through self-defined internal meaning and value. And three, being better humans – at work, at play, and in relationships – by growing, celebrating, and harnessing our human qualities (vis-à-vis tech and AI), such as, creativity, open-mindedness, empathy, autonomy, discernment, gratitude, kindness, and fellow feeling. Then, growing out into the external world and community from this surer foundation. With the potential positives this has for individuals, communities, and societies.

A psychologist and therapist I once knew, emphasised – from her vast experience – the fact that many people live passively: that life just happens to them, and they just react to it. And, how this lack of control, or sense of control and direction, can have difficult psychological and relational consequences. It is our belief, that such passivity is even more problematic in the modern world because of, amongst other things, the powerful influence on us of hugely unequal societies and unrepresentative democracies; the power of data-driven social and surveillance technologies; the impact of AI creations, efficiency, and productivity; as well as the pervasive power and influence of both Authoritarian and Market States, and their accordant Medias.

It is our opinion that an alternative approach to life and learning is needed, with different priorities and with a more sustainable conception of growth, development, and value. For us, that approach is to be found in our ability to grow, develop, and direct our own lives forward, while maintaining a clear, conscious, and appreciative awareness of the fact we are members of complex, interdependent communities, and societies. We read the educationalist John Dewey’s work as supporting this position, particularly his strong case for the importance of education being not only a place to gain content knowledge, but also a place to learn how to live. In Dewey’s eyes, the purpose of education should be the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. He noted that,

"To prepare [people] for the future life means to give [a person] command of [themselves]; it means to train [them] so that [they] will have the full and ready use of all [their] capacities" (My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey, 1897).

We support this perspective and in many ways, this is what Twenty2Beyond was created for. We focus on both the interconnected and interdependent nature of our own personhood and the interconnected and interdependent nature of ourselves in our social contexts, whether at work or play, whether in society or in intimate relationships. We specialize in perspective and attitude shifts that will enable you to be better able to both manage your present internal world and move beyond into external ways of living you value more, and getting that work-life balance more balanced, including being someone you value more. We do a lot of work on active awareness, which leads you towards being more aware on a day to day and moment to moment basis. This leads to greater self-awareness but also towards what Lisa Miller refers to as ‘awakened awareness’, with the ability:

[To] scan the world and knit together meaning; …that we feel better when we are able to choose to make a brighter meaning from the stuff in our lives." (p92-94)

This outlook is reinforced by Kemp Powers, the co-Director of the film, ‘The Journey of Soul’, who observed how, “Life itself is about taking whatever we have thrown at us and turning it into something beautiful”. We also agree with Victor Frankl when he said, “We all wish and desire to find and fulfil meaning in [our lives]”. One of the most important aspects of his work was its subjective adaptability; it didn’t seek to provide universal truths for all humans but, as Dr. Frankl stated, it sought to determine what is, “the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment” (Frankl 131). Though this meaning is always changing from moment to moment, person to person, it is ever-present; there is always some meaning in a life. At Twenty2Beyond, our work supports the growth and development of this outlook and attitude.

We also agree with Bob Dylan, where he says, “Life isn't about finding yourself or finding anything, it is about creating yourself and creating things". We agree with both Frankl and Dylan about the importance of attitude. Dylan observed that, “It’s not the experience that counts, it’s the attitude towards the experience”, while Frankl realized that we have, “The freedom to choose [our] attitude”. Abraham Maslow himself also suggested that it was the attitude we bring to our lives that is maybe, “the crucial catalyst for where one's life and self-growth goes”.

While eminent psychologist Martin Seligman concluded his 2018 autobiography with two profound insights that support this focus on attitude. The first insight, was revealing how we humans are all physiologically and psychologically endowed with a living ‘Hope Circuit’: how having a sense of control in the future provides us with hope, and that having this hope psychologically strengthens, reinforces, and protects us from helplessness, depression, and simply giving up on things in the present. And, how we gain more control and hope in the future by being “called into the future, by the future”, not by stumbling from our pasts, through our presents into the future. Further plasticity then leads us to be more able to keep calm, keep trying, and keep going.

“This is why expert athletes, soldiers, and pilots are calm under pressure. Their brains detect and expect control when others panic and freeze.” (2018: 375)

The second insight, was Seligman concluding, from a lifetime of working on human agency, how central well-being is for us humans to aim our ‘moral compass’ and orientate our futures towards. How our lives benefit from an intentional process of growth towards greater well-being (2018: 389). He noted how:

“We can all say yes to more positive emotion. We can all say yes to being more engaged at work, with those we love, and in leisure. We can all say yes to better relationships with our fellow human beings, our fellow animals, and our planet. We can all say yes to more meaning in life. And we can all say yes to more noble accomplishment.”  (2018: 390)

I couldn’t agree more. I was genuinely moved when reading the end of his book and reading these two insights. I was moved by the weight and simplicity of the insights themselves but also because I had, from a very different route and path, arrived at the same conclusions. I had identified, first, the need to look to the future, over the long-term, and direct our lives towards it, with some degree of discernment, control, hope, and patience. Second, I had also seen the central importance to us all of having greater autonomy, agency, and lived value for our own well-being. And consequently, the need for forms of education that directly focus on and support the growth of these aspects in our lives because they do take focus and work - they don't always appear by chance.

At Twenty2Beyond, we approach this challenging teaching and learning context, with its adaptive approach to attitude and the building of value, direction, and hope, through our own 5-Point Growing a Life Learning Framework, which includes, in part, growing and developing 22 skills or qualities. Overtime, we will be developing a whole school of relevant and valuable content and courses based on this context, these beliefs, this framework, and these skills and qualities. I look forward to it (and I'm working on it :).

2. Secondly, and most importantly, all our work is structured around our Growing a Life Learning Process. Our ‘Growing a Life Learning Process’ supports our Valuability Principle, frames the areas of study that we focus upon and acts as a guide for where growth and development will unfold, dependent on the multi-dimensional nature and outlook of each individual learner involved. It includes learning to:

e. Have a healthier attitude to life-long learning, growth, and development.

We look to achieve these areas of growth and development through specific learning approaches, models, and concepts and by helping enable the growth and development of 22 Skills or Qualities, with a particular focus on working towards: Acceptance, Discernment, Valuability, Kindness, and Life-long learning. These 22 Skills or Qualities are:

“[An Education] which heighten[s] the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of [their] living into one of learning, sharing and caring.”

3. Third, our work is assured by our Process in Action Concept

Our ‘Process in Action Concept’ adds a layer of constant reflection and action to our five growing a life-components (a-e). Which means we cannot just sit dreaming and theorizing about their growth and development, we are engaged in a constant process of learning, reflection, discernment, and action. It means that reflection or theorizing without some kind of action is insufficient, while acting without valuable learning and reflection is equally insufficient to the process of growing a life with Valuability.

4. Fourth, our work is elevated by our Equality of Process Idea

Growing a Life as a ‘Process in Action’ is, for us, a significant point of human equality because it represents what we refer to as an ‘Equality of Process’: that no matter where we are or what our circumstances are, we all have aspects of the ‘Growing a Life Process’ to grow and develop. Whether that is working on acceptance, doing more things we value doing, being kinder or working on any of the other of our 22 skills or qualities, we all have work to do. This is for us where the humbling quality of equality lies. We don’t stand above or below anyone, as we all have valuable areas of ourselves that we need work on, no matter our financial status, enlightened state, or power.

5. Finally, our work is layered with joint accountability through our Process Commitment

We work with people who want what we are offering and who have, what we call ‘Process Commitment’. This is commitment to the work you have to do, as well as to the collective component of our work. Which is simply a commitment to accepting, respecting, and valuing the role our social environment plays in our individual growth and development, and that we support through our ‘Kindness’ component. We, for our part, commit to support you through our Process and beyond. We confirm this joint buy-in before we begin.

Our work centers a lot around being grounded in the present moment but this acceptance in the present is very much guided by our encouragement to look forward and to use that future to pull you towards it. Rather than being both hamstrung in the present by your past and pushed forward by it. It is working on this wonderful balance of finding things to aim towards, staying rooted in the present to achieve them, and not being solely defined by the past, that makes life constantly challenging, interesting, and super valuable.

You will also be supported to clearly identify and value the staging points on your journey ahead, and to reach them. This requires a third element; a light being shone on the parts of your character that can be evolved at each stage to help you move forward. This is the goal-process-character triptych, as I refer to it, espoused by, amongst many others, Jim Loehr and Brett Ledbetter, which is a core component of all our courses. Where you have some future orientation in mind, you have a process to get there, and you stay rooted in the present and keep working on aspects of your character towards it. The focus, for the majority of the time, shifts from a future orientating point to you in the present moment.

Overall, our work will support you to:

16. Be fully engaged in your own life, with a growth mindset.

So, within our work there is…