In Introduction to Neuroconstruction you'll learn:

• Why it's important to work with the client's subjective and constructed experience, rather than taking a cookie-cutter coaching approach.
• How the brain creates psychological states and our personal reality (and why this is vital to understand in the new era of coaching).
• How to take a neuroconstructionist coaching approach when working with first-order change (behavior change).
• How to take advantage of the new wave of neuroscience-based constructionist coaching.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the Ideal Self as a key driver of purposeful change and sustained motivation.
• Explore the contrast between the Ideal Self and the Ought Self, and how each shapes emotional and cognitive states.
• Understand how envisioning a desired future self supports openness to new ideas, future-oriented thinking, and long-term goal orientation.
• Use evidence-based coaching strategies to help clients articulate a clear, emotionally resonant vision of who they want to become.
• Understand the role of positive emotional attractors in sustaining engagement and intrinsic motivation.
• Integrate the Ideal Self into coaching sessions, helping clients develop identity-based goals that align their values, goals, and daily actions.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain the importance of personal vision, including purpose/meaning, core values, and aspirational identities.
• Describe the roles that emotional attractors and the Ideal Self play in helping people change.
• Use a neuroscience-based approach when working with values and vision, as well as co-creating the relationship.
• Coach with curiosity and facilitate change by working with components of the Self: vision, values and aspirational identities.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explore how the brain constructs meaning from language and experience, and why this matters in coaching conversations.
• Learn how to identify and unpack the subjective meaning behind the words clients use to avoid assumptions and misinterpretations.
• Practice techniques for “slowing down the language” to surface the deeper cognitive and emotional frames driving client behavior.
• Understand how meaning is actively constructed, shaped by prior experiences, values, and identity.
• Examine the neuroscience of motivation: how the brain assigns subjective value and how this shapes goals, decision-making, and behavior.
• Discover how to identify the implicit reward signals clients are responding to, and how to work with them to realign motivation.
• Apply neuroscience-informed strategies to co-create new perspectives and meaning structures that support desired change.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the neuroscience of how habits are formed, so you can help clients to start taking charge of the habits that impact their life.
• Identify the specific behaviors and habits that need to change to unlock potential.
• Leverage the brain's valuation system to "tip" into a new behavior and reinforce it for long-term change.
• Know when to use motivation, immediate action, or micro celebration to establish and reinforce new behaviors.
• Draw from the neuroscience-based habit formation map, so you know exactly what part of the habit process to focus on for rapid and lasting change.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Use evidence-based behavior change strategies to help clients define their ideal future and recognize their obstacles to success.
• Identify when to shift from visioning and future-oriented questioning to problem solving and planning (timing this correctly accelerates results).
• Help clients gain insight into the barriers preventing them from changing their behavior.
• Create an action plan so that clients know exactly what to work on, and can start taking action immediately (an invaluable but often overlooked step in behavior change).

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Help clients work with the brain's affective and emotional "systems"
• Describe to clients how the brain makes emotions to help them understand that they have more control over their experiences than they think.
• Use affect awareness values-based action to manage emotional states during goal pursuit.
• Help clients develop an acceptance style way of being, so that they’re unaffected by unhelpful emotions as they encounter obstacles and challenges as they pursue goals.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the how, why and when of insight and analytical thinking as thought-modalities for problem solving and decision making.
• Highlight why the biggest issue when faced with a problem or decision is not the problem or decision itself, but the brain's response, and how to address it.
• Utilize a neuroscience-based coaching process to facilitate insight-solutions to problems.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the differences between permanent and personal domains of human concern.
• Draw on the neuroscience evidence for different domains of concern, so clients gain valuable insight into their importance.
• Design the domains of concern that clients will observe and assess their lives with.
• Bring clients' awareness to the unavoidable concerns of life, so they can act to take care of them.
• Develop a life concerns map for each client, to help guide them toward a new way of being.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe how psychological life is actively constructed by core psychological ingredients that are managed by intrinsic brain networks, rather than produced by fixed mental faculties.
• Explain how traditional interventions target outputs (e.g., behavior, thought, or emotion), whereas lasting transformation requires revising the brain’s generative model: the predictive architecture that constructs meaning, experience, sense of self, and view of the world.
• Understand how prior learning shapes perception, action, and identity, and guide coachees to construct new ways of being that expand their range of effective actions.
• Use the principles of psychological construction and predictive processing to support deep, system-wide change across emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the self as an active construction: a predictive self-model that forecasts who the coachee is, what they can do, and what is possible for them, rather than a fixed identity waiting to be discovered.
• Revisit the Ideal Self and Ought Self through a neuroconstructionist lens, distinguishing self-authored aspirations from inherited “shoulds” and recognizing how each shapes motivation, emotion, and action.
• Recognize how identity priors (long-held beliefs about who one is) limit a coachee’s range of effective action, and why goals that conflict with the self-model tend to stall.
• Help coachees construct an Ideal Self that is vivid and coherent enough to act as a new prediction: one they can rehearse, test, and gather evidence for in daily life.
• Work with the gap between current and ideal self without triggering threat, using small identity-consistent actions that update the self-model one experience at a time.
• Use the Self Band to locate where a coachee’s self-construction is generating stuckness, and choose the lightest intervention that resolves it.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand meaning-making as an active, predictive process that constructs personal reality through language and prior experience.
• Recognize how language both reflects and shapes a coachee’s conceptual scaffolding, including identity, values, and perceived possibilities.
• Gain insight into your own linguistic patterns and how they generate psychological experiences, emotions, and actions.
• Identify and work with the structure of meaning-making—including categories and concepts—to help coachees loosen rigid interpretations and construct more adaptive realities.
• Use the Change Cycle to loosen automatic meaning patterns, surface underlying rigid conceptual structures, and open space for new interpretations and shifts in self-perception.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the role of somatic awareness in shaping experience, and how tuning into the body can enhance health, relationships, and performance.
• Distinguish between interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness, and guide coachees in shifting flexibly between internal states and external cues to construct a more accurate map of reality.
• Explain how core affect—arising from bodily signals—underpins all psychological states, including perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior.
• Facilitate somatic and embodied shifts that allow coachees to move from reactive states to more grounded, coherent ways of being.
• Identify and help coachees revise postures, physiological habits, and somatic practices that reinforce unhelpful mental and emotional patterns.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand virtues and character strengths as conceptual constructions that shape identity, guide behavior, and scaffold adaptive prediction.
• Help coachees recognize and develop their signature strengths as embodied ways of being that generate coherence, confidence, and resilience.
• Support coachees in shifting from problem-based self-concepts to strength-based narratives, reinforcing adaptive identity priors through action and reflection.
• Facilitate the integration of virtues such as courage, compassion, and perseverance into daily life, enabling coachees to act from their highest values even in uncertainty.
• Apply a multifaceted constructionist approach to help virtues become internalized and sustainable patterns of experience.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Facilitate the identification and embodiment of guiding philosophies as stable, motivational anchors.
• Work with complex conceptual structures (e.g., compassion, courage, service) as predictive priors that shape action and identity.
• Help coachees operationalize and live from their chosen guiding philosophies to support meaningful, values-based change.
• Translate abstract ideals into felt, enacted ways of being that guide behavior across contexts.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Integrate conceptual, somatic, and affective coaching moves to support second-order change.
• Facilitate deeper shifts by working with concept relations and category expansion across multiple domains of experience.
• Recognize when and how to combine interventions across the conceptual, affective, and motivational domains of the NCC model.
• Support coachees in reorganizing predictive scaffolding that maintains rigid identity and behavior patterns.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Identify and work with deeper-level conceptual polarities, such as identity, moral meaning, and unspoken life rules.
• Facilitate conceptual polarity shifts at the level of self-concept, life philosophy, and existential concern.
• Help coachees reframe limiting identity narratives and integrate new self-concepts that allow for greater emotional range and behavioral flexibility.
• Apply linguistic tools to loosen rigid language patterns and open space for new meaning-making pathways.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain how emotions are not fixed responses but constructed experiences, shaped by interoception and conceptual knowledge, in context.
• Distinguish between affect, mood, and emotion, and describe how each contributes to a coachee’s psychological experience and way of being.
• Help coachees identify and reconstruct the conceptual scaffolding that gives emotional states their meaning, revealing greater agency over how they feel and respond.
• Recognize patterns of emotion that arise from unmet needs, rigid constructs, or outdated predictions, and guide coachees toward more adaptive interpretations.
• Facilitate embodied emotional shifts that integrate both somatic and cognitive insight, promoting coherence across thought, feeling, and action.

Upon completion of this module you will be able to:

• Understand the PsychASSETS^® model and its relevance to motivation, behavior, and emotional experience.
• Identify unmet psychological needs that underpin coachees’ recurring challenges.
• Use the needs framework to support prediction revision, motivation realignment, and deeper emotional coherence.
• Help coachees meet their needs in more adaptive, value-aligned, and self-authored ways.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Distinguish between different levels of emotional construction, from core affect to complex constructed emotions.
• Identify the motivational drivers and conceptual scaffolding underlying recurring emotional states.
• Help coachees uncover the needs and meaning-making patterns that generate persistent emotional themes.
• Guide emotional transformation by reconstructing emotional interpretations at the level of both body and meaning.
• Apply the advanced NOVA™ model to increase emotional awareness, uncover the origin of emotional states, and support values-aligned, adaptive responses.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand attention as a key modulator in the brain’s construction of experience—amplifying, filtering, and shaping what becomes psychologically real in any moment.
• Develop the capacity to capture, hold, and skillfully redirect a coachee’s attention to facilitate real-time shifts in perception, meaning, and behavior.
• Learn Neuroconstructionist Alchemy™ basics—a specific class of language patterns that disrupt rigid interpretations and invite new constructs, concept relations, and ways of being.
• Apply advanced linguistic techniques to dissolve cognitive and emotional rigidity, deepen presence, and create space for transformational insight.
• Recognize and intervene when attentional patterns reinforce maladaptive constructs, helping coachees experience new options for seeing, feeling, and acting.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe what coaching is and give examples of different coaching approaches.
• Explain what brings you to the field of coaching.
• Recognize and understand the ICF Competency Standards.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe what distinguishes coaching from other support professions.
• Define client-centered coaching and explain the importance of the coaching relationship.
• Be able to explain the link between the ICF performance indicators for Cultivates Trust & Safety and Maintains Presence and unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathic understanding.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain three of the foundation principles of solution-focused coaching.
• See clients as competent, resilient, resourceful - and building on these resources to enable our clients to build change in their lives.
• Help clients learn to grow - and not focus on the pre-occupation with finding explanations before taking action.
• Help clients focus on positive outcomes, not the eradication of a problem.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Define ‘be’ goals and ‘do’ goals and give examples.
• Explain what is meant by ‘goals as incentives’.
• Explain what determines the choice and pursuit of goals that clients set for themselves.
• Give examples of what will assist clients to think about goals from different perspectives.
• Demonstrate how to work with a client to set & pursue goals based on expectations and free fantasies.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Apply the 7 Step Coaching Format to the Initial Session.
• Provide examples of SFC Signature Questions for the Initial Session for each step in the 7 Step Coaching Format.
• Summarize the minimum skill requirements for the ICF Competencies Listens Actively and Evokes Awareness.
• List the SFC signature questions for the Initial Session - goal setting.
• List the SFC signature questions for Second & Subsequent Sessions - committed action.
• Demonstrate how the SFC signature questions for Second & Subsequent Sessions can be utilized in an observed coaching session.
• Apply the SFC signature questions for Ending the Work - recognition of and reflection on achievement.
• Explain the temporal map of coaching model.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• List SFC signature questions for decision-making and coaching in challenging situations.
• Explain the Choice Point Model (Acceptance and Committment).
• Apply the Choice Point Model as a SFC approach to procrastination.