Jean Moroney’s Thinking Lab:

Where Ayn Rand fans come
for support in achieving their meaningful goals
in the world as it is

The Thinking Lab is a year-round group coaching program for Ayn Rand fans, designed to support you to achieve all of your meaningful goals — whether they are work goals, relationship goals, health, wealth, or recreation goals. We run on an annual cycle designed to match the ebb and flow of goal-pursuit during the year:

• In January & February, we run the 8-week New Year’s Launch to achieve a major goal in that time. We kick off with a Thinking Day, I offer 2 group coaching calls a week (that is, 8 per month), and I also deliver new classes on creating and breaking habits. There is optional daily thought work.
• In March & early April, we slow down the pace and focus on ongoing relationship goals. We reduce the coaching calls to 3 a month, and the classes are on objectivity in social relationships.
• Mid-April through Mid-June, we pick up the pace to run the Spring Launch! Same program as New Year’s, but just in time to get something major accomplished before summer vacation. New classes are on creating work flow. 8 coaching calls a month.
• Mid-June through August, we slow it down and focus on cooperation in relationships. Again, 3 coaching calls a month, this time with classes focused on understanding cooperation, especially in relation to wealth goals.
• In September and October, we pick up again to run the Labor Day Launch. Same program, this time as you settle back down to work in the fall. The topic of the classes is productivity. Again, 8 coaching calls a month.
• In November and December, we focus on connection in relationships, just in time for the holidays. Back to 3 coaching calls a month. This time the classes focus on how you create a warm connection to help you resolve interpersonal conflicts.

The Need for Coaching

So how do you learn to manage your thoughts, feelings, and actions? I learned mostly by means of coaching.

When I left electrical engineering to study “psycho-epistemology,” I also started dating Harry Binswanger, who was laying the groundwork in that field at that time. (“Psycho-epistemology” is “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction of the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” —AR) In addition to his coaching, I had the privilege of getting individualized feedback from Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz as a full-time student in the Objectivist Graduate Center (OGC, 1994-1996). It is there that I learned “thinking on paper” (from Peter Schwartz in a one-on-one tutorial), which is by far the most powerful tool I know for managing thinking. It allows you to slow down the thinking process so that you can manage it.

I came out of the OGC with sufficient logical thinking skills to be able to teach them one-on-one and use them to do philosophical detection on popular books on anything related to mental skills. I learned how to introspect my emotions from books such as Mind Over Mood and When Panic Attacks. But I didn’t learn how to manage my feelings until after reading Marshall Rosenberg’s NonViolent Communication and attending workshops and training on his method. Ostensibly it is a method for better communication, but at its root, it is a tool for managing your own emotions, i.e., for calming yourself down in stressful situations. Secondarily, it is a tool for supporting other people emotionally so that they may calm down, too. To learn to manage emotions in real time in the presence of other people takes showing up for live or video events so you can practice with people.

With my cognitive and emotional skills, I figured out a lot of tactics for managing action. Some of it was learned from books like Getting Things Done and How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. But honestly, my ability to use my mind to get the results I wanted in the world didn’t truly take off until I learned about Brooke Castillo Hick’s “self-coaching model.” I learned this process almost entirely through individual and group coaching offered through her Life Coach School, and I promptly got certified myself as a coach through her school. This has radically improved my ability to help Thinking Labbers apply theory in practice — because I can do more than just teach them the theory and offer them tactics. I can coach them through the process.

There are three reasons I think coaching is critical to learning to manage your mind:

1. The Problem of Subjectivity: The way you are thinking and feeling feels natural to you. This is why you can see that your behavior is off without having a clue how you might be creating that result. A coach who is listening carefully to you can understand your context and is in a great position to help you see where a thought needs challenging or a feeling needs understanding.
2. The Problem of Vulnerability: Identifying errors in your thinking may trigger moments of self-doubt. This is an extremely vulnerable feeling, and the emotional system will often send up a defense against it. That’s a shame, because your willingness to introspect that feeling to understand concretely what values are at stake is the key to resolving the conflict. Having a coach by your side offering empathy can help you stay in that difficult moment long enough to harvest the critical information that is only available when you experience the intense emotions. A coach does this by neither minimizing nor dramatizing the painful moment. What makes me (and other coaches) good coaches is that we are on the premise of growth, so we have been through similar challenges. These moments of painful self-understanding precede every breakthrough, because they help to reveal the actual underlying conflict or contradiction that needs to be resolved.
3. The Normalization Benefit of Group Coaching: In all of these forums (OGC, NVC, and LCS), I got individual feedback plus I witnessed members of my cohort get individualized feedback. Being in the same boat with the members of my cohort helped to normalize the problems so I didn’t get too discouraged! Often it was easier to understand the logic of the processes when someone else was in the “hot seat.” That helped me test drive the processes myself and be less distressed when I had trouble. I was more likely to see a problem as something to ask my coach about than to think there was something wrong with me. A group coached by an empathic leader develops a camaraderie that helps individuals be courageous to speak up and get the coaching they need, even if that is by purchasing one-one-one coaching to supplement the group coaching.

The Thinking Lab Process for Achieving Goals

In the Thinking Lab, you learn my process for achieving goals. It builds in exactly as much introspective work as you need: If there’s no evidence of a problem, you don’t need to introspect. My process has five steps:

1. Set a rationally selfish goal.

This sounds easier than it is because emotions are not good predictors of what is in your rational self-interest. My goal-setting process includes a set of checks and balances to ensure that you have integrated reason and emotion when you set your goal.

2. Devise a doable strategy for achieving the goal that provides frequent payoffs enroute.

This is a creative problem-solving process. The usual advice to “break it up into steps” is often insufficient because it doesn’t take into account the need for motivation to keep up momentum. If your plan is a slog of 10,000 unpleasant steps with no payoff until the goal is finally achieved, you are unlikely to keep at it, or feel it was worth it if you do.

3. Initiate the planned action through self-direction, not pressure.

Too often, coaches and mentors encourage you to “just do it,” “suck it up and go.” You can get a lot done in a short time by pressuring yourself through self-discipline tactics, but over the long term you pay a steep emotional price due to the suppression that is required. I have developed a third alternative which is neither self-discipline nor self-indulgence, but rather self-direction. It is a zero-pressure process for ensuring you do follow through to take the rationally selfish action.

4. Monitor progress, thoughts, and feelings for evidence of conflicts or contradictions.

It’s not enough to just measure progress out in the world. Often more important to your long-term success is to notice what’s going on mentally. Your thoughts about the work can make it easier or harder. Your feelings about it are often your early warning indicators that you are off track. Much of coaching involves troubleshooting setbacks and failures by helping you name your thoughts and feelings and then use those as leads to get to the root cause of the difficulty. The ultimate goal of the coaching is to teach you to introspect all of those warning bells sooner rather than later. The sooner you catch the problem, the easier it is to fix.

5. Correct course, i.e., draw on self-esteem to resolve the conflicts and/or contradictions and recommit to your rationally selfish goal.

If you find a problem, you need to correct your course to avoid it, eliminate it, or overcome it. This may be emotionally challenging, especially if the root cause is a mistake you made in the past that has created conflict, difficulties, and even suffering for you in the present. To think objectively about how to proceed, you may first need to give yourself compassion. You may need to mourn a dashed expectation. You may need to draw on your inner strength. A coach can be a big help in these difficult moments, but I developed a process for this that enables you to draw on your own self-esteem in such difficult moments and take care of yourself.

(Note: my view of how you strengthen self-esteem is radically different from what I’ve seen discussed elsewhere in the Objectivist movement. I believe that anyone in the Thinking Lab has self-esteem — they just need to learn to activate that context when they feel self-doubt.)

You may notice that this process is similar to mainstream processes, such as “Decide, Plan, Do, Adjust.” Your familiarity with other goal-setting processes is not a hindrance; my process will augment your existing knowledge.

3. Legacy Self-Study Courses on Essentialization Skills

For the first 5 years of my business (1998-2003), I focused almost exclusively on teaching essentialization skills in one-on-one tutorials and small groups. I wrote two handbooks and created self-study materials for a couple of dozen lessons. Around 2011, I developed a non-fiction writing process and gave a course on that.

This material has a lot of value in it, though all of it needs updating based on my current understanding. I will get to that someday. In the meantime, I make the legacy versions of this material available for those with intellectual goals. These processes can speed up your learning curve tremendously, and of course, you can get coaching on any of them.

The written references are:

• The Condensation Handbook, 95 pages. (How to reverse outline an article)
• The Definitions Handbook, 168 pages. (How to define terms, based on Harry Binswanger’s methodology)
• A Non-Fiction Writing Handbook, 40 pages. (A 15-step process plus recommended readings)

The coursework is:

• Condensation: 1-audio introduction plus 6 lessons with detailed answers
  • Reading assignments from The Condensation Handbook
  • 4 assignments are subheads of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR)
  • 2 assignments are chapters in The Ayn Rand Column
  • My rough answers to most sections of OPAR are also available upon request
• Concretization: 3-audio introduction plus 4 lessons with detailed answers
  • Reading assignments from The Definitions Handbook
  • Assignments are for the concepts: dishonesty, dependence, justice, and altruism
• Definitions: 1-audio introduction plus 8 lessons with detailed answers
  • Reading assignments from The Definitions Handbook
  • Assignments are for 8 common concepts ranging in difficulty from “fork” to “argument”
  • Assignments also include multiple choice drills for clarifying key terms and distinctions, such as “genus,” “ultimate genera,” “specific vs. concrete,” and others
• Non-Fiction Writing: 10-audio course
  • 10 audio lessons with 2 assignments (approximately 8 hours of material)
  • 4 bonus audios

Do you need to be serious about Objectivism to join?

You do not need to be a die-hard Objectivist to learn from, feel welcome in, and enjoy the community in the Thinking Lab. But you do need some philosophical alignment with Objectivism, which is why I market to Ayn Rand fans rather than a general audience. The key areas of agreement needed are:

• You are pro-reason and rationality (as opposed to mystical or emotionalist)
• You believe in free will and that morality is important
• You believe that rational selfishness is the key to happiness
• You want reason-emotion harmony in your life

You should know that I am a die-hard Objectivist. I am known to “geek out” in discussing how my understanding of psychology integrates with the principles of Ayn Rand’s theory of concept formation and her principles of ethics. Also, a number of people have become more convinced about Objectivism after working with me and seeing how the philosophy guides you to happiness.

I have more questions. How do I get them answered?

Email me at: jm@thinkingdirections.com or if you are pretty serious about joining, request an introductory consult with me in the form below.