"Almost all ideas are wrong, so tackle them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive."
— Jordan B. Peterson
This course complements the Skill Course. It targets the contents of your mind by helping you to critically examine and further develop a self-created belief system and an achieved identity structure. These courses challenge whatever you take for true and it allows you to replace weak and unsupported opinions by more solid, better supported, and more realistic opinions. The Thought Course is based on multiple year experience with courses of the University College Groningen. Students of these course gave many testimonials (and here and here )
Owning your opinions
Your opinions are yours so the aim of the course is not to replace your opinions with some other set of (preferred or "correct") opinions. That would be indoctrination: "the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically". Media and and universities are pretty good at that.
The purpose of the Thought Course is quite the opposite: namely to identify those beliefs you have accepted and internalized although you cannot sufficiently support or defend them and upgrade or replace these with better supported, more defendable, and more realistic variants. Variants that you have consciously decided on as of sufficient quality to base your future on.
Your opinions are yours. Yes. But are they yours because you adopted them after critical evaluation, or because you adopted them simply by default? The difference is huge and many people are unaware of this difference when they defend them.
Challenging your opinions is unsettling
Challenging your opinions is an unsettling process. Especially challenging your core beliefs — beliefs you identify with — leads to feelings of lost control that last as long as your weak opinions are not replaced by stronger and more supported ones. When you find that many of your core beliefs are weak and baseless, you might feel quite shaken, uncertain, and even lost. You also feel an urge to do something about it. Actually you have two choices: to engage the confrontation or to postpone the confrontation. If you expect to you would rather postpone the confrontation this course is not for you.
This "crisis" is as unpleasant and stimulating as it is normal: many people have such periods in life — usually unplanned — when they are developing their achieved identity. Like most crises, this is above all a period of change and (potential) growth, and necessary to free you from the weaker aspects of your worldview (which might be substantial).
By substituting the weak or unfounded opinions and beliefs by stronger and more supported ones, you build a new and more solid foundation as a basis for life-long self-improvement.
Constructing your own belief set is empowering
The updated belief-set is self-created and hence you understand it more fully and deeply. Challenging your beliefs is uncomfortable and you need to explore new perspectives, thus you enlarge your comfort zone. And the combination of deepened understanding, a larger comfort zone, and more realistic beliefs provides you with a solid basis for life-long (self-)confidence.
The habit of continually challenging your beliefs and replacing them with ever-higher quality variants — what you might refer to as mental self-care — ensures the continual and steady improvement of your belief-set. With that you improve the basis on which you decide to act in the world. Gradually your expectation become more realistic and the outcomes of your behaviors become less random and more in accordance with your intentions. And this brings more of your life under your influence.
This is why constructing your own belief set is so empowering: it changes the world from a place where random outcomes are the norm, to a place where your actions tend to contribute to quality of life for you and all you care for.
How does it work?
Each session is starts with a homework assignment about videos or podcasts in which topics and viewpoints are addressed that might bring you outside of your comfort zone. Depending on the shape of you comfort zone and the selected topics you may end up more or less in your comfort zone. The topics and viewpoints are always conveyed by knowledgeable individuals, so you will not waste your time on superficial crap or obviously wrong viewpoints and information. But that does not entail that the viewpoints are correct (and the same holds for your’s). The homework assignment is usually twofold: 1) say something "profound" about the topic using the insights and viewpoints provided and 2) observe and report your emotions and attitudes (like approach or avoidance) while doing so.
You can easily loose yourself in the background research to make sense of and to understand each of these topics. All are interesting and complex. So you need to find a balance. In general, if everyone is prepared and does some background research, the ensuing in-class discussion will bring up many useful and insightful viewpoints. The in-class discussions are not intended to lead to conclusions or closure. Quite the opposite, they aim to activate well-supported viewpoints. It it your task to integrate whatever you find strong enough in your world view.
For example, one topic might be "trust in authorities". This might lead to the question of "Under what conditions can/will you trust the words of a government, multinational, or bureaucracy?" Answering this question is not an isolated activity, since a truly accepted answer has consequences on how you process information from authorities in future assignments, or even better, in daily life.
All weekly issues & topics build on each other and form an updated network of mutually influencing knowledge, skills, strategies, et cetera. Importantly you are now more aware of why you harbor your opinions, what well-supported diversity exists, and why you use the strategies and values you employ (in contrast to those you do not employ) to approach it.
Steelmanning
A very useful outcome of each topic is the ability to formulate opposing viewpoints, especially those opposed to your own, with the strongest and most respectful formulation possible. This is called "steelmanning". It is opposed to a strawman argument, in which someone firstly formulates the opponent’s position in a feeble or flawed way and secondly attacks this "strawman". Journalists do this often and and it leads to intellectually empty debates and wasted time of viewers or readers. In contrast, steelmanning involves a respectful approach of an opponent’s position and it elevates any discussion to a discussion about essences and mutual understanding.
Since true intellectual opponents are not idiots, their positions are not made from "straw", but well-informed and well-reasoned. Steelmanning is therefore a great way to dispel your own unrealistic ideas about the ("wrong") opinions of others and to make their perspectives and insights available to you.