Create Self-Awareness in Critical Psychological Skills

We have spent years studying what it takes to be successful across a wide range of performance domains: The Mental Toughness of the professional athlete. The Intellectual Curiosity and Drive for Achievement of the successful entrepreneur. The Confidence and Emotional Intelligence of the high performing executive. Through our research spanning thousands of corporations, sports teams, start-ups, and other organizations; we have found 4 psychological skills areas that, if developed over time, will have a profound impact on professional performance and career growth:

  • Mental Toughness: persisting through obstacles, resilience, controlling emotions, tolerating stress, & maintaining confidence
  • Emotional Intelligence: being empathic, managing the emotions of others, influencing and persuading, being self-aware
  • Intellectual Curiosity: exploring the possibilities, ideation, inquisitiveness, social curiosity, having to know
  • Drive: self-discipline, taking initiative, work ethic, competitiveness

While not everyone starts at the same developmental point with respect to these skills, we now know that each can and should be consciously developed in professionals across performance domains. Through our skills development program, participants not only develop their own capacity in these areas, but they can also train to use psychological principles to develop these skills in others as current and future coaches, mentors, and leaders.

Participants complete the Psychological Skills Profile (PSP), a psychometric assessment that assesses 17 personality facets as they relate to the 4 psychological skill areas. Upon completion of the assessment, participants receive detailed reporting of their unique personality dynamics, motivational factors, perceptions, and behavioral tendencies within the context of the 4 psychological skills. Each participant’s customized report provides interpretation of strengths and vulnerabilities, likely behaviors/reactions in various performance contexts, as well as detailed development recommendations to begin to close gaps in key areas.

Become Certified

As a next step, partners can become certified in applying Cognitive Behavioral Techniques (CBT) to support psychological skill development in the professionals that they coach (Executive Coaching Track), organizations that they lead (Talent Management Track), students that they teach (Business School Track), or athletes that they support (Sports Track). Upon completion of the PSP and receipt of customized reporting, participants schedule two coaching and feedback sessions with an AWS consultant. During these sessions, the participant and consultant review participant’s results in detail, conduct in-depth analysis of trait combinations, consider the implications, and then create a personalized development plan reflective of the participant’s results and career goals.

Participants then engage 16 to 20 hours of a self-directed curriculum. Curricula vary depending on track. All tracks require the completion of learning modules focused on interpreting, providing feedback on, and applying the PSP assessment. All tracks also require the completion of learning modules focused on applying CBT-based coaching techniques. From there, learning modules in each track reflects the specialized needs of professionals in that particular area.

Collaborate with the Academic Community

With your certification, you join a network of specialists with expertise in such diverse talent management and human capital areas as coaching, human capital analytics, industrial psychology, employee selection, training, change management, and leadership development. This allows you to both expand the offerings you provide your clients, as well as providing you opportunity to be part of other larger collaborations.

Close the Scientist-Practitioner Gap

At the core of AWS’s mission is a passion to close the gap between breakthrough findings in psychological science and what is applied in many performance domains; including business, education, and sports. Therefore, you will find that a focus on applied science drives all of AWS’s offerings: The psychometric properties of the PSP; the meta-cognitive techniques we teach through the CBT-based coaching; our methods to quantifiably link talent management and development to critical business outcomes and ROI; the techniques we teach in creating compelling proposals for interventions; our approach to stimulating intellectual curiosity; as well as the extensive organizational research that was involved in the development of AWS psychological skills model. It is our goal through all our offerings to leverage psychological science to connect performance, educational outcomes, career growth, team success, and business results.