What you would actually be doing.
A step-by-step procedure for examining the assumptions a decision is already resting on, practised until it holds up in a difficult hour. Its technical name is deconstructive mental analysis. A worked example is set out below.
To make the activity of the mind visible while it is happening.
Not afterwards, in the reconstruction — where the mind has already tidied the sequence into a story about a decision that was, on reflection, obviously correct.
Most training aimed at judgment works on content: frameworks, checklists, catalogues of bias. Content is useful and it is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that the apparatus generating the judgment is invisible to the person using it at the moment they are using it, and becomes visible only later, when the decision has already been made and defended.
The method has one aim: to shorten that delay, until the noticing happens inside the conversation, while it is still running. What follows is the sequence by which that is trained, what it develops, where it comes from, and what is measured — with the limits of each measurement set out beside it.
Four movements, run in order — and the order is not decorative.
Each movement is defined, repeatable and documented, and each one ends somewhere you can use it. Nothing is asked of the participant beyond honest observation, which turns out to be a great deal.
Baseline & mapping
Before any work begins, a long intake conversation documents the terrain in your own words: the conversation you keep re-running, the decisions that reliably stall, the hour of the day when the sharpness arrives, and the load you are carrying at the moment. Validated research instruments are administered before the first teaching session, so that the starting position is recorded rather than remembered.
This matters more than it sounds. Memory of one's own mental state is reconstructive and flattering. Six weeks into work of this kind, almost everyone reports having been worse at the beginning than they actually were — which feels like progress and is an artefact. A written baseline is the only defence against that, and it is also the only thing that makes the closing measurement mean anything at all.
Mapping is also where we establish what the participant actually wants, which is frequently not what the application said. That conversation belongs at the start, before anyone has invested in a version of the answer.
Deconstruction
This is the core of the method and the part that cannot be hurried. Guided analysis takes a specific, live assumption — not a belief held in the abstract, but one that is currently organising the participant's experience — and examines it directly: what it asserts, what it is built from, and whether the thing it refers to is findable when it is actually looked for.
The work is first-person and empirical in the ordinary sense of the word: the participant looks, and reports what is found. Nothing is taken on assertion, including anything we say. An assumption that survives inspection is left alone. Many of the assumptions that generate internal conflict do not survive it, and what changes then is the authority the thought carries.
This movement is absorbing for some people and unremarkable for others, and which one it will be is hard to predict in advance. That is one of the reasons the work is done in small numbers, with a named instructor, and with someone to talk to between sessions.
Stabilisation
An insight that occurs once, in a quiet room, under favourable conditions, is not yet a capability. Stabilisation is the unglamorous majority of the work: training attention to hold its position while conditions push against it — fatigue, time pressure, hostility, public exposure, and the particular pressure of being watched by people whose opinion is materially expensive.
The practices here are ordinary and repetitive, and at some point the participant will find them boring. That is expected and it is part of the design. Attentional stability is a substrate: without it, the observation trained in the second movement is available only under easy conditions, which is precisely where nobody needs it.
Progress in this movement is measured rather than felt. Self-report about one's own attention is unreliable in both directions — people in the middle of real gains often report none — which is why the instruments are administered again at the end.
Integration
The practice is applied to actual decisions, actual people and actual consequences: the board meeting already in the calendar, the person who has to be let go, the position that has become a matter of pride. Structured transfer work runs alongside the rest of the programme from the second week onwards.
This is the movement most short formats leave out, and it is the one that decides whether any of it reaches your Tuesday. Improvements on laboratory attention tasks have not been shown to transfer to working life, so the transfer is worked on directly, in scheduled hours, against decisions with dates on them.
It is also where the practice earns its place: a difficult conversation in which it is available while the conversation is still running, rather than an hour afterwards.
One worked example, start to finish.
Everything above describes the procedure. Here it is being run, on the kind of ninety seconds that goes on to cost a week.
This is a teaching example, written for this page and used in session. No participant's material appears anywhere on this site.
The situation
Two days before a launch, with four other people in the room, a senior engineer asks to move the date by three weeks. The participant says something even-tempered, the meeting ends, and the exchange runs on inside his head until about one in the morning.
The fact, written down
The teacher asks one question: what would a camera have recorded? The participant writes the answer as a single sentence, in his own hand, containing only what the camera caught.
“At 16:40 on Thursday, in front of four colleagues, R asked to move the launch to the 29th.”
The interpretation, written down beside it
Second question: and what did you add? It is written in the words it actually arrived in, before it has been tidied into something more reasonable.
“He is undermining my position in front of the team.”
The join
Third question: at which word did the second sentence enter? People expect this to be vague. It is usually a specific detail, and it is usually findable.
Here it is “in front of four colleagues”. Take the audience out and the request is a scheduling question. Put the audience back and it becomes a question about standing. That is the moment a request to delay a decision turned into a threat to status, and that moment is the object of the work.
Both sentences held apart, and tested
Fourth question: what else is that same fact consistent with? Three answers are written, even where the first one already feels correct — a supplier date that slipped, a test that failed on Tuesday, a person who has been carrying a concern for a fortnight and chose a poor moment to raise it.
The interpretation is not argued with and it is not talked away. It is held next to the fact for long enough that both can be checked. That holding is the trained part.
What is said next
Fifth question: what is the one question that would test it, and can you ask it before you reply?
“What are you seeing that makes three weeks the number?” It takes four seconds to say. The whole of the training lives in those four seconds, and in whether the sentence that follows tests the reading or defends the position.
Five questions, in this order, every time.
This is the extract every participant is given in week one, on one side of paper. It is worked in writing at first, out loud in session by the middle of the programme, and silently inside a live meeting by the end. The questions themselves do not change.
What happened, in words a camera could have recorded? One sentence: time, place, who was present, what was said.
What did I add? In the words it arrived in, before it is tidied.
At which word did the addition enter? Name the specific detail that carried it.
What else is the same fact consistent with? Three answers, in writing, even when the first one feels settled.
What is the one question that would test it — and can I ask it before I reply?
Fifteen minutes a day, and what the sessions do with it.
The daily practice is short, written and always the same shape. The sessions are where a teacher reads what you wrote and finds the place you stopped early.
The sequence below is the eight-week individual programme. The six-week cohort runs the same shape in twelve live sessions, and the institutional programme runs it across a group.
What fifteen minutes looks like
Three minutes placing attention on one object and holding it there, with no analysis of any kind. Seven minutes running the five questions in writing, on one live item from that day. Three minutes holding the fact on its own, with the interpretation set to one side, watching what the body does when there is nothing to defend. Two minutes writing the sentence you intend to say, and when you intend to say it.
It starts at fifteen minutes and lengthens through the programme. It is done at a desk, with a pen, and it is expected to be dull by the third week. Dullness is a good sign and it is discussed in session.
Session one
The instruments are already completed, so no time is spent on them. The session collects raw material: three recent moments where a conversation carried on inside your head after it had ended. Nothing is analysed yet. You leave with the worksheet, one instruction, and the first sitting in the calendar.
Session five
By now the fact and the interpretation are separated in writing before the session starts, and the session opens with the teacher reading what you wrote. His job has changed: the split is no longer being taught, it is being audited. The common finding at this point is question three — the join named too generally, which is the exact place the examination stops being useful.
The mid-point review
At the end of week four the work stops for one scheduled session that examines the work itself, against what you said you came for in week one. It is written down, both of you sign it, and it names what has moved, what has not, and what changes for the second half. What happens when nothing has moved is set out on the Programmes page, in the fee terms.
The last session
No new material. One decision from your calendar that has not happened yet is taken through the procedure out loud, at speed, with the teacher interrupting. Then the closing instruments, the written review, and the two follow-up contacts put in the diary at one week and one month.
What the written review contains
Two pages, under four headings: what you brought, where the procedure held, where it stopped, and what to run on your own for the next ninety days. Your scores from both ends of the programme sit beside it with an interpretation, including where nothing moved.
It is written by the teacher who taught you, it belongs to you, and no copy goes to anyone else. Where an organisation is paying, the organisation does not see it.
Four things it trains, in ordinary words.
Everything in the programmes develops one of four capacities. Each is described here as it is used in a working week, with the name the research literature gives it and the instrument that measures it — including where that measurement is weaker than the field usually admits.
Attentional stability
Putting attention where you intend and keeping it there while conditions push against it — the fourth hour of a hard day, the third version of the same argument, the meeting you are chairing while something else is going wrong. In the literature this sits with sustained and executive attention, and it is the capacity with the clearest support behind it: the best available meta-analysis puts the effect of attention training at roughly a quarter of a standard deviation — Hedges' g ≈ 0.29 (Verhaeghen, 2021, Mindfulness).
That effect is real, replicated and modest, and it is measured on laboratory attention tasks rather than in meetings. This capacity is the substrate: the other three are only reachable under working conditions once this one is in place, which is why the daily sittings are short, unglamorous and every day.
Meta-awareness
Noticing that you are thinking, while you are thinking — the difference between being inside the argument you are having with an absent person and seeing that it is running. In the research literature this is studied as decentering, and it is measured with the Experiences Questionnaire.
It is the capacity most often used outside working hours, on the meeting that will keep running unless something interrupts it, and it is trained by repetition. On the measurement: the instrument is validated as an instrument, which establishes that the thing can be measured consistently rather than that it causes anything downstream. We work with it on that basis.
Cognitive defusion
Holding a thought as a thought rather than as a fact about the world. The distance between “this project is failing” and “I am having the thought that this project is failing” is small in words and very large in a room where a decision is being made. This is the one used at the moment a fact turns into a threat. The construct the literature uses is cognitive fusion, measured with the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire.
It is the capacity that appears soonest and is the hardest to keep. Under load, thought re-fuses with fact quickly and without announcing that it has done so, which is why it is trained through repetition on live material.
Flexibility under load
Updating when the situation changes — including, and especially, when updating is expensive to your position, your reputation or your self-image. This is the one that operates on the moment a decision turns into defence of a position you have already announced. The research construct is psychological flexibility.
It is also the capacity with the weakest measurement behind it. The field's standard instrument, the AAQ-II, has documented discriminant-validity problems — it tracks general distress more closely than it tracks the thing it is meant to measure (Wolgast, 2014, Behavior Therapy 45(6), 831–839; Tyndall et al., 2018, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science 12, 278–284) — so we report it as a distress index rather than as a flexibility score.
It is a practice, not a syllabus.
There is no curriculum to get through, and what you are buying is not more information. The work is with attention itself — noticing what it is doing, while it is doing it — which is why the programmes are built around practice and observation, and why the shortest description of the method is two words: look at that.
The work is with the instrument, not with more information.
These methods did not originate in a laboratory.
They come from contemplative traditions that spent centuries doing one thing with unusual rigour: investigating how attention constructs experience.
The closest relatives of what we teach are the non-dual lineages — Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism — traditions distinguished by their focus on direct investigation of awareness rather than on belief or ritual. We name them because that is where the method comes from, and because naming it is the only honest option available.
Over the last three decades, cognitive science has independently operationalised much of what those traditions described, under names such as decentering, meta-awareness, cognitive fusion and self-referential processing. We work in that overlap, and we teach in the second vocabulary because it is the one that can be checked.
The origin is named because it is the accurate answer to a fair question, and because a method whose sources you can go and read is easier to argue with.
What we have removed is everything that does not survive translation: the metaphysics, the belief commitments, the vocabulary of attainment, and the social apparatus that surrounds a tradition. What remains is a training method, taught as a training method, by a company you are paying. Nothing here requires you to accept a claim about the nature of reality, and nothing here is improved by your believing one.
What we measure, and what the measurements are worth.
Instruments are administered before the programme and again at the end. Results go to the participant with an interpretation, including where nothing changed. Completion is voluntary and does not affect a place.
| Instrument | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Experiences Questionnaire | Decentering — observing a thought as an event in the mind, and holding it there while it is examined. |
| Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire | Fusion with thought content — the degree to which a thought is taken as a description of the world. |
| Mindful Attention Awareness Scale | Dispositional attentional awareness in everyday activity. |
| Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II | Psychological inflexibility — reported by us as a distress index, for the reason given below. |
| Perceived Stress Scale | Subjective stress load. Collected for the participant's own report; never published by us as an outcome. |
| Sustained-attention task | Performance under sustained attentional demand — with the trade-off described below. |
Two of these instruments carry documented limitations, and each limitation travels with the instrument everywhere it is named. The AAQ-II behaves substantially as a general distress measure, so we report it as a distress index. Sustained-attention tasks index a speed–accuracy trade-off as well as attentional lapse, so we report and control for that. The citations, the effect sizes and the remaining caveats are set out in full on Evidence and limits.
The method is only useful applied.
Six to twelve weeks, one to one or in a small closed cohort, ending with the practice applied to decisions you are already carrying. Admission to the cohort and the individual programme is by application and a conversation with a member of the teaching team; an institutional engagement begins with a scoping conversation instead.