The Extraordinary Self®
8 Key Abilities for Your Extraordinary Future
Transformation Program
The whole system, from the inside out
Over fifteen years of research and teaching, we found that people who keep growing and keep feeling good about themselves, whatever life brings, share eight abilities. Those abilities can be learned.
This course teaches all eight, in the order that makes each one easier to learn than the last. It begins with your sense of your own worth, because everything else stands on that, and it ends with the relationships and the goals that a steady sense of worth makes possible.
This is the core Extraordinary Self course. Each of our other six courses takes one part of it and goes deeper: stress, self-talk, self-confidence, self-defeating patterns, emotional resilience, and, for Key Ability 8, Win/Win relationships, the relationship course that goes with the book, Toward an Extraordinary Relationship by Dr. Diane Ernstoff Kramer. If you want the whole set of changes for yourself, start here.
What you will be able to do
By mastering this course you will feel good about yourself most of the time, whatever the day brings, because your sense of your own worth no longer depends on how the day went. The voice in your head will be on your side more often than against you.
You will handle stress and strong feelings without being run by them, make decisions you trust, hold your own in relationships without giving yourself away, and reach goals that used to stay on the list.
Most people who finish tell us the biggest change is in how they feel about themselves, and everything else follows from that.
Who this course is for
This course is for you if you want the whole picture rather than help with one problem. It is for you if you have read the self-help books, understood them, and still find the same old patterns running your days.
It is also for you if several things are hard at once, your confidence, your stress, a relationship, a goal you keep not reaching, and you suspect they are connected. They are, and this course works on the connection.
What you will learn
To build a steady sense of your own worth, so that you feel okay about yourself even on a day when things go badly. To find your Limiting Beliefs, the old conclusions about yourself that you have carried since childhood, and replace them with Liberating Beliefs: “I am okay, and I can learn to ___.”
To recognize your self-defeating patterns and what they protect you from. To turn your Inner Judge, the voice in your head that criticizes you, into an Inner Coach, a voice that tells you the truth, helps you to learn and grow and is on your side.
To find your mission and your vision, the life you actually want. To set breakthrough goals and action plans, and to keep learning your way toward them one next step at a time. To take full responsibility for your own part, and to build relationships in which both people win.
How the course works
The course is self-paced and online, and you can use it on a computer, a tablet, or a phone. You start when you like, stop when you like, and pick up where you left off.
Every lesson has the same shape. It tells you what you will learn. It teaches one thing, with real people and real conversations. It asks you to write, in your own private journal. You listen to a guided audio visualization, which is where the new response gets practiced in your body, not only understood in your head.
Then the lesson sends you back into your life with an Action Goal: one thing to do before you return. When you come back, the next lesson asks how it went. That is how what you learn on the screen turns into what you do in your kitchen, your office, and your own head.
Most lessons take about an hour, and most people do one or two a week. (Confirm.)
What the lessons cover
- Where you stand now: assessing your eight key abilities
- Tool 1: 4-2-4-2 breathing
- Tool 2: from Limiting Beliefs to Liberating Beliefs
- Key Ability 1: unshakeable self-worth
5 and 6. Key Ability 2: self-defeating patterns, and how to change them
7 and 8. Key Ability 3: the Inner Judge and the parts of you that get in your way
9 and 10. Key Ability 4: your mission and your vision
11, 12, and 13. Key Ability 5: breakthrough goals and action plans
- Key Ability 6: next-step learning, so that you keep growing
- Key Ability 7: taking 100% responsibility for your part
- Key Ability 8: Win/Win relationships
- Putting the eight abilities together
What is inside
Seventeen lessons, 253 interactive screens, and seventeen guided audio visualizations, with real-life examples, practice exercises, and workbook pages. An Action Goal at the end of every lesson and an accountability check at the start of the next. Available any time, on any device.
Every course also includes your own Blueprint for Change, a private online journal that only you can see, workbook pages, learning checks and feedback as you go, and the e-book Become Your Own Superhero with Liberating Beliefs.
Live group support
Every learner is welcome in our private Facebook group, Toward an Extraordinary Relationship, open to readers of the book and to everyone enrolled in an Extraordinary Self course.
Each week has one theme and one short question a day, and you can bring your own situation any time. Dr. Diane reads everything and answers most days. Lorraine, who moderates the group, has done this work herself and will be in the conversation with you.
About Dr. Diane
Dr. Diane Ernstoff Kramer, Ph.D., is a psychologist and marriage counselor with fifty years of practice, Professor Emeritus in the State University of New York system, and the founder of Extraordinary Self Programs. She is the author of Toward an Extraordinary Relationship.
She and her late husband Fred built the learning platform these courses run on with the help of Donna Anselmo, Rachel Hazan and Grant Larimer. Dr. Diane wrote the courses herself. They draw on her fifty years of practice, on psychological research, and on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the study of how people who do something well actually do it, so that others can learn it).
Our guarantee
If the course is not what you need, we want to know, and we will make it right. Every course is covered by our satisfaction guarantee; see the Satisfaction Guarantee page for details.
Eight courses in one. Most people who finish it say the change is in how they feel about themselves, and everything else follows from that.
