Clear Course #2: A Clear New Year

A new six-week course starting Monday, 4th December 2017

Charles Davies
HOW TO BE CLEAR
7 min readNov 6, 2017

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(Hi. This course sold out, but you can book your place on the next one here. Thanks. C)

If you read the ‘Invitation to a course in being clear’ that I posted here a few weeks back, you’ll know I was very excited about the idea of setting up an online course where I could teach a small group everything I know about clarity.

Happily, the excitable idea turned into a real thing — and a tribe of twelve has convened to get clear together and learn how to have very clear ideas, how to make clear deals — and how to clear the way for their creative work.

If you’d like to join the next group of twelve, you can sign up here for the still-very-reasonable introductory price of £200.

It’s going to be the same format as the first course — a weekly group call, a private Facebook group and everything-else-I-can-think-of-that-might-be-helpful (including Very Clear Ideas cards and Identity Yoga cards sent to your front door).

This time, though, the course will be in two halves.

The first half — 4th, 11th, 18th December — will focus on teaching the key processes for working with ideas, identity and initiative.

The second half — 8th, 15th, 22nd January — will be dedicated to ensuring that the coming year is as clear as can be.

If you’d like to sign up, book your place here.

(And if you need to pay by instalments, email me and we’ll make alternative arrangements.)

A clear morning. Carn Brea, Cornwall.

And the rest of the details…

Here’s what the course looks like:

  • It’ll be an online course, so you can join wherever you live. (I live in Cornwall.)
  • It’ll last six weeks. (Starting on Monday, 4th December 2017.)
  • There’ll be a group call once a week. (90 mins, Monday evenings, recorded if you can’t make it).
  • There’ll be a ‘half-term’ break for Christmas and New Year.
  • There’ll be a closed Facebook group for keeping in touch between calls.
  • There’ll be emails and videos and other things to nudge and encourage along the way.
  • It’ll cost £200 (you can pay upfront or in instalments). And there’ll be an option to ‘tip’ if you want to pay more.

There are three things I’ll definitely teach as part of the course:

Very Clear Ideas — a systematic approach to making any idea clearer
Identity Yoga — a very quick way to clear creative blocks
Initiative Mapping — a simple way to keep track of how people work together

Six weeks is long enough to build new habits.
A group of twelve is small enough that we can get to know each other along the way.

Learn how to be clear. And actually use it.

If you’ve never used Very Clear Ideas or the other tools, you can join this course as a way to learn them.
If you’ve already mastered them (or you’ve been on a retreat / come to a workshop / helped me develop them), then you can join this course to get some friendly support with whatever you want to get clear on this month.

And by the end of the course…

There’ll be a dozen masters of clarity. Who can call on each other for support. Who have a shared language and a shared understanding of what it means to be clear.

You’ll be able to sum up any idea in a sentence.
Able to dissolve any creative block.
Able to get and give the help that’s needed.

You’ll know what being clear means — and you’ll feel it. With a new practice that you can bring to your everyday life and get better and better at.

And, maybe most of all, it will have been all kinds of fun. And joyful and moving and simple and clear and hefty and effortless.

There are twelve places.

Twelve packs of Very Clear Ideas cards ready to post.

On the process of getting clear

“I went through this process with Charlie some years back. To get clear about what I was here on earth to do. Whichever way we looked at it, the answer was Zen Master. Now I am a Zen Master. So that was a pretty Clear Idea.”
Kashyapi — Poet, Contemplative

“Not only can I say you will get clear — it’ll be fun too… If it calls to you — just do it.”
Elizabeth Lovius, Executive Coach

“Charlie is the alarm cord I pull when my own head gets too confusing. He cuts through the babble to see what’s going on like no-one else can. Charlie should come with a health warning as this can be highly-disruptive (and much needed) work.”
Kathryn Sheridan — Founder and CEO, Sustainability Consult

“With an intense work schedule and a myriad of projects and tasks to manage it can be difficult to stay focused on what it is that makes the work meaningful and rewarding. I attended the workshop in the hope that I would find a better way to understand what is authentically motivating for me in work and how to connect my day to day activities to this source. I wasn’t disappointed!

The workshop structure and delivery were excellent. I came away from the day with a clear and easy to use process to explore and test what it is that motivates a person (be it myself or someone I am trying to help). In the interval since the workshop I have successfully used the process to understand myself and my motivations better. I have also shared the process with a number of other people, and without exception they have found it easy to use and insightful.’’
Professor John D. Kelleher — Dublin Institute of Technology

“A great experience that brought clarity to what I was trying to do with my start-up. I continue to use the output of our session to guide what I do…. highly valuable.”
Richard Eason — Founder, Cyclefox

“Coaching at its finest and most transformational.”
Karen Gartside — Reteam Ltd, Chicago

“An unforgettable talk. Short but so powerful. Very, VERY, insightful. It was a talk where almost every word made sense, was valuable. Even the silence.”
Titia Bruning — Knowmads Business School, Amsterdam

“I’m not even sure what Charles said or what I said, but what I do know is this. I messaged Charles later that night with the following: “All I know is that everything from here is going to be OK.”
Chris Drummond — Founder, Crafted Crate

The sign-up page is here — or scroll down for the reading list…

Handy reminder at London Waterloo. November 2017

And some clear reading, to be getting on with…

“When I teach people to be clear, I teach the basics. And then we practice. And then we share the tips and tricks we learn along the way.”

“I believe there are three things… I don’t mean three handy tips for success — yadda, yadda, yadda — I mean there are three actual, fundamental, necessary components to any creative process.”

“We have to understand the creative processes of nature as a whole — rather than limiting ourselves to the specific culture of work in human society in our lifetime.”

“You change your life when you take the initiative. It’s like changing tracks. It’s opening up a brand new path. Plugging into something new… it’s important to end initiatives too. To notice when they’re done and wrap them up and close them down and let them go unambiguously.”

“…And it’s all very simple. But this little bit of structure — of helper and helped — is the underlying code for collaboration. Even with chains of hundreds of people. Even with hugely complicated projects. You can build an infinitely vast family tree of helpers just using this simple question of who is helping who…”

“In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true… And if, having taken it, I can look back and say — in that moment I was true to myself and to the world I was in — then there is no space for regret. Because what more can we ask of ourselves than that — in one moment — we might manage to stay true to ourselves and the world we are in?”

“But the essence of work is this: as creative, alive, human beings we have the capacity to see things that don’t exist yet and then bring them into the world. Work is creation.”

And if you haven’t done so already, you can go here to book your place:
http://www.charlesdavies.com/shop/clear-new-year

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