Learn How You Can Help Your Children Develop Thinking & Problem Solving Skills Through Daily Activities

There are effective meaningful ways to support and train children to become better thinkers and problem solvers which will lead to their academic, career, sporting and relationship success. Our job as parents is to train our children in such a way that they become effective, independent, efficient thinkers.

Understanding how children go about developing these essential thinking skills and what role parents play in that development is the subject of this seminar.

Through this 2 1/2 hour seminar, parents can expect to learn:

• how a child’s thinking skills develop
• how to support a child’s development of thinking and problem solving skills
• how important the role of the parent is
• how important mentoring and role modeling is
• how important project based learning is
• how integral good planning is in bringing it all together

Critical Thinking for Success, LLC co-founder Bob Kauffman will be leading this practical, yet powerful seminar.

Mark Your Calenders and Plan to attend Today!

Date: Monday, May 23, 2011

Time: 7PM to 9:30PM

Cost: $60/individual or $90/couple

Location: Marriott Courtyard,

800 Lake Cook Road, Deerfield, IL 60015

Space is limited,

So Register Early!

Register Here Online

To receive additional information email Cathy Kauffman at cathy@criticalthinkingforsuccess.com or call 312-388-3597.

Since CT affects Meta-Programs, All function is improved. While it can not increase the terminal velocity of the eye (250 still images a second) it does increase the efficiency at which those images are processed in both rate and detail. As a result the continued simultaneous monitoring of 4 displays containing multiple markets and order entry software became much easier. Similarly hearing improved, I was able to glean improved levels information from the ‘back ground noise’ from the floor that I heard on the headset that connected me to the floor.

The result of this was increased income in an increasingly competitive market.

Cognitive training and neurofeedback therapy can help people who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and head injuries regain functionality. They also offer a opportunity to treat ADD/ADHD without medication.

We have learned from cognitive science what the critical basic thinking skills are that allow athletes to perform at their best when they are under intense pressure. When these basic thinking skills are most efficient athletic performance improves and is maintained at a high level even during times intense pressure. We have found this to be true no matter what the athletic endeavor is. We have even been able to improve the performance of U.S. Marines when they are under the intense pressure of training and combat. You can’t get much more intense than that.

Frequently you will see highly skilled athletes have their games fall apart under the intense pressure of the game. This does not have to happen. With the proper mental training, they will be able to stay focused and perform at their highest level even in the most intense contests or games. Given the major investments that individuals, families, coaches, teams, agents and owners make it would seem wise to invest a little more into the crucial mental skills required to be the best.

At Critical Thinking of Success, we have found that we can not only improve professional athletes abilities and performance under pressure, but business people have improved their golf, tennis, other sports performances as well as they get trained cognitively in the effort to improve their business success.

Up to now coaches could only guess at how to improve these basic mental skills, but the American Institute of Learning and Cognitive Development has discovered an approach to improving thinking skills that had been developed in Australia.  We have been trained in this approach and have brought it to the United States.  We originally brought it here to improve academic and business skills, but we have found it has great application in sports.  The developer of the approach told us it had applications in sports, but we had not thought much about it until one of the partners within AILCD, after improving some of his thinking skills, cut twelve strokes off his golf game while actually playing less golf.  This woke us up to the opportunities in sports that this approach had.  Up to this date we have only worked with amateur athletes.  They all have stated that this approach has improved their games.  We have worked with a former professional baseball player who played in the major leagues for fifteen years.  We worked with him to help him reach greater goals and to be more efficient in his business.  It helped him there tremendously and he has stated that he wished he had this training when he was playing baseball as he felt it would have helped him be even better in his playing days.  In Australia, a coach trained in this approach has helped keep the Canterberry Bulldogs, a world class rugby team, at the top of their league for twenty years by continually developing “B” players into “A” players and “A players” in world class players.

The way we think can be divided into three different levels of cognition. The first level is made up of basic thinking skills or functional skills that we develop with our parents’ interaction from the time of our birth to the time we start school.  The second level of cognition is made up of procedural skills that we develop in school such as reading and writing.  These skills are dependent of the efficient development of the functional skills.  The final level of cognition is the conceptual level of thinking, where we combine ideas into concepts that gives us our beliefs about ourselves and the world.  This level of cognition is directly impacted by the efficiency of the functional skills as well. Inefficiencies in the basic thinking skills impacts our effectiveness in every facet of life, including sports.

Some of the basic thinking skills that have a direct impact on sports are shape recognition, direction and orientation, classification and categorization, environmental acuity, field discrimination, analysis and synthesis, pattern recognition, abstract sequencing, motor integration and others.  If any of these skills are inefficient, it could have a big affect on an athlete’s performance.  How well we recognize things, how well we process them, how well we strategize and how well we execute has everything to do with the efficiency or inefficiency of these basic or functional cognitive skills.

At the American Institute of Learning and Cognitive Development we have successfully been applying our approach to helping poor students become great students, businesses become far more successful and families relate far better.  We even have helped brain injured clients recover lost skills.  We are currently working with the United States Marine Corps to help them train their Marines in how to recognize and avoid roadside bombs and snipers.

We are interested in working with professional and collegiate athletes and their coaching staffs to improve performances by improving the thinking skills of their athletes.  The results will occur both on and off the field as their athletes become better critical thinkers.

There are effective alternatives. Medication merely treats the symptoms of ADD/ADHD and does resolve the problem. The medication helps relieve the symptoms for a while, but they return as the medication wears off. Medication at best is a temporary fix and we don’t know the long term effects of taking the prescribed medications over a long period of time.

Neurofeedback and cognitive training can often produce permanent changes for the persons suffering from ADD/ADHD so that they can focus and get things done with a relaxed focus and be able to get good sleep at night.

Neurofeedback is a process in which the brain is given feedback directly so that it is able make the adjustment needed in brainwave activity that will allow a person to effectively focus during the day and get good sleep at night. There are several neurofeedback softwares being used today, some are more effective than others. We have found the LENS system to be the most effective for treating ADD/ADHD as well as for treating traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Cognitive training is a series of brain exercises that build efficient new pathways in the brain and is very helpful in increasing a persons ability to stay focused and complete tasks effectively. People are taught to become very competent critical thinkers that includes the integration of their emotions with their thought processes.

In combination these two approaches can be very powerful in the treatment of ADD/ADHD as well as brain related problems

Reclaiming our lost potential through neurofeedback can return us to a world of new possibilities. It won’t make us smarter, faster or better than we are physically or genetically capable of being but neurofeedback has helped many people bring back their best selves.
Often when people experience the benefits of neurofeedback training they feel a sense of becoming their “old self”—reclaiming their peak potential and capabilities they have previously experienced. Successful training seems to help our brain and nervous system regain equilibrium to better balance and control itself. The results are indisputable.

In neurological functioning, a minor change can make profound differences in our daily experience. When stress, other outside factors or biologically-based mechanisms disturb our nervous system’s equilibrium, neurofeedback training can trigger our brains own ability to rebalance and may be experienced as a reversal of the effects of stress.

When used as an educational tool for neuro re-education, our central nervous system learns to redefine our reactions to stress. The extent of our neurological over and under reactions is reduced, which helps us to be more discerning and return to functioning at our best.
We, at the American Institute of Learning & Cognitive Development, use neurofeedback as one of our core instruments to help clients function better in life.

We believe it is in the minds of key employees. Are your key employees cutting edge leaders, thinkers and strategists developing and introducing new, profitable products and ideas each day? Or, are they following the same business methods day in and day out?
Competition gets tougher every day.
In this intense new global market, some experts believe the ultimate performance frontier is the efficiency of the human mind itself. Simply put, the leaders with sharper, smarter, more innovative thinking will be the ones who win.
Today, no one can afford to underutilize their employees’ minds.

Personal Effectiveness

At The American Institute of Learning, we help high-functioning business leaders identify and leap beyond their current performance limits to become more cognitively nimble. Once trained in functional cognition, they make faster, better decisions with much less stress.

What is Functional Cognition?

Most people don’t think about their thinking. And those who do usually focus on WHAT they think rather than HOW they go about thinking.
Yet we all possess unconscious mental templates, and we rely on them to filter our experiences and derive our decisions. These templates (and the skills to manipulate them) are the underpinning of functional cognition.

…and why does it matter?

Functional cognition is developed indirectly in early life through modeling and experiential learning. Foundational skills like motor integration, spatial awareness and analysis & synthesis become the basic building blocks we need to succeed as adults – at the office, at home and in the gym.
When cognitive skills are inefficient, performance problems and undue stress result. The AILCD offers proven methods to increase cognitive efficiency using clearly different methods of managing thinking and performance.
Individuals who maximize their cognitive efficiency are better able to:

• bypass old thinking patterns and find new, efficient mental pathways,
• access and apply prior learning,
• boost mental capacity and attain breakthrough performance, and
• undertake new learning and experiences with curiosity rather than dread

The Impact of Cognitive Training

Powerful. Relevant. Fast. This is what AILCD clients say about the experience of cognitive coaching. “I accomplish what I HAVE to do in much less time so I have more time to do what I WANT to do.” “I no longer have to worry about what I should or could have said in a conversation or meeting.” “This work is transformational.”
After a few weeks of training, our clients’ performance issues begin to fade, and they begin to achieve functional breakthroughs that other people notice and commend.
Cognitive coaching makes a difference in three areas:
Professional Achievement

Clients are more efficient at work. They spend less and less time on day-to-day administration as they efficiently accomplish it in much less time. They have a renewed interest and excitement in their work. Stress and procrastination begin to fade as clients improve their cognitive efficiencies.

Our training helps executives improve their business effectiveness in the following key areas:

• Decision-making
• Communication skills
• Leadership
• Problem solving
• Creativity
• Business acumen
• Information management
• Organizational ability
• Self-confidence
• Effective relationships

The ability of your business’s employees to creatively and effectively think is the one remaining competitive advantage that your business can have in today’s competitive market. Research shows that the majority of business owners and their employees are only 20 to 60% effective in their thinking and planning processes. Therefore, the businesses that develop their critical thinking skills have a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace. The American Institute of Learning and Cognitive Development can help business owners gain that competitive advantage with break-through training of their greatest assets, the minds of themselves and of their employees.

The results of such training are huge and the process of training is fast and relatively inexpensive.

Examples of results our clients have achieved are as follows:

• New business reached $48M in sales in 5 years.
• New business in the fashion industry reached over $10M in sales in 3 years.
• A commodity broker made more in 1 month than he did in his previous best year.
• A custom software company which was stuck at $2M for 5 years are now at over $20M.
• Golfer after 30 years of golf shot an 82 when his previous best was 92.
• Took the worse platoon in a U.S. Marine Corps battalion(There are 15 platoons in a battalion) and in ten weeks of our training they were the best platoon plus their behavior improved dramatically.
• Dramatically improved marksmanship of Marines without their needing to go to the rifle range.
• Helped new attorneys pass the Bar Exam and doctors pass their board certifications.

We can share many more examples with you as well.

The training process is a quick and easy one. Usually the process will take as little as 3 to 4 months meeting weekly. We begin with an assessment of 14 basic training skills that are the foundation of our ability to think creatively and to get great quality results with our actions. With the use of our assessment process we can design the training process that is needed to address the specific training needs of our clients. We not only help improve the efficiency of any thinking skill that is inefficient, but we also teach the person how to think about their own thinking process so that they are able to get the most from the thinking they do on an ongoing basis.

If you are interested in knowing more about this incredible process, please contact us for a complimentary meeting to see if there is a right fit.